A life of fun behind the serious public face
Tfarmer/businessman b August 9, 1964 d January 28, 2019
he image John Wilson projected in public was a serious one, but the ‘‘real’’ person was quite different. Wilson, who was the chairman of New Zealand’s largest company Fonterra, has died aged 54 from cancer. He stepped down from the board last year.
He was ‘‘a huge amount of fun’’, recalled his friend Mike Petersen, who met him at university and later accompanied him on trade missions overseas.
‘‘You never saw that in his roles at Fonterra, because they were serious roles. He was a guy who enjoyed life.
‘‘Throughout university, he was always at the forefront of things, if there was a social event he would get it up and running, and he got up to all kinds of antics,’’ Petersen remembers.
Born in 1964 and raised on the family dairy farm at Te Awamutu, Wilson was educated locally before attending Auckland Grammar School as a boarder.
Tatua chairman and ‘‘good mate’’ Stephen Allen described an education shaped by a grounded rural upbringing, coupled with mentors such as former All Black and principal Sir John Graham and All Black coach Sir Graham Henry.
The friendly rivalry that Wilson and Allen developed at secondary school (Allen went to Kings College) extended into later business life when they became chairmen of their respective cooperatives.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in agricultural science from Massey in 1986, Wilson returned to take the reins on the family farm, and later bought another dairy property near Geraldine.
He first came into prominence in dairying politics in the mid1990s, when at a conference former Fonterra chairman Sir Henry van der Heyden witnessed a ‘‘young redhead with a voice twice the size that he was, full of confidence but also full of common sense. I came away from that conference knowing I had met a future leader’’.
The late 90s saw rousing debate over the direction of the dairy industry. Wilson was instrumental in ensuring farmers provided an overwhelming 86 per cent support for the merger of the existing dairy co-ops to create Fonterra.
One of the questions that nagged at him was the opaque way in which the Dairy Board, which handled all dairy exports, operated. With the co-ops of the time, which managed the domestic market, it was simple. They paid the farmers out of revenue minus costs, and added a margin to make a profit. But the same could not be said for the multimillion-dollar business that the Dairy Board ran.
‘‘It was all a matter of faith, and it drove John mad. He believed to his core that farmers should be able to see the numbers, warts and all, and know they were absolutely right,’’ van der Heyden said.
When Fonterra came into being in 2001, Wilson became chairman of the Shareholders’ Council, the body that represents farmers.
Once he became a board director in 2003, he was handed the task of developing the milk price paid to farmers, perhaps his greatest legacy to the industry.
For van der Heyden, he is ‘‘the godfather of the milk price’’ – an independent, transparent model that represents security to farmers. As a result, when he became chairman in 2012, his knowledge of the way Fonterra operated saw him regarded more as an executive chairman.
Wilson acted in other ways to protect farmers’ interests. When the milk price went from a high of $8.40 a kilogram of milksolids in 2013-14 to $3.90 in 2015-16, and heavily indebted farmers were staring down the barrel of bankruptcy, Fonterra lent $383 million to 76 per cent of its farmer/ shareholders to keep them afloat.
It was his commitment to farmers that helped push the loan proposal through the board.
Leading New Zealand’s largest company – although Wilson was always adamant it should be referred to as a co-op – brought with it occasional intense media and political scrutiny.
His chairmanship coincided with the tenure of Theo Spierings as chief executive, who was frequently the subject of public ire for the generous salary he was paid – considered excessive by New Zealand standards.
His final year was marked by the first Fonterra loss, largely due to the troubled Beingmate investment and a payment to Danone over the false botulism scare.
Petersen, who is New Zealand’s agricultural trade envoy, says when Wilson was part of overseas trade missions, he was always careful to remove his Fonterra hat and argue for the general good of the dairy industry.
‘‘He was a New Zealander first and foremost in those international forums where we were looking for a better deal for farmers.’’
Petersen believes that if illness had not cut his life short, Wilson would have happily gone back to the farm and would have focused on the farm and family.
Besides his Fonterra governance, Wilson was also chairman of Milktest NZ, and a director of T&G Global, Rangitata South Irrigation and the Hugh Green Group of Companies.
He is survived by his wife, Belinda, and four daughters. –