Ken McGuire gave a delightfully lugubrious description of the many problems faced by New Zealand's shipping.
He started with the sad fate of New Zealand's most commercially significant vessel, the SS Dunedin, which had taken the first cargo of refrigerated meat to England in 1882, thus paving the way for a period of greater prosperity. After several successful voyages it disappeared without trace. (It was a sailing ship, initially a passenger ship but converted to freight - its "funnel" was the chimney for its refrigeration plant which consumed three tons of coal a day). Efficient and reliable shipping became vital, and the country had 60 international ports.
More recently NZ was served by the Conference Lines, and each coastal settlement had its own international port controlled by a Harbour Board, but most of the smaller Boards folded and the work of the Boards was taken over by Regional Councils. By world standards our ports are small and inefficient. When the NZ Shipping Corporation bought two ships, they each held 2,000 containers, but modern ships can now take 15,000, and the biggest, 25,000. Some modern ports handle 40,000 containers a day.
New Zealand has two major disadvantages: it is small, and it is way off the main trade routes, so nowadays we exist as an appendix to Australia, which creates further problems when Australia's ports experience rolling strikes. A new problem has arrived with Covid; when the pandemic struck shipping companies expected a major decline in world trade and disposed of many of their older ships. Then, when trade picked up sooner than they expected they were caught short of capacity. As most NZ trade to Europe is transhipped via Singapore or Hong Kong, we suffer a triple disadvantage.
Ken then gave illustrated examples of what can go wrong for individual ships and containers:
- loads can catch fire which is almost impossible to extinguish
- containers can be washed off the deck in heavy seas
- container piles (which can be eight high) can collapse, destabilising the ship
- ships can and do hit rocks, as with the Rena outside Tauranga
- the weight of container stacks can crush the bottom layers
- ships can be hijacked
- ships can get caught in the Suez Canal or blocked by one that has been
- etc., etc.
To compound the problems, many of the newest ships are too large for any New Zealand port and the new dual fuel ships will not be able to refuel here.
The list was depressing and could have been endless but before terminal depression set in, time ran out, leaving us with a glimmer of hope that somehow trade will continue, and a sense of amazement that it will succeed despite all these difficulties.
