Maritime Union agrees with freight industry concerns on profiteering

The Mar­itime Union has tak­en the unusu­al step of agree­ing with a truck­ing indus­try boss.

Main­freight man­ag­ing direc­tor Don Braid has said glob­al ship­ping lines are prof­i­teer­ing off the fall­out from COVID-19.

Mar­itime Union of New Zealand Nation­al Sec­re­tary Craig Har­ri­son says the com­ments are accu­rate.

“New Zealand is depen­dent on glob­al ship­ping lines whose inter­ests are not the same as New Zealand’s.”

He says the effect of COVID-19 on the sup­ply chain has exposed how vul­ner­a­ble New Zealand’s trade links are.

Mr Har­ri­son says ongo­ing issues with sup­ply chain con­ges­tion, missed ship calls to ports, and extreme surges in the cost of freight, are caus­ing sig­nif­i­cant dam­age to the econ­o­my.

He says the fact that Main­freight are now char­ter­ing ships to move car­go inter­na­tion­al­ly was a major devel­op­ment and illus­trat­ed a change in think­ing.

“The entire glob­al logis­tics sys­tem is bro­ken, and now we need to focus on new solu­tions that pro­vide secu­ri­ty and reli­a­bil­i­ty.”

Mr Har­ri­son says the Mar­itime Union is push­ing for New Zealand-owned and oper­at­ed coastal ship­ping.

This would pro­vide feed­er ser­vices between main “hub” ports and small­er “spoke” ports.

Inter­na­tion­al ves­sels are per­mit­ted to car­ry domes­tic freight between New Zealand ports – but in the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, port calls are being missed as a result of ship­ping lines hav­ing oth­er pri­or­i­ties for their sched­ules.

Mr Har­ri­son says there needs to be a nation­al ports strat­e­gy where invest­ment and plan­ning is based on nation­al require­ments, not parochial com­pe­ti­tion between ports.

“The only peo­ple ben­e­fit­ing from the cur­rent chaos are glob­al ship­ping com­pa­nies.”