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.”