I RECENTLY received Shipping Australia’s (SAL) latest newsletter Signal which has no less than nine articles critical of Australia’s port performance, with the final article calling for a federal inquiry into the lack of productivity.
Normally, the newsletter deals with more mundane issues such as automation in shipping, nuclear-powered vessels, IMO updates and other events. To drive home the message even further, the articles were also published in the recently released SAL Annual Review 2025.
The articles delved into the details of the latest World Bank's Container Port Performance Index (CPPI) Report and came up with some interesting comparisons and statements. The author(s) must have spent the summer break studying the report while sipping a negroni sitting under the cabana on the beach.
SAL has generally been critical of our port performance (container ports in particular), but this newsletter has hit a new level of criticism using cherry-picked findings from the report. It also criticises port management and highlights the lack of infrastructure investment, forgetting the fact that annual container throughput across Australia is only 9m TEU.
Thus, ports have limited scope for spending millions of dollars on equipment and infrastructure while ensuring a reasonable return on their investments.
One of the articles mentions that waterside performance is the main game. The report states that it ‘focuses on the time spent [by a vessel] in port as a proxy of performance’, thus ignoring landside performance. I’m not sure what our importers and exporters would have to say about that. SAL, of course, whose members are mainly foreign-owned shipping lines, would say that.
I have advocated in previous commentary on the report that if, in future, landside performance is to be included it would improve Australian ports’ ranking. The potential inclusion of landside performance measures is also mentioned in the current report.
Another article discusses the ranking of the English Premier League. What that has to do with port performance is unclear. Maybe Australian ports should be relegated to a lower league?
In another article the author(s) goes into a long discourse about apples and oranges to illustrate why we should not be critical of the report focusing on waterside performance alone. It is a rather long-winded analogy to defend their view that waterside performance is enough to condemn Australian ports for being inefficient and poor performers.
Another article deals with the fact that Bell Bay is our highest scoring port, which is quite easy to achieve when you have an annual throughput of 27,000 TEU and hardly any vessel waiting time. The article then ends with discussing the height of the average male to prove that there are outliers such as Bell Bay.
So how do we react to this outpouring of criticism by SAL? Maybe we finish with the word that is used frequently at the end of several of their articles... disregard!
I hope that some other commentators, more qualified than me, refute some of the findings. I believe, and have mentioned previously, that Australian ports, while hardly world leading, are doing okay in the context of what is currently occurring in a troubled world and a disruptive logistics sector.