Newcastle losing container trade to Sydney

Recently released trade figures for the privatised Port of Newcastle show a total of 7960 “twenty-foot units” or TEUs – the standard size measure for cargo containers – being moved through the port in 2016. Of these, 4302 were imports and 3658 exports.  In contrast, Newcastle container movements totalled 13,200 in 2009-10. The following year, Newcastle Port Corporation boasted of a “35 per cent increase in container trade to 18,243 TEU”.

“Newcastle Port Corporation has a container strategy that it is continuing to implement in order to grow container trade to ultimately support the development of a container terminal  on the Mayfield Portside Lands,” the corporation said in its 2011 annual report.

Trade consultant Greg Cameron, one of the architects of Newcastle’s original BHP-era push for a container terminal, said Newcastle had lost more than half of its container trade since 2011.

Mr Cameron said the trade had been growing in the early years of the century because the shipping industry believed the state government of the day was looking to have a container terminal built in Newcastle, and so was pushing trade its way.

But once the government privatised Port Botany in such a way that gave it an effective 100-year monopoly on container trade, Newcastle container traffic began to drop off.

“The only containers that move in and out of Newcastle nowadays are on general cargo ships, which have their own cranes,” Mr Cameron said.

“World trade in containers is conducted at ports that have container terminals with their own ‘portainer’ cranes, and so Newcastle is losing container shipping business to Botany and Brisbane.”

The government justifies the Botany monopoly by saying the biggest market is in Sydney and that Newcastle should concentrate on coal.