THE wool industry is running out of time to establish a body that can speak for growers with real authority, says ANDREW FARRAN

Confidence in the wool industry has been tested these past weeks.

Only 30 per cent responded to the recent WoolPoll to determine the R&D and marketing levy payable by wool growers to Australian Wool Innovation for the next three years.

Despite what AWI directors claim, it was far from an overwhelming endorsement of past and projected policies.

This followed a statutory performance review by independent consultants of the past three years, which reaffirmed what many wool growers already knew.

To quote AWI, the review found AWI could be more effective in strategic planning, governance, consultation and the measurement of its own performance.

Then there was the 620-page report on the industry tabled last month by NSW Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells.

The Senator has proposed the replacement of AWI because, in her words: "AWI's problems are systemic and ingrained".

Problems abound, which should lead to further discussion at the AWI annual meeting in Sydney at the end of the month.

But after all this time, through many decades, what sort of representative body or skills-based structure might better meet the overwhelming needs of wool growers?

How might it be constituted to ensure it was truly representative of the industry, particularly growers who carry much of the burden of wool's problems?

If skills-based as suggested, how would such a body deal with the politics of wool, an area that time and again has undone all previous industry structures?

Indeed, who represents wool growers in the broad even now?

Not AWI, formally an R&D and marketing body but around which has swirled all manner of intrigue since its inception.

Nothing to do with politics, you might think.

Then how did its present board, about which there are the above concerns, come to be elected?

Enter the Australian Wool Growers Association, formed by a relatively close group of NSW wool growers, which has managed to keep its organisational structure, membership and finances a virtual secret.

By playing on the insecurities of largely marginal, disgruntled wool growers, they rallied enough support in a low-polling vote to remove the previous board and impose their own nominees.

Since then issues of governance and misdirected projects have tended to dominate AWI's proceedings.

Their notional counter-part, WoolProducers Australia, which should have emerged as the dominant peak body, has instead become beholden to the National Farmers' Federation for finance and control.

As a result it is essentially a derivative, subordinated grouping which, despite its democratic claims, has only a tenuous connection with wool growers as a whole.

While nominally it provides for direct independent membership, this is something actively discouraged by the NFF and its affiliates, bodies which themselves have been losing support among farmers in recent years.

But could WPA broaden its base by promoting direct membership and become the representative body needed?

What is needed, apart from disciplined R&D and marketing, is a body that can be said to be truly representative and which can speak and lobby for growers with real authority.

But do wool growers have the stomach anymore for building organisations which all too frequently, after a period of disenchantment, they bring down through self-destructive factionalism or indifference?

It is not as if all is quiet on the wool front and that these matters can be left to rest.

Challenging, life-threatening issues are at the forefront today, about which there are divergent views within the industry.

These include declining sheep numbers and wool prices, the shift towards prime lambs and cropping; AWI governance, mulesing and moves affecting the auction system and marketing.

There are issues concerning wool-grower interests in, and relations with, the Australian Wool Exchange, the Australian Wool Testing Authority and various other official industry groups.

There are also policy and other matters coming before the International Wool Textile Organisation, as well as climate change issues and policies.

This is not an exhaustive listing by any means.

Widely diverging views are not a reason for continuing organisational fragmentation.

There is opportunity for a coming together to think, talk and resolve these matters in the common interest, an interest under threat from outside the industry as much as within it.

Those who don't stand together may otherwise, in time, fall separately.

In this climate the AWI board's recent call to double the term of its directors should be out of the question, quite apart from its failure to disclose directors' salaries and allowances to its own stakeholders.

Senator Fierravanti-Wells' report may well stimulate wider discussion but it leaves the handling of industry political matters unaddressed or lacking in sufficient prescription that would avoid previous difficulties.

The ideal would be an across-the-board representative industry structure to deal with wool politics and matters of wider concern, which in turn would relate to but not seek to control a skills-based, cost-effective R&D and marketing directorate, whether it be a reformed Australian Wool Innovation or a new structure altogether.

• Andrew Farran runs a 2000ha wool and cropping property southwest of Edenhope