While Winston Peters was dreaming up another quixotic policy - to forcibly move Auckland's port to Marsden Pt - the port company was conceding at last that it cannot intrude further into the Waitemata Harbour. In Ports of Auckland Ltd's annual report released on Thursday, chairwoman Liz Coutts wrote, "It is no longer acceptable for a port to reclaim more land every time it needs (additional) capacity. That approach was literally unsustainable."
Her concession is a considerable victory for the citizens who went to court to stop a planned extension to the container wharf that juts furthest in the channel between the city and Devonport and for this newspaper's efforts over the past five years to publicise the intrusion the extension would be.
As a result of the resistance to this sort of port expansion, Auckland's previous mayor and council commissioned a study of alternative ports in its region and the current mayor, Phil Goff, advocates one of the suggested options, a site in the Firth of Thames. Now Peters, MP for Northland and leader of a party that he hopes will hold the balance of power after this election, proposes to have Parliament pass legislation to move the entire port to his patch.
Less parochial voices would say the last thing New Zealand's economy needs is a new port, the country already has too many. And the second last thing it needs is for the country's largest import gateway to be moved to Marsden Pt, from where just about everything would have to be railed south. About 75 per cent of the cargo crossing the Auckland wharves is consumed in the region.
The remaining 25 per cent possibly allows the load on Ports of Auckland to be spread to ports in other regions, including Marsden Pt or Tauranga, the country's second largest port which already has a freight terminal in Auckland and part owns Northport at Marsden Pt. The obvious solution is for the boards of the three ports to get together and work out the most efficient use of all of them, taking into account Auckland's capacity constraint.
