Shipping Australia’s chairman, Scott Henderson, discusses the the impact of COVID-19 last year, and how Shipping Australia developed last year:
The COVID-19 year, 2020 has certainly been a different year for all of us in
our own businesses, for Shipping Australia Limited and in our private lives. Shipping Australia started the year:
- developing new ideas to promote the use of the blue highway in support of the Government’s latest review of coastal shipping
- building the case for an ocean liner shipping block exemption to support efficient consortia operations for international shipping
- and arguing against the introduction of a new levy on all containers in Melbourne to subsidise improvements to on-dock rail at two terminals only.
By the beginning of March, like the rest of the world, our focus was shifting towards the impacts of COVID-19 on the international shipping sector, and by the end of that month we could really think of nothing else.
For Shipping Australia Limited, it has been an exceptionally busy year, an excruciatingly frustrating one, and a year of change. The ‘busy’ has been in relation to COVID-19 – keeping members informed of myriad changes to national, State and local policies and regulations that impacted the shipping industry at every change.
The ‘frustrating’ has been the relentless advocacy and engagement with those three levels of governance, in a continuing effort to get reasonable
policies adopted and some level of policy alignment.
This review piece has been extracted from the Shipping Australia annual review. To read the full piece, click here.
