Editorial: Port bosses may yet pay price of snub

Hundreds of protestors marched on Quay Street in Auckland to protest over the Ports of Auckland wharf expansion. Photo / Dean Purcell

Opinion

The Auckland port company has agreed to poke one finger rather than two into the harbour from Bledisloe Wharf for the time being. That compromise, accepted by the Auckland Council last week on the casting vote of the mayor, will satisfy neither side. Sooner or later, the company has to accept it can have no more of the harbour.

The penny is slow to drop. Not long ago, the company seriously imagined it could mitigate that loss of harbour views by erecting a tower, six shipping containers high, on the end of Captain Cook Wharf. Citizens could climb it for the view they will have lost at ground level, provided no ship was berthed at the extended Bledisloe Wharf.

In the annals of insults added to injury, this proposal deserves a special place. It is hard to know whether it was a calculated attempt to belittle the visual amenity threatened by the wharf extensions or whether the port executives really are blind to the harbour's character.

The Waitemata, despite expansions of its port over the past 175 years, remains an attractive wide waterway at the port - but only just. As wharves reach ever further into the channel, there will come a point at which the city can no longer see water to North Head, but just a channel between the wharves and North Shore.

The tipping point could occur suddenly. While an extra 100m of wharf does not sound much, and does not look far on a map, it would obscure the harbour entrance from the central waterfront and make the outer harbour look and feel confined. Many believe the tipping point has arrived.

Yet the port company is pressing on with preparatory work for wharf extensions it must know will not happen. If the port continues to snub its nose at the public and proceed with the extensions, it will ensure the subject is the central issue at the local elections next year and it can expect to deal with a new mayor and council more assertive than this one.

The company needs to accept that its wharves and adjacent landholdings are as large as the port is going to be. If longer berths are needed for the latest container ships, they can be carved out of its existing area. The port surely does not need to use harbourside space for unloaded vehicles. Importers should be collecting them as they land.

Auckland is not about to lose its port, or the port lose its primacy in the national picture. The port has moved east in the past 50 years and could do more development east of the Fergusson container terminal without encroaching on the visual and recreational attractions of the harbour.

It has forsaken the old central wharves, Princes and Queens, for public use and ought to do the same with Captain Cook Wharf if it can spare it for a public viewing tower of a lost splendour. Office towers give occupants a good wide view of the harbour and the public deserves an equally expansive outlook at street level. The port company should come down from its tower and hear the sentiment in the streets. The port has enough of the harbour, it will get no more.