Government ports report narrow and biased

The Mar­itime Union has attacked what it describes as the “nar­row­ness of vision” in yet anoth­er report into the state of New Zealand’s ports.
Mar­itime Union Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary Joe Fleet­wood says the Min­istry of Trans­port com­mis­sioned Freight Futures report trav­elled down well worn paths and added lit­tle to the debate.
He says the lat­est report pro­motes a free mar­ket agen­da that was now glob­al­ly dis­cred­it­ed and dri­ven only by cor­po­rate self-inter­est.
Pos­si­bly the intent of the report was to pro­vide jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the con­tin­u­ing “avoid­ance” approach of the Nation­al Gov­ern­ment to ports pol­i­cy – which could be summed up by the words of the song “What ever will be, will be.”
Mr Fleet­wood says the new NZIER report repeats mate­r­i­al from the recent Port Per­for­mance and Own­er­ship report to the Local Gov­ern­ment Forum, which rep­re­sents big busi­ness and pri­vate sec­tor interests.The report was biased against work­ers in the indus­try who it por­trays as a prob­lem, was hos­tile to pub­lic own­er­ship and had a “thin­ly veiled con­tempt” for demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions like local Gov­ern­ment.
Claims that New Zealand port per­for­mance had been harmed by the Employ­ment Rela­tions Act were not accu­rate or backed with any sub­stan­tive evidence.Mr Fleet­wood says he is con­cerned that the real­i­ty of reduced pay and con­di­tions, con­tin­u­ing health and safe­ty issues, and the destruc­tion of career paths and secure jobs for young work­ers in the ports indus­try, were not cov­ered by the report.
He says the reg­u­lar deaths and injuries of work­ers in the mar­itime indus­try, includ­ing over­seas crews, showed a human cost to the so-called effi­cien­cies of the free mar­ket.
“They did­n’t put any­thing about that in the report though, as the lives and well­be­ing of the work­ers in the indus­try do not seem to come into the equation.”“All it shows to me is that this is the usu­al blood­less and dry approach by peo­ple who have noth­ing to do with the indus­try and for whom short term prof­it is the only mea­sure of suc­cess.”
“The authors of this report obvi­ous­ly have no under­stand­ing of how the increased usage of poor­ly trained and unskilled casu­al work­ers, and dif­fi­cult and unsafe work­ing con­di­tions on some old­er and small­er ships call­ing at our ports, can impact on these sta­tis­tics.”
The small­er size of New Zealand ports was just one rea­son why so-called effi­cien­cy com­par­isons with huge glob­al ter­mi­nals over­seas was mis­lead­ing.
These “under­pro­duc­tiv­i­ty” argu­ments are reject­ed by many in the indus­try, and Fonter­ra’s Gen­er­al Man­ag­er of Logis­tics Nigel Jones had pub­licly respond­ed to sim­i­lar claims in a pre­vi­ous NZIER report by stat­ing it was dan­ger­ous to look at issues such as crane pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in iso­la­tion, because ports were part of the sup­ply chain.
Mr Fleet­wood says as tax­pay­ers and wealth pro­duc­ers, mar­itime work­ers object to sub­si­diz­ing reports by peo­ple who are remote from the every­day real­i­ty of our indus­try.
The Mar­itime Union has pro­posed an active mar­itime and ports pol­i­cy rather than the fatal­is­tic approach of the cur­rent Government.“We pro­pose ‘KiwiPort’ a nation­al ports plan, cab­o­tage for coastal ship­ping and the inves­ti­ga­tion of New Zealand invest­ment in ship­ping for our glob­al trade routes.“The growth of spe­cial­ist areas such as the off­shore indus­try also had the poten­tial for devel­op­ing a high skill indus­try, and need­ed to be fac­tored into any mar­itime pol­i­cy.