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.