Shipping Realities

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31857, 9 December 1968, Page 14

Shipping Realities

The discussion in Wellington last Friday of New Zealand’s maritime policy was a useful exercise. Sponsored by the Export and Shipping Council, it served to enlighten many interested persons on some of the hard facts of the shipping business. It may be some time before any of those who have strong views on New Zealand’s future in shipping adjust their opinions and hopes to fit the facts. Nevertheless, it is important that they do so, for policies founded on myths or on mistaken notions will prove very costly if they are ever enacted. Anyone may suspect that the chairman of the P. and 0. Company, Sir Donald Anderson, was mainly interested in protecting the extensive interests of his company and its many subsidiaries; and he was indeed quite frank about what his company is after: money. But he was also frank about the service it is prepared to give to make a reasonable profit—or rather, by the standards of most businessmen, an unreasonably small profit—on its investment.

An old, but telling reason for increasing shipping charges was raised on Friday, when the discussion centred on whether New Zealand should have its own overseas shipping line or find other ways to influence freight rates and to promote shipping services to new markets. The reason is, of course, the higher cost of getting cargoes on and off ships—costs incurred while ships are not at sea. How New Zealand’s participation in the ownership of overseas ships would alter these costs is very difficult to see. One of the best answers to this problem is container shipping—an undertaking which, because of the high cost of installations both aboard ship and on shore, is the one in which New Zealand is least likely to engage. The Minister of Labour, Mr Shand, hinted that the present Government might go some distance towards acceding to demands for New Zealand’s participation in overseas shipping. Mr Shand offered two reasons for his proposal that one member of a shipping conference serving New Zealand be at least partly owned by New Zealand interests: it would assist New Zealand in negotiating freight rates and it would provide employment for New Zealanders. Mr Shand did not say that his plan would reduce, or even hold, freight rates; and unless the “ New Zealand ” company proved more efficient than any of its competitors within the conference there seems, as yet, no reason for believing that it would lower the cost of overseas shipping.

The Labour Party has promised to establish a State shipping corporation—a plan which might be disastrously uneconomic and return few of the advantages claimed for it. After studying the formidable and, so far, unanswered, arguments advanced by Sir Donald Anderson, the Labour Party might welcome the Government’s devising something to enable Labour to abandon this plan for a corporation to serve “ new or limited markets ”.