Australian container port performance has been demonstrably underperforming over a five-year period, according to the World Bank’s Container Port Performance Index 2020 to 2024.
Before we go on, there have been several arguments advanced to downplay or discredit the work of the World Bank. We didn’t think those arguments would stand up to scrutiny, so we scrutinised them, and they don’t. You can see a detailed discussion in the pages that follow.
Ranking Australian Ports
The World Bank put all the ports in a rank, just like, say, runners racing in a sprint: first, second, third and so on. 403 container-handling ports were ranked. Melbourne ranked at position 265, Adelaide (266), Botany (357), Brisbane (377), and Fremantle (379). All placed in the lower half, and some of them near the back of the pack.
About 66% of all container ports in the world were ranked as better performers than Melbourne and Adelaide; about 88% were ranked as better performers than Botany; 93% were better than Brisbane; and 94% were better than Fremantle.
Measuring performance
The measure of performance for container-handling seaports in the World Bank report is called the “CPPI 2024”. As the report says, it focuses on the time spent in ports as a proxy of performance. The higher the CPPI 2024 score, the better.
The World Bank standardised the CPPI at about zero. Any port that is above zero in 2024 did better than the average in that year; any port at about zero is about average; any port below zero is worse than average.
The CPPI 2024 indicates a trivial difference in performance when the numbers between two ports are close together, as, for example, the Chinese port of Mawan (133) and Vietnam’s Cai Mep (132). There’s an increasingly large difference in performance as the numbers drift further apart.
China’s Dalian is a gateway port and it has a CPPI 2024 score of 137 and a TEU throughput of about 5 million TEU. It’s at the very frontier of efficiency with extremely high performance. Greece’s Piraeus is a gateway port (albeit with some transshipment). It has a CPPI of 40, so better than average, and a TEU of 5.1m. Brazil’s gateway port Santos has a CPPI of -166 (it’s literally the second-worst performing port in the world) and 4.7m TEU.
Three different container ports doing the same kind of job with similar volumes, using similar (but not identical) infrastructure and equipment, and they have three totally different CPPI scores. What does this prove? Performance matters. And it matters a lot.
What Aussie ports scored
Melbourne and Adelaide scored -8. By way of comparison, consider that Yokohama (Japan), scored 115. That’s a difference in performance score of 123 points. We can say that Melbourne and Adelaide perform a little bit less than average. Botany scored -48. It’s 163 points lower than the best-in-class (i.e. the gateway operations port of Yokohama) and far from the average. Brisbane and Fremantle are at -93 and -94 points and are far distant both from the best-in-class and the world average.
Performance over time
This year’s report also recalculated all the scores for the full five years (2020 to 2024) on a like-for-like basis (we go into this in some detail later in this report) so we can see which port is improving or declining over time.
Melbourne started off (in 2020) a bit above average, fell to a bit below average, and stayed there. Adelaide was sub-average, got to about average, fell back again, and clawed its way back to merely sub-average. Botany started off average, got worse, then stayed there. Brisbane was above average while Fremantle was about average, but both got and fell to near the bottom of the performance table.
The only reason they are not among the very bottom-ranked is because those ports have extraordinarily terrible performance scores. Australian container ports are not comparable to the bottom-dwellers. After rank position 382, port performance isn’t just bad it’s increasingly atrocious. Durban is scored at -721, which is in a poor performance league all of its own.
But it’s no defence for Australian ports to argue that very poor performance is OK because it’s not as bad as the extraordinarily, terribly bad, performing ports.
No reasonable reading of this authoritative, world-leading, expert analysis could possibly conclude that Australian container ports are doing well. They’re not.
Australian container seaport performance is poor. It has been for a while.
This is not a marginal complaint. This is not an industry whinge.
This is not OK.
Pretending otherwise is not credible.
Australia has a real, and serious, public policy problem to solve.
