Massive price hikes in DP World Australian ports must scuttle Auckland port privatization plans

DP World, the glob­al port oper­a­tor linked to a pri­vati­sa­tion agen­da at the Port of Auck­land, is embroiled in con­tro­ver­sy in Aus­tralia after mas­sive price hikes for port users.

Ter­mi­nal fees are set to jump more than 50% at DP World’s Bris­bane, Mel­bourne and Syd­ney oper­a­tions, lead­ing to one freight indus­try man­ag­er describ­ing the sit­u­a­tion as “day­light rob­bery”.

The price hit also led to Australia’s for­mer com­pe­ti­tion watch­dog chair, Graeme Samuel, say­ing the Gov­ern­ment need­ed to take con­trol of the mod­el of pri­vati­sa­tion that had led to “ram­pant high prices”.

Mar­itime Union of New Zealand Nation­al Sec­re­tary Craig Har­ri­son says the news con­firm find­ings in a report released in Sep­tem­ber 2023 by the Union that warned of major price hikes on freight if Port of Auck­land was pri­va­tised.

Mr Har­ri­son says the Union had accu­rate­ly pre­dict­ed the fail­ure of the pre­vi­ous automa­tion project at Port of Auck­land, and it did not want to be proved right about port pri­vati­sa­tion.

He says Auck­land City needs to imme­di­ate­ly dump any pro­pos­als to pri­va­tise the Port of Auck­land, unless it want­ed to wreck the local econ­o­my.

Mr Har­ri­son says the DP World in Aus­tralia is cur­rent­ly at war with freight busi­ness­es, importers, exporters and their work­force.

“Do we real­ly want to hand over a strate­gic asset and nat­ur­al monop­oly to this type of out­fit?”

Pro­tect­ed indus­tri­al action is ongo­ing in Aus­tralian ports, with the Aus­tralian Coun­cil of Trade Unions last month call­ing on DP World to ‘return to good faith bar­gain­ing and aban­don their attacks on hard work­ing mar­itime work­ers in Bris­bane, Syd­ney, Mel­bourne and Fre­man­tle.’

More bad news about the prac­tices of the multi­na­tion­al came out in a report released this week in Aus­tralia, show­ing DP World in Aus­tralia paid zero income tax in Aus­tralia over the last eight years, despite rev­enues of over $4.5 bil­lion in that peri­od.

A poll released by the Mar­itime Union on 11 Octo­ber showed an over­whelm­ing major­i­ty of Auck­lan­ders want­ed the Port of Auck­land kept in pub­lic own­er­ship.