The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission’s recent Container stevedoring monitoring report 2020-21 has revealed the weak points in the Australian supply chain.
A high-level meeting was subsequently called by the Department of Home Affairs to discuss the issues in the ACCC report, including port congestion, port performance and industrial relations. Also present were a wide range of representatives from industry and also government officials from bodies such as the Department for Infrastructure and also the Federal Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Shipping Australia CEO, Captain Melwyn Noronha, told the gathering that uninterrupted international trade is vital to the interests of all Australians. Adding that Australians rely on international trade for jobs, goods and property, he told delegates that ocean shipping carries 99.9% of everything that comes into, or leaves this country.
“The job of a ship is to deliver goods from Port A to Port B. And that is what ships are doing. But when ships arrive at Port B, they are held up. They are forced to wait, sometimes for many hours, before they berth,” he told attendees.
The landside logistics chain is problematic too as there is a mis-match in working hours.
Referring to the recently released container stevedoring report, he noted that the ACCC have demonstrated that port congestion is a problem, that port performance is a problem and that industrial relations in this country is a problem too.
“Ships work 24/7, trucks don’t. They don’t work weekends. They don’t work evenings. They don’t work public holidays. The mismatch doesn’t work,” he told delegates.
Asserting that these problems must be solved, he called – as a minimum – for:
- good quality port governance and oversight, which must include price monitoring that is tied to port performance
- ships to be berthed promptly upon arrival
- enterprise bargaining to have short, strict, timeframes
- for compulsory arbitration if the parties cannot agree in the timeframes with immediate settlement of the disputes
- start and expiry dates for waterfront enterprise bargaining agreements to be staggered so that they cannot all be expired at the same time
- an absolute prohibition on any industrial action that prevents stevedores from working sub-contracted ships
- the working hours of the trucking industry to be aligned with the working hours of the shipping industry.
“Why? Because uninterrupted trade is vital to the interests of all Australians,” he told attendees. Outside of the meeting, he later added the comment that “ports do not like to be measured on their performance.”