Complete overhaul of NZ shipping policy required following Rena sentencing

The Mari­time Uni­on is call­ing for a com­plete over­haul of New Zea­l­and ship­ping policy to avoid a repeat of the Rena dis­aster.

Mari­time Uni­on of New Zea­l­and Gen­er­al Sec­ret­ary Joe Fleet­wood says the main prob­lem is that New Zea­l­and des­per­ately needs a ship­ping policy.

Mr Fleet­wood says the jail­ing of the Ren­a’s Mas­ter and Mate was a case of attack­ing the symp­tom but not the dis­ease of dereg­u­lated Flag of Con­veni­ence ship­ping (Edit­or­i­al note: see more inform­a­tion about Flag of Con­veni­ence ship­ping below).

“The approach for the last gen­er­a­tion has been for Gov­ern­ment to abdic­ate its respons­ib­il­ity to ensure stand­ards in the mari­time industry.”

As long as Flag of Con­veni­ence ship­ping was giv­en a “free ride” in New Zea­l­and waters, Rena style incid­ents were “almost guar­an­teed”.

“The sur­pris­ing thing is how long it took for a ship­ping dis­aster of this type to hap­pen, not that it did hap­pen.”

Mr Fleet­wood says the Aus­trali­an Gov­ern­ment this week passed Ship­ping Reform Pack­age bills to regen­er­ate Aus­trali­an owned and Aus­trali­an crewed ship­ping.

New Zea­l­and, by con­trast, was still locked into failed dereg­u­la­tion policies from the 1980s.

“Do we need more Rena style dis­asters to get the same action on mer­chant ship­ping in our waters?”

Mr Fleet­wood says the rein­tro­duc­tion of cab­ot­age (giv­ing pri­or­ity to New Zea­l­and owned and crewed ship­ping) was now back on the agenda fol­low­ing the Aus­trali­an devel­op­ments.

He says that it was extremely dis­turb­ing that a mari­time trad­ing nation like New Zea­l­and was now com­pletely depend­ent on glob­al ship­ping lines and Flag of Con­veni­ence ves­sels.

“We need a New Zea­l­and ship­ping line to ensure our mari­time and eco­nom­ic secur­ity.”

There were a num­ber of oth­er basic changes that could be eas­ily made to rap­idly improve safety in the industry, such as the man­dat­ory use of ded­ic­ated ship­ping lanes, which could have pre­ven­ted the Rena dis­aster.

Great­er reg­u­la­tion of ship­ping was required to mon­it­or fatigue, safety stand­ards, and the con­di­tion of ves­sels.

“The crew are under enorm­ous pres­sure for faster turn­arounds from the own­ers. In this envir­on­ment, errors and bad judge­ment will con­tin­ue.”

Increas­ing the liab­il­ity on the own­ers and char­ter­ers of ves­sels was obvi­ously required.

The Mari­time Uni­on had also lob­bied the Gov­ern­ment pre­vi­ously to the Rena Dis­aster for the pro­vi­sion of a quick response ves­sel to assist for ship­ping or off­shore oil and gas industry emer­gen­cies.

Mr Fleet­wood says the dereg­u­lated and “tox­ic” com­pet­i­tion in the entire mari­time industry was respons­ible for many prob­lems in ship­ping and ports.

He says the recent moves to remove for­eign flagged charter ves­sels from the New Zea­l­and fish­ing industry were an acknow­ledge­ment of the crisis in the wider mari­time industry.

The changes had vin­dic­ated a long run­ning cam­paign by the Uni­on to get the fish­ing industry cleaned up.

The prob­lems exper­i­enced with Flag of Con­veni­ence ship­ping in New Zea­l­and waters had many sim­il­ar­it­ies, and had to be dealt with in the same way.

Mr Fleet­wood says the Mari­time Uni­on wel­comed the grow­ing polit­ic­al sup­port for New Zea­l­and ship­ping from oppos­i­tion parties.

What is Flag of Con­veni­ence (FOC) ship­ping?

A flag of con­veni­ence ship is one that flies the flag of a coun­try oth­er than the coun­try of own­er­ship.

Cheap regis­tra­tion fees, low or no taxes and free­dom to employ cheap labour are the motiv­at­ing factors behind a shipown­er­’s decision to ‘flag out’.

Some of these registers have poor safety and train­ing stand­ards, and place no restric­tion on the nation­al­ity of the crew. Some­times, because of lan­guage dif­fer­ences, sea­farers are not able to com­mu­nic­ate effect­ively with each oth­er, put­ting safety and the effi­cient oper­a­tion of the ship at risk.

In many cases these flags are not even run from the coun­try con­cerned.

Once a ship is registered under an FOC many shipown­ers then recruit the cheapest labour they can find, pay min­im­al wages and cut costs by lower­ing stand­ards of liv­ing and work­ing con­di­tions for the crew.

Glob­al­isa­tion has helped to fuel this rush to the bot­tom. In an increas­ingly fierce com­pet­it­ive ship­ping mar­ket, each new FOC is forced to pro­mote itself by offer­ing the low­est pos­sible fees and the min­im­um of reg­u­la­tion. In the same way, ship own­ers are forced to look for the cheapest and least reg­u­lated ways of run­ning their ves­sels in order to com­pete, and FOCs provide the solu­tion.