Editorial: Crowds just reward for show team

The Royal Show opened in Hastings yesterday.

Whether we like showing-off or not, we don't have much choice this week as the weather plays into Hawke's Bay's hands for the Royal Show, which opened yesterday.

We will, of course, no doubt see the obnoxious winds which tend to have been the bane of showgoers in October each year since the year dot.

But the show is a celebration of all of Hawke's Bay, and in particular a fair number of hard-working people.

The Hawke's Bay A & P Show has for most of its 152 years been a shop window to the backbone of the regional economy, the agricultural and pastoral sector. Or "primary industries", to use the modern descriptive as worn by the Minister of those things, Nathan Guy, who visited the show yesterday.

While he carries stern messages for farmers, the expected impact of El Nino and the need for a big dam among them, there are subtle messages all over the showgrounds, from the opening day through to People's Day tomorrow, when more than 15,000 are likely to visit the showgrounds.

It would be a hard soul who would not get some sort of lift out of seeing all the schoolchildren interacting with the animals but it is a little sobering to think the show needs its fiscal success on the following two days to make it possible. By tomorrow night, the Hawke's Bay A & P Society, a not-for-profit organisation, will have some idea if it will be able to balance the books.

The success of the show, which has resulted in it being granted Royal Show status for the next three years, is built around the efforts of its vast and mainly volunteer worker input - and it is that which is rewarded every time a pair of feet passes through the turnstiles.