CONTAINER detention in Australia has drifted a long way from its original purpose. What was once a practical tool to incentivise the timely return of equipment has increasingly become a blunt revenue instrument — imposed even when cargo owners and their service providers have no ability to avoid delay.
And right now, that unfairness is on full display.
Since December 2025, prolonged Australian Border Force (ABF) Border Holds — particularly in Sydney — have left containers immobilised for weeks on end, with many cases exceeding one month on hold. Transport operators can’t collect them. Importers (or their agents) can’t unpack them. Empty container parks can’t receive them. Yet shipping lines continue to clock up detention charges as if nothing unusual is happening.
That’s not commercial discipline. It’s a failure of commercial fairness.
This isn’t new. For years, Freight & Trade Alliance (FTA) and the Australian Peak Shippers Association (APSA) have raised concerns — through formal submissions and direct engagement with shipping lines — about detention and demurrage being applied regardless of whether delays are within their control.
The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) has now put that concern in black and white, finding that charges are imposed even when congestion or delays are outside industry participants’ control, with ongoing concerns about fairness and transparency and limited ability for cargo owners to dispute or avoid charges.
The Productivity Commission went further, calling out the imbalance of bargaining power between shipping lines and their customers, and noting that detention is “often levied irrespective of whether the causes of delay are within the control of cargo owners.”
Even the Senate’s Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Committee has described detention and demurrage practices as “punitive rather than cost-reflective”, with strong calls for regulatory intervention.
When three major national institutions all say the same thing, it’s not anecdotal. It’s structural.
The present predicament simply sharpens the point.
Containers placed on regulatory holds — such as ABF border or x-ray holds or DAFF Country Action List (CAL) holds — cannot be collected or returned. There is no legal or practical way for importers, exporters or their logistics providers to move faster. Yet detention continues to accrue regardless.
There are limited protections around terminal storage in some, but not all, circumstances. There is, however, no equivalent safeguard against detention imposed by shipping lines.
That gap is now costing Australian businesses very substantial sums per container, often running into tens of thousands of dollars, for delays created entirely by government intervention.
Shipping lines have consistently argued that detention is an equipment charge, not a cargo charge, and that containers are revenue-generating assets which must remain in circulation to support global trade flows.
From this perspective, free time is already factored into freight rates to allow for normal operational delays, and any extension of free time is treated as a loss of equipment utilisation and revenue to the shipping line — even where the delay is wholly outside the control of cargo interests.
This framing helps explain why detention continues to accrue during regulatory holds, but it also reinforces the concern identified by Australian regulators that such charges are increasingly punitive rather than cost-reflective when applied in circumstances where no party in the commercial chain can influence the outcome.
Some shipping lines also point to the absence of any Australian regulatory framework requiring detention to be suspended during government-imposed delays, noting that international guidance — such as the US Federal Maritime Commission’s (FMC) Interpretive Rule — is not applicable in Australia.
Operational constraints are also frequently cited, including limited weekend depot operations and historically low industry take-up when extended hours have been trialled, as reasons why weekends continue to be counted in detention calculations.
At the same time, shipping lines in Australia generally maintain that they remain open to reviewing individual cases on commercial grounds, but have resisted any blanket policy change that would automatically suspend detention during regulatory holds.
The commercial logic underpinning these positions is clear: containers must move to earn revenue.
But that logic collapses when applied to situations where no party in the commercial chain can influence the outcome.
Detention may relate to equipment, not cargo — but it is still being charged to cargo interests who cannot return that equipment.
The United States faced exactly this problem — and fixed it.
In 2020, the FMC made it clear that detention and demurrage are unreasonable when shippers have no ability to avoid them and that charges must incentivise freight fluidity, not penalise unavoidable delay.
The FMC has since enforced that standard, including imposing a USD 1.975 million civil penalty on CMA CGM for unjust and unreasonable practices.
In other words: if you can’t return the box because the system won’t let you, you shouldn’t be paying for the privilege of being stuck.
Australia already has the evidence. We already have the international precedent. We already know the commercial arguments — and their limits.
What we don’t yet have is a regulatory framework that forces fairness into the system.
Detention should incentivise efficiency. Not punish inevitability.
Until that principle is embedded in Australian policy, detention will remain what regulators, senators and shippers alike now recognise it to be: not a logistics tool, but a revenue lever pulled at the worst possible moment.
And that’s not how a serious trading nation should run its supply chains.