Ports of Auckland gives us resilience

By Rus­sell Mayn

Sec­re­tary, Mar­itime Union of New Zealand Auck­land Branch Local 13

The floods in Auck­land and the north­ern regions have left peo­ple shell shocked. Our largest city has been hard hit by the heav­i­est rain­fall on record. As well as the imme­di­ate human cost, the ongo­ing eco­nom­ic effects will be severe.

It is now appar­ent that things aren’t going back to nor­mal, ever. Fol­low­ing on from the pan­dem­ic, we now are find­ing out what cli­mate change means in real terms.

We need to start plan­ning for what things are going to be like, not what we hope they would be. Our sup­ply chains and trans­port sec­tor are cen­tral to our response.

So what can be done?

Our trans­port indus­try needs to get onto a new tra­jec­to­ry imme­di­ate­ly. We need resilient sup­ply chains that can with­stand severe dis­rup­tion.

There has been a push to shut down or phase out the Ports of Auck­land. We now need to reflect on the advan­tages of hav­ing a local logis­tics hub that can func­tion even in extreme weath­er events.

If Auck­land was depen­dent on Mars­den Point as its key gate­way port, what hap­pens when con­nec­tions are sev­ered by flood­ing?

The May­or has pushed for car imports to be removed from the Auck­land water­front almost imme­di­ate­ly.

We now see many main roads through­out the region dam­aged or impass­able. Bypass routes are not suit­able for heavy traf­fic.

Mars­den doesn’t even have a rail link yet, and even if it did, we see from the recent washout and derail­ment at Te Puke that rail is vul­ner­a­ble too.

We can’t afford to have sup­plies in and out of our biggest city depen­dent on remote hubs that may sud­den­ly become inac­ces­si­ble.

The Ports of Auck­land needs to remain as a work­ing port to build our resilience.

Going back, the Port of Lyt­tel­ton played a key role in the after­math of the Christchurch Earth­quake and the recon­struc­tion process. It was acces­si­ble when land based links were out of action.

The “blue high­way” of domes­tic ship­ping links means that even in times of dis­as­ter our pop­u­la­tion cen­tres and impor­tant regions can be ser­viced.

There needs to be redun­dan­cy built into our sup­ply chains. We have to spread the freight task over dif­fer­ent modes and give pri­or­i­ty to low emis­sion, resilient trans­port such as coastal ship­ping.

It also requires a nation­al ports strat­e­gy which rec­og­nizes ports as essen­tial infra­struc­ture, as opposed to cash cows for local author­i­ties. Ports need to be work­ing togeth­er as opposed to pur­su­ing parochial interests.The con­cern of the Mar­itime Union is there have been decades of nation­al paral­y­sis when it comes to deal­ing with these issues. It was left to the mar­ket to decide, or rather a few vest­ed inter­ests. The result is not good. We are now run­ning to catch up.

There is progress in some areas, such as coastal ship­ping, which has gone through a recent resur­gence due to sup­port­ive Gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy set­tings.

But in oth­er areas, we are still locked into an out­mod­ed mind­set in a rapid­ly chang­ing world.

For exam­ple, how were over­seas oil cor­po­rates allowed to shut down Mars­den Point refin­ery, leav­ing us less pre­pared and less resilient in a volatile glob­al sit­u­a­tion?

After the pan­dem­ic, the sound­bite from the trans­port indus­try was that “just in time” had become “just in case.”

We are in dan­ger of slid­ing back into com­pla­cen­cy.

It was only a mat­ter of time before a weath­er event like this occurred. There will be more.

The fan­ta­sy of the glob­al free mar­ket is dead and buried. Dereg­u­lat­ed cap­i­tal­ism is dri­ving us towards social and envi­ron­men­tal col­lapse, yet is not deliv­er­ing for work­ing peo­ple whose essen­tial work keeps the sys­tem func­tion­ing.

New Zealand needs to urgent­ly focus on get­ting the basics right. Our infra­struc­ture needs to be pre­pared for ongo­ing crises.

Late last year, the Gov­ern­ment announced an inquiry into New Zealand’s eco­nom­ic resilience to sup­ply chain dis­rup­tions. This will need to keep up with dis­rup­tions that are now hap­pen­ing in real time.

There needs to be a fast shift to low emis­sion trans­port modes. Cli­mate change, pan­demics and war are going to be ongo­ing fea­tures of the world in the future, not one off excep­tions.

We will need resilient local freight hubs as part of this new sit­u­a­tion. Ports of Auck­land needs to stay.

This arti­cle was first pub­lished in the New Zealand Her­ald on 3 Feb­ru­ary 2023