I had been the NBA President for nearly three years. I was openly unhappy with the other Executive over the levels of service provided to the NBA by the Executive Secretary/Editor Harry Brown. As well, there were enough manipulations by some of the National Executive members that I had simply had enough…
Terry Gavin tried to keep it all calm. He wrote to the other Executive members (not copying Harry Brown or myself) just before an upcoming Executive meeting.
As I had notified the Executive of my interest in tendering if the administration contract was advertised, to avoid the conflict of interest I did not take part in discussions about either the contract nor any assessment of Harry Brown’s performance after that.
But rather than reviewing the performance of the service provider, the other members of the Executive pulled something of a surprise move and decided to renew the contract for a further two years. And then they had the temerity to tell me that I should not allow my nomination for President at the upcoming conference. And that I should resign from the Executive at the same time. Oh, yes, and I should do all of this without telling the industry why…
My relationship with Harry Brown did not really change subsequent to me saying I would like to tender for the admin services. I had never been impressed with the service that Harry Brown delivered, but I was determined to work through and around him as necessary. The NBA had several important projects underway – Pest Management Strategy and the Commodity Levies application. I was proud of what the NBA achieved through this time, in spite of very poor administrative and management support. Most of the time I knew Harry Brown was not being malicious or sneaky – he just wasn’t very competent at the job he was trying to do.
I wrote the President’s Notes for the June NZ Beekeeper magazine with sadness, but they revealed my levels of frustration.
There was the delightful irony that the decisions I wrote about were, in fact, what I had been asked to do by the Executive, all apart from the fact I should not tell the industry why I was doing it…
But in a different context, these were heady times for NZ beekeeping and communications, with the rapidly growing use of email and the Internet. Back then, I managed an email distribution list called NZBkprs. It had about 70-80 members. It was a self-enrolling thing; though I handled the technical list management, I did not know for sure who many/most of the participants were. Beekeepers were just starting to use the Internet, and the list fulfilled valuable functions. It was just open, immediate communication, focussed on both NZ beekeeping generally and on the activities of the NBA.
So when I wrote the column to send to the magazine, I copied the text to the NZBkprs list, just like I had done for many other such writings. It would take several weeks before the column would appear in the magazine for most beekeepers, and the list allowed for interaction and participation. It had never been a problem.
Harry Brown did not see it that way. He wrote that had the intention to resign simply appeared in the magazine, he would have had no issue, but “the release of the report to ??? (who knows how many) people, 3 minutes after it was faxed to me” was the problem. Timely communication – it really was a challenge back then.
[Let’s set the behind-the-scenes, the parts that I, the NBA president, did not know about at the time. Harry Brown approached the NBA’s solicitor four times over the next six weeks but never once told me, the NBA President, that he was doing so, nor did he provide his own letters nor those of the solicitor to the NBA President nor to the Executive as a whole (in the normal Friday-mailed papers for the week). It would later transpire that he was sharing all the information with one of the Executive members…]
Harry Brown first asked the NBA solicitor (in a very roundabout way!) about the status of decisions of a group of the Executive who had met after an Executive meeting. [When I finally got to see all this correspondence, I particularly appreciated the NBA Executive Secretary, writing to the NBA solicitor, asking if the NBA President had libelled Harry Brown, the NBA Executive Secretary, in the NBA President’s notes, published in the NBA’s journal by the NBA’s editor. Who was also Harry Brown…]
The solicitor provided a response only two days later. It pointed out that there would be a breach of duty and a conflict of interest to provide Harry Brown with legal advice regarding defamation.
That same day, I had written a letter to Harry Brown, after two more instances of him taking instruction from Russell Berry – and not even informing the President.
On 21 June Harry Brown wrote to the solicitor asking about the requirement to make a replacement appointment to the Executive after any resignations. The solicitor responded on 30 June, saying that the Executive does have an obligation to fill any vacancy on the Executive.
On 1 July Harry Brown was writing to the solicitor again, this time clearly at the direction of an Executive member, asking how he could make the President’s resignation “binding”.
He followed that up, only three days later, saying that he was “under intense pressure from the Executive not to let this opportunity (to ensure he can not renegade (sic) on his word, after a unanimous vote of no confidence in him by the same people, in March.”
The NBA solicitor responded that same day, saying that she had not realised the urgency to the NBA. She described the June 1997 magazine notes as an “intention” to resign, but pointed out to the NBA that “it would be most unlikely in the present circumstances that the President decides to withdraw his stated intention to resign.”
And it was about this time that Harry Brown slipped up a bit. He included one of the solicitor’s several responses in the weekly pack sent out to all Executive on Fridays. When, as the NBA President, I realised he had made this approach without informing me, I was not at all happy…
But did the Executive Secretary front up with honesty and supply all of those previous to-and-fro communications with the NBA solicitor? No…
And so we went through those last few weeks into the 1997 Nelson NBA conference. I wrote my last column as NBA President before the conference and then gave my President’s Report to my last conference.
The Executive meeting prior to the conference had a typical bit of mischief and manipulation. When there was some discussion about signing the contract with Harry Brown, I indicated I would step out of the room in light of potentially wanting to tender for the service contract. And while I was out, Russell Berry moved the adoption of a previous meeting minutes “addentum” to which I had already objected! There’s a great line there: “It was known that the fifth member of the Executive not present, was also in favour of this decision.” Harry Brown had tried to add this bit provided by Russell Berry in after the minutes had been sent out. I had refused to sign the addendum, as it was not an Executive meeting, but rather a sub-committee that was supposed to manage the performance apprisal for Harry Brown.
But still, there was no mention to the meeting of the communications to the solicitor, or responses received from the solicitor. Nada. Zip.
After that meeting finished, I rang the NBA solicitor to ask about the legitimacy of that action of adopting the minutes when I was recused for a different reason. The solicitor seemed relieved to talk with me, saying there had been a number of communications with the NBA that she did not think I was aware of, and immediately faxed copies to me.
When the fax came in with the “trail” of all these communications, I called a special meeting of the Executive. I don’t have any minutes of that meeting, but I do still have my own notes of the lead up to it, and how that last meeting went…
When confronted with the letters to and from the solicitor, Harry Brown simply clammed up. He would say nothing. He was asked what he had meant by “intense pressure from the Executive” and who, exactly, had asked him the “four questions” on 1 July. Harry Brown just didn’t say much of anything. He wouldn’t implicate anyone as being in any way involved or responsible, but nor did he take any sense of responsibility. He mostly just sat there. I remember he sweated a lot.
When Russell Berry was asked, point blank, if he had seen all of the various letters, he started flustering and flipping through the stack of papers he had in front of him. As he did that, Richard Bensemann’s hand shot out to stop the flutter of the papers – and he triumphantly pulled out one of the letters from the solicitor! Russell Berry continued to insist that he could not confirm he had seen all of the letters unless he was to carefully check through his records.
In explaining why they had sought the legal advice, Harry Brown and Russell Berry claimed it was to avoid having a pen engraved if it wasn’t going to be presented. Harry Brown added that the reason he had not provided all of this information the previous day during the Executive meeting was because he had not brought a copy of that correspondence with him to the meeting. Yeah, nah…
So I conducted the 1995 Nelson NBA conference, giving it all the best I could.
I got a couple of nice quotes and mentions in Bee Fax, the MAF newsletter that was included into the magazine:
“I would prefer that the questions directed to the Minister end with a question mark, rather than an explanation point.” – Nick Wallingford, NBA President
The NBA President, in recognising Peter Bray, who wished to speak to a remit: “Mr Berry … I mean Mr Bray” Peter Bray, in reply: “Mr Freud … I mean Mr Floyd, might have something to say about that!”
And a mention from former NBA President Allen McCaw, in his speech of appreciation: “When I was President, and you were on the Executive, you used to annoy the hell out of me sometimes. But you were usually right – and that used to annoy the hell out of me even more!”
When it came time to elect a new President, I stepped away from the front of the room and listened to the rest of the conference from one of the back seats, for the first time in several years. When the meeting ended, I met the remaining Executive, with Russell Berry as their new President, only long enough to scribble my resignation from the Executive on a piece of notebook paper. And I dated it and I signed it. It felt terrible. It felt good.