A PAPER prepared by the Freight Reform Advisory Panel has backed trade diversification at Newcastle and Port Kembla, as mineral trades decline.
The paper was prepared by Kerry Schott AO, Lucio Di Bartolomeo (chair of the Australasian Railway Association and Hermione Parsons (chief executive of the Australian Logistics Association) on behalf of the New South Wales government.
Work on the Freight Policy Reform program began early last year and concluded in January of this year.
The final report outlines a roadmap for change, identifying short, medium and long-term actions to be delivered.
An earlier consultation and interims direction paper was previously published last year with feedback considered in the development of the final document.
According to the paper, “Port Botany is and is likely to remain, the main container port until its capacity is reached”.
“Any government-funded infrastructure needed to support container terminals should be directed to Port Botany for the foreseeable future,” the paper stated, while also supporting diversification elsewhere.
“The panel supports the Port of Newcastle and Port Kembla diversifying its activities, particularly as coal traffic declines.”
The paper backed elements of the Port Botany Landside Improvement Strategy (PBLIS) notably in terms of moving from a penalty scheme to an incentive scheme, albeit with some recommendations from the earlier Willett Review into PBLIS be phased or staged.
The paper identifies 14 of the 21 recommendations for immediate adoption with six to be given further consideration.
“However, due to strong opposition from the trucking sector, several PBLIS recommendations are not adopted at this time,” the paper stated.
“Any changes carried out should be reviewed in five years.”
The staged approach would see the PBLIS recommendations implemented in three groups.
The first group would focus on:
According to the paper, these recommendations are expected to achieve the most benefits across all of industry and allow other changes to follow “when there is greater confidence and certainty”.
The second group of recommendations, which require further development and potential business case consideration include:
These recommendations can be “concurrently progressed” with the first group of recommendations, the paper states.
The third group of recommendations are changes to the current PBLIS rules that were opposed by some transport operators and should be “further considered during the implementation process”.
They include:
Meanwhile the paper notes the need for “significant improvements” to increase rail network capacity with issues including better coordination between the state’s three rail networks, the constraints rail faces in the allocation of paths through the dense passenger prioritised Sydney Trains network and unfavourable access pricing for the rail network compared with that faced by road network users.