South Island disruption highlights need for coastal shipping

Mari­time Uni­on of New Zea­l­and Nation­al Sec­ret­ary Craig Har­ris­on says coastal ship­ping could provide a essen­tial life­line to regions in future events.

“The ter­rible floods in Can­ter­bury have dis­rup­ted and dam­aged the land-based sup­ply chain.”

Mr Har­ris­on says nat­ur­al dis­asters like earth­quakes and flood­ing were a fea­ture of life in New Zea­l­and.

This was on top of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic which was still caus­ing massive dis­rup­tion and con­ges­tion in the sup­ply chain, he says.

“We are enter­ing into a new and uncer­tain age and the focus needs to go onto sup­ply chain secur­ity.”

Mr Har­ris­on says with cli­mate change, it was clear that there would be ongo­ing and increased severe weath­er events, and there needed to be redund­an­cies built into the sys­tem.

“If we don’t get this right, we are going to see ongo­ing dis­rup­tion that will have dire eco­nom­ic con­sequences and could poten­tially endanger com­munit­ies.”

Mr Har­ris­on says the Gov­ern­ment now recog­nized the need for a true multi-mode trans­port sec­tor, but needed to deliv­er promptly.

He says there was now wide­spread sup­port with­in the logist­ics, trans­port and ports sec­tors for rebuild­ing New Zea­l­and owned and oper­ated coastal ship­ping, which over many years had suffered from poor policy set­tings and lack of sup­port com­pared to roads.

The key goal was New Zea­l­and flagged ships con­nect­ing regions with major centres on a hub and spoke mod­el.

“Coastal ship­ping is the obvi­ous solu­tion for low-emis­sion, secure trans­port going for­ward.”