Shipping and logistics suffers from a “bit of middle-child syndrome,” the Hon. Natalie Ward MLC, the NSW Shadow Minister for Transport and Infrastructure and Deputy Leader of the Liberals, told Shipping Australia Luncheon guests in Sydney recently.
Shipping Australia was honoured by Ms Ward who generously gave the keynote speech at our recent Spring Luncheon, held in early September in Sydney.
Ms Ward argued that the youngest child in Sydney is the Metro, which everyone is excited about and everyone is giving it all their attention. The eldest child, is Sydney Trains, which has been around for a while and gets all the criticism, but it is the sensible eldest child that is responsible and turns up.
“But the middle child, I want to acknowledge, is the shipping industry,” she said, to general chuckles in the room. “It is the child that gets on with it. It is the peacemaker that fixes the problems, gets things from one place to another and ensures that our country continues to run without a huge amount of acknowledgement. And I want to acknowledge the quiet importance of your industry because basically everything in Australia is brought to businesses, large and small, and to consumers by you,” she said.
Ms Ward acknowledged that the industry supports many jobs in the economy, and keeps goods and commodities moving.
“That is why I want to talk today not just about your industry specifically, but about the broader economic and business environment in which you operate. Because the pressures facing shipping, freight and logistics are, in large part, quite similar to a number of the pressures faced by so many businesses across our state,” she said.
She then went on to argue that while Sydney and Australia are growing, growth without infrastructure is not an opportunity, it is pressure.
“You have got more homes, more people and more freight without the roads, without the rail, without the capacity around the precincts and the last-mile connections. That means congestion, which you know better than me means delay and cost. None of that is good, because for an industry that lives by turnaround times and lives and dies by reliability, congestion is not just a planning problem. It is a cost problem. And that sits directly on your balance sheet, no matter what your involvement in the industry…. You cannot have a growing population and a growing freight task without the infrastructure to support it,” she told our guests.
She added that business confidence across NSW is now lower than it was at the height of the COVID period.
“For an industry like yours, which is capital-intensive, exposed to global shocks and reliant on complex supply chains and thin margins, that macro environment must matter. Obviously it has to. You do not need me to tell you that freight forwarders, customs brokers, stevedores, shipping agents and the small operators who service the ports are all businesses too. They all play a part, and they are feeling exactly the same cost pressures as every other sector. That is not a good thing,” she said.
Ms Ward set out several policy prescriptions to tackle the issue.
Firstly lower taxes. She identified payroll taxes as being a tax on jobs and a handbrake on business and industry, particularly in labour-intensive industries. Her party, the Liberal Party, would raise the payroll-tax threshold if elected from $1.2 million to $1.5 million, and the thresholds would be indexed to CPI. Meanwhile, the rate of payroll tax will be lowered from 5.45% to 4.75% for business with a payroll of under $10 million.
Secondly, less red tape and layers of bureaucracy. She commented that she would rather see smaller or less government, with fewer politicians. During her speech she discussed artificial intelligence and said that her part would ensure that government agencies identify savings where they do not need a tonne of people to do a job and can automate it.
Thirdly, building of infrastructure that the shipping and logistics industry needs. She discussed the possibility of securing what the Liberal Party calls a “New Western Sydney City Deal”. She noted that previous deal between federal and state governments was “transformational”, helping to fund the M12 motorway to the airport, a Northern Road upgrade, and Western Sydney International Airporty.
“Huge infrastructure in an area that needed logistics and freight corridors, and it ensured that happened. So we would be calling on the federal government to do that again. Let us look at another plan. Let us look at those corridors and make sure they are kicking in and we are kicking in as a joint enterprise. Because, in my view, for an industry like shipping and logistics, that last-mile connection between the port, the rail terminal, the distribution centre and the customer — that is everything,” she told the Shipping Australia guests.
Ms Ward also turned to other matters.
“We will also take a number of other issues to the electorate, including restoring certainty for business by removing Labor’s digital spying powers, where they can come into your business, retrieve your digital records and take information they want from those. I will double the funding for Business Connect, which is a program that is free for businesses to ring, get support, get help and avoid insolvency. We think free business advice is critical to those struggling to survive. If they are prepared to have a go, we think it is a service government should provide,” she added.
Ms Ward also argued that NSW should develop a “genuine industry strategy” as the state has not had one for more than 20 years.
“And that is not just a piece of paper and a shiny new framework. It is actually about saying: this is where we want to head, you input into it, and we will drive it there,” she commented.
She concluded her speech with a call-back to her middle-child analogy.
I think it is important that we have a vision for this state where the quiet middle child gets recognised, where we are more aware of those challenges that you face every day, and where we are helping you by either getting out of your way, taking out layers of bureaucracy, or saying, “We will invest to support you to make those supply chains easier.”
“We want to make sure that you are treated as an essential part of the conversation and you are not an afterthought,” she told the industry.
