National Road Carriers (NRC) says the findings of Parliament’s first cross-party inquiry into ports and the maritime sector backs up NRC’s election call for freight to be treated as one system.
“The Transport and Infrastructure Committee has confirmed our view: New Zealand’s freight network is being planned and funded in pieces, and it performs like it,” says NRC GM Policy and Advocacy James Smith.
“Ports are where road, rail and sea meet, and almost every container that crosses a wharf starts or ends its journey on a truck. This report is as much about road freight as it is about shipping, and we want the incoming Government to treat it that way.”
The Committee’s report recommends port investment be assessed as part of an integrated freight system, and that a National Ports Strategy be developed. It also unanimously recommends recognising road and rail connections to ports in the next Government Policy Statement (GPS) on land transport and creating a national freight and port data framework with published, comparable measures.
“The Committee has put its finger on the problem. Roads, rail, ports, workforce and energy all sit with different owners, and nobody holds end-to-end accountability,” Smith says. “A port expansion delivers little if the road to it can’t efficiently carry the freight.”
NRC urges the Government not to stop at a ports-only strategy.
“A standalone ports strategy would repeat the very fragmentation the Committee criticised. It needs to sit within a single national supply chain strategy covering road, rail, sea and air, owned by a Minister of Supply Chain with the Freight Advisory Council given the mandate to develop and monitor it,” Smith says.
“The report proposes developing the strategy in partnership with the maritime sector. Road carriers move most of the freight to and from every port, so we need to be part of that partnership from the start.”
The report also records concern about Auckland’s vehicle booking system charges, which rose dramatically over four years and are paid by transport operators before being passed down the supply chain.
“Our members pay these charges every day. We support closer Commerce Commission scrutiny, and we want vehicle booking and other landside charges named in its monitoring brief so the costs passed to carriers and their customers are covered,” Smith says.
NRC’s other priorities in response to the report include:
- Landside measures such as truck turnaround times, booking-slot availability and gate charges in the new data framework, underpinning freight-efficiency targets for 2030 reported every year
- Priority and funding in the next GPS for port access routes, including SH16, the Avondale–Southdown rail corridor, the Marsden Point Rail Link, SH1 Warkworth–Te Hana and resilient SH2/SH5 access into Hawke’s Bay
- Modelling the road task before any shift to a hub-and-spoke port network
- A fast VDAM pathway so high-productivity vehicles can carry 38-tonne containers the whole journey on port and inland-port corridors
- A freight workforce plan that covers truck drivers, including a residency pathway for drivers
- Extending the resilience assessment to fuel supply, backed by increased onshore storage
“The Committee has given New Zealand a shared diagnosis across parties. Now the system needs to be delivered,” Smith says. “NRC stands ready to help the next Government build a freight system that moves more, spends smarter and stays safe.”
