International report on Auckland Port automation shows safety and economic dangers of privatisation proposals

A new report from the Inter­na­tion­al Trans­port Work­ers’ Fed­er­a­tion (ITF) – Lessons in fail­ure: Automa­tion at the Ports of Auck­land – demon­strates the risks pre­sent­ed by any pri­vati­sa­tion of the Ports of Auck­land, says the Mar­itime Union of New Zealand.

Mar­itime Union of New Zealand Nation­al Sec­re­tary Craig Har­ri­son says the rais­es impor­tant red flags in the pri­vati­sa­tion debate.

He says while the report is focused on the fail­ures of the automa­tion project, it illus­trates how bad pri­vati­sa­tion would be for the Auck­land econ­o­my and for the nation­al econ­o­my.

“The first issue is the claim Ports of Auck­land is a finan­cial fail­ure. The report shows POAL was one of the best per­form­ing ports in the South­ern Hemi­sphere before automa­tion and it is return­ing back to that lev­el of oper­a­tion now man­age­ment has changed, and automa­tion has been aban­doned.

“The sec­ond issue is the huge cost of the automa­tion fail­ure to the econ­o­my. Work­ers paid for it with their lives and the drop in through­put and the con­ges­tion that it cre­at­ed cost Aotearoa New Zealand more than a bil­lion dol­lars. There is a huge risk attached to fur­ther med­dling in port oper­a­tions. Hand­ing over the Ports to off­shore own­ers would give them mas­sive lever­age over our entire econ­o­my and poten­tial­ly put lives at risk.”

“The third issue is how a pri­vate own­er could find effi­cien­cies in cur­rent oper­a­tions.

“The for­mer POAL man­age­ment tried automa­tion and attack­ing work­ing con­di­tions and the result was effi­cien­cy went down. The new port man­age­ment realise that and are work­ing with the union, and POAL oper­a­tions are quick­ly return­ing to their for­mer lev­els of through­put.

“This report shows there’s no fat to cut in port oper­a­tions. The only way a pri­vate oper­a­tor could get the kind of return they expect would be to pump up prices and the costs to Auck­land busi­ness­es and, ulti­mate­ly, to the peo­ple of Auck­land and our econ­o­my as a whole.

One of the report’s authors, Pro­fes­sor Nigel Haworth, agrees.

“We ran a micro­scope across port oper­a­tions and clear­ly iden­ti­fied the ter­ri­ble harm the ‘go-faster’ approach had on safe­ty. Peo­ple paid for it with their lives. Along­side that there was a huge finan­cial impact caused by attempt­ing to auto­mate a port that wasn’t suit­able for it.

“There are seri­ous lessons to be learned from this report for oth­er ports con­sid­er­ing automat­ing, but also for the future of Ports of Auck­land.

“Ports of Auck­land is crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture and is effec­tive­ly a monop­oly. Putting it in pri­vate hands would give the own­er a licence to strip-mine Auckland’s busi­ness­es and our econ­o­my and risk a return to the dan­ger­ous and unsafe prac­tices that left so many fam­i­lies of work­ers bereaved.”