Concerns with port takeover threat

The Mar­itime Union of New Zealand has warned against the takeover of New Zealand ports after ship­ping giant COSCO announced its inter­est in buy­ing into New Zealand ports this week.

The Chi­nese state owned multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tion COSCO is one of the world’s largest ship­ping lines.

Mar­itime Union spokesper­son Vic­tor Bil­lot says the Union is opposed to hand­ing con­trol of ports over to glob­al oper­a­tors.

Mr Bil­lot says that the takeover of New Zealand ports by glob­al oper­a­tors will lead to “ports of con­ve­nience”.

He says there is ongo­ing pres­sure for pri­va­ti­za­tion, attacks on Unions and casu­al­iza­tion, in “ports of con­ve­nience” around the world that are dom­i­nat­ed by glob­al oper­a­tors.

Mr Bil­lot says the Union is very con­cerned by trends over­seas under free trade agree­ments for employ­ers to bring in short-term, casu­al labour across bor­ders.

“This process is one where multi­na­tion­al employ­ers use work­ers against work­ers to attack wages and con­di­tions.”

Mr Bil­lot says prob­lems were already present in “flag of con­ve­nience”, and some nation­al flagged, ship­ping and fish­ing oper­a­tions in New Zealand waters.

He says that Chi­nese state cor­po­ra­tions have pub­licly stat­ed in Aus­tralia they are inter­est­ed in con­trol­ling the entire logis­tics chain from mines to rail to port to ship­ping, includ­ing the sup­ply of labour for such oper­a­tions.

Mr Bil­lot says any ratio­nal­iza­tion of New Zealand ports must be planned and done in the inter­ests of New Zealand.

“The takeover of an indi­vid­ual port by a ship­ping multi­na­tion­al could desta­bi­lize the entire indus­try and result in port ratio­nal­iza­tion being dri­ven by mind­less com­pe­ti­tion and mar­ket monop­oly rather than a planned approach to ben­e­fit New Zealand.”

He says New Zealand as a trad­ing nation should main­tain con­trol of its own mar­itime trans­port oper­a­tions as far as prac­ti­cal.

New Zealand ports were large­ly owned by local gov­ern­ment and returned prof­its to local com­mu­ni­ties rather than to over­seas share­hold­ers.

Prob­lems with parochial­ism and dupli­ca­tion of infra­struc­ture must be dealt with by a Gov­ern­ment-led nation­al ports plan, not sell offs which would cre­ate more chaos and insta­bil­i­ty in the indus­try.

The Mar­itime Union sup­port­ed the Keep Our Port Pub­lic cam­paign in 2006 when glob­al oper­a­tor Hutchin­son failed to gain a con­trol­ling stake in Ports of Lyt­tel­ton.