Day: 27 August 2009

Government can put New Zealanders in containers, but it can’t give them jobs shipping them

The Mar­itime Union has a mes­sage for the Gov­ern­ment: instead of jail­ing New Zealan­ders in con­tain­ers, it would be bet­ter to have them work­ing on the con­tain­ers by rebuild­ing coastal ship­ping.

Cor­rec­tions Min­is­ter Judith Collins announced today a “con­tain­er unit” will be set up at Rimu­ta­ka Prison to house surg­ing num­bers of pris­on­ers, the lat­est embar­rass­ing step in New Zealand’s fail­ure to con­front the real issues behind crime.

Mar­itime Union Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary Trevor Han­son says New Zealand work­ers have been forced out of mar­itime employ­ment in their own coun­try by allow­ing over­seas labour to be exploit­ed on the New Zealand coastal waters.

He says that due to the “open coast” pol­i­cy intro­duced by Nation­al in the 1990s New Zealand had seen its ship­ping indus­try tak­en apart, while many oth­er coun­tries reserved their domes­tic mer­chant ship­ping and fish­eries for local indus­try.