Here’s why we need only NZ-flagged ships travelling around our coasts

By Grant Williams

I work at Ports of Auck­land. I’m onsite every day as part of the steve­dor­ing team, in the 20 years I’ve been a water­sider, I’ve had just about every job there is. Lash­er, strad­dle dri­ver you name it.

Every day we’re work­ing with ships that are flagged under a huge vari­ety of nations, and with crews from the four cor­ners of the world. Sail­ing is an inter­na­tion­al trade. Which is why the ports have come under so much scruti­ny since Covid-19 reared its head.

From what I see day in day out the response at my port is pret­ty good. It’s not easy – every part of the job has been tak­en apart, looked at for how it could car­ry the virus, and put back togeth­er in a way to make it safe.

That’s meant chang­ing shift han­dover, work­ing in bub­bles, health checks pri­or to each shift, mak­ing sure that inter­ac­tion between our guys who go on ship and the crew are as lim­it­ed as pos­si­ble, stay­ing vig­i­lant, and test­ing.

Who­ev­er it was that claimed we refuse test­ing needs to under­stand that our guys wor­ry about tak­ing this home to their fam­i­lies. They’re not going to say no to some­thing that keeps them safe.

No sys­tem can be per­fect­ly virus-proof. And we’re deal­ing with crews from over­seas oper­at­ing under oth­er coun­tries’ laws and Covid pre­cau­tions. They don’t know what “lev­el 3” is.

But when every­thing is going to plan, and so far it has, the process­es keep us safe. But there’s always the chance some­thing unex­pect­ed might hap­pen to put that, and us, at risk.

Ports of Auck­land is in a good posi­tion to man­age that risk. It’s a busi­ness of 500 peo­ple with mas­sive economies of scale and skilled logis­tics sup­port. How­ev­er, because we don’t have New Zealand flagged coastal ship­ping, these over­seas ships aren’t just vis­it­ing our big ports. They’re also tak­ing our domes­tic freight between ports rang­ing from Gis­borne to Bluff to Nel­son to Napi­er to North­land.

Every sin­gle one of these stops increas­es our risk and our costs. Our out­sourc­ing of coastal freight to off­shore ship­ping lines means every port has become an inter­na­tion­al port, a bor­der cross­ing, a place Covid could get in.

Because of that we need biose­cu­ri­ty and cus­toms at every port and Covid has made this even more impor­tant. Our small­er ports do a great job but the cost of mak­ing an inter­na­tion­al ship vis­it safe is dupli­cat­ed at every port it enters. So is the risk of some­thing going wrong.

One of the answers to mak­ing this safer is pret­ty sim­ple. So sim­ple we used to do it up until the mid 1990s. Change the law so only New Zealand flagged ships ply our shores. Bring the inter­na­tion­al car­go in and out of the two big ports in each of the North and South Island, and move it around using our crews on our ships.

It makes a lot of sense to lim­it our ship­ping bor­ders to these big ports where we can focus our resources for bor­der con­trol, and have New Zealand ships take car­go to and from those hubs to our region­al ports.

Ships crewed by peo­ple oper­at­ing under New Zealand law and employ­ment agree­ments, who know what Lev­el 3 means, who use the New Zealand trac­ing app and can be eas­i­ly reached by our health sys­tem, who are part of our team of five mil­lion.

But it also makes eco­nom­ic sense. Under Covid-19 the world has sud­den­ly got a lot big­ger again as logis­tics chains have bro­ken down and big multi­na­tion­al sup­pli­ers have gone under. We’ve assumed the big inter­na­tion­al ship­ping firms will always be will­ing and able to car­ry our domes­tic freight, but they might not be.

Hav­ing our own fleet of ships that are capa­ble of trans-Tas­man and Pacif­ic runs (and beyond) makes a lot of sense. But with coastal ship­ping left unpro­tect­ed we’ve got down to just one ship that can do that. That’s a thin thread to con­nect to the world.

There are a lot of oth­er rea­sons to get behind mov­ing coastal ship­ping back into New Zealand’s con­trol. It’ll lead to low­er green­house gas emis­sions, ease con­ges­tion on our roads, cre­ate jobs, give us greater eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty, and bring us into line with most of the coun­tries we like to com­pare our­selves with.

The ben­e­fits of domes­tic coastal ship­ping have always been there wait­ing for us to take advan­tage of. Covid has brought them into focus in a way that means we might actu­al­ly grasp this chance to do it. As some­one who’s worked on our shores for a long time, I hope we do.

Grant Williams is the Steve­dore and Nation­al Runan­ga Rep­re­sen­ta­tive at the Mar­itime Union of New Zealand.