Shipping Exports ‘Boards Should Call Tenders’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31123, 28 July 1966, Page 6

Shipping Exports ‘Boards Should Call Tenders’

(.Veto Zealand Press Association)

DUNEDIN, July 27. The producer boards should call tenders for shipping their exports, according to the president of the Otago Chamber of Commerce (Mr M. McKinnon). The chamber viewed with alarm the latest increase in freight rates, he said.

“T h e Conference Lines are, in effect, a great monopoly operating on a costplus basis. Their costs have risen, but has any determined effort been made to offset continually increasing costs by the adoption of improved methods of operating?” Mr McKinnon said.

“New Zealand can no longer afford to refuse competitive shipping lines an opportunity of quoting for the work of carrying New Zealand’s produce to Britain, and returing with merchandise vital to our economy. “The producer boards and the farming community are convinced that the Conference Lines are the only organisation with the necessary space, dry and refrigerated. “This is absolutely wrong and we challenge the boards to put their next contract out to tender. “The producer boards and their heads are experts in their own fields of meat, dairy produce and wool, and New Zealand is enormously indebted to them. Nevertheless they have consistently bought New Zealand’s shipping space in the first shop they came to and have refused so much as to look in the window of any other. "Outside the farmer-run export economies of Australia and New Zealand, not a country in the world would place its national cargoes—both inward and outward—in the hands of a great shipping monopoly and suffer a succession of adverse increases in cost at a time when increased overseas earnings are vital to continued financial stability. “New Zealand can not afford to pay the cost of the results of the United Kingdom shipping strike as it is being called upon to do today.” New Zealand’s produce was marketed on a long-term fixed basis, and there was no provision to recover continual shipping increases.

“The cold fact emerges that the profit ratios of the farmer producers are being steadily reduced,” said Mr McKinnon. “It is incumbent on the farmer to insist through his producer boards that action is taken to stay these continuing freight Increases, by ensuring that other methods are used to reduce shipping expenses,” The chamber wanted competition “and we mean real competition” for the Conference Lines and all possible alternative shipping sources should be investigated. "New Zealand cannot continue complacently to accept and afford the same pattern that has existed with little change since 1882,” Mr McKinnon said.