“The revolving door and crazy behavior of the board is symptomatic of a failed business model,” Mr Massy said.

“You may have the best CEO in the business but once you are on a failed business model then you are always going to fail.”

Mr Massy, who has been vocal in his belief that a statutory board should have been scrapped when the floor price scheme collapsed in 1991, and largely because agri-politics started dictating its work, said Brenda McGahan’s admission that she could no longer work at AWI was more evidence the organisation should be shut down.

“They tried to defy the trend away from wool with generic marketing but with wool it would never work and they just continued the Wool Corporation trend of dumbing it down to a commodity when really it should be a specialist fibre," Mr Massy said, referring to the period before and after the collapse of the reserve price scheme when “customers were permanently driven away”.

“We could have had 20 Icebreakers like New Zealand with the funding AWI has had but instead we have none.”

Mr Massy said woolgrowers would be served best if supply chains had been left to form.

He said the problem was that, under statutory rule, people talk about a single ‘industry’, when in reality there was instead a diverse series of segments.

Mr Massy believed the promotion of a diversity of wool fibres should be left up to supply chains who worked at delivering a product customers wanted.

When Mr Massy was on the wool statutory boards AWRAP and the IWS from 1993-1995 he said both the prime lamb and wool industry internal audits (lamb 1991, wool 1995) declared a need to listen to customer needs.

“The meat industry has followed up on that advice and look at where it got them.

“(As for wool) just look at the mulesing debate to tell you how well it deals with its customers.”

“This is now the 21st century and (the wool industry) has got a horse and buggy model which has failed,” he said.

“And that failed model is driving away a lot of our best talent.”