Trucking Industry Summit 2022 Michael Wood
Minister of Transport, Immigration, Workplace Relations and Safety “You are the people who day in and day out do the work to get the goods moving around our country, which is so important for our economy and for our communities,” was how Minister Wood kicked off his address. He expressed his enjoyment in working with a sector with a practical and direct approach, saying that although the industry and the government might not always see eye to eye, understanding each other made working together easier. Covid-19 was cited as the reason the government’s focus had largely been week to week/day to day for the past couple of years. But Minister Wood said it could now refocus and consider the strategic challenges existing in the freight sector, noting that the weekend of the summit (30/31 July) was when the country’s borders were again open. He said the government’s commitment lay in a safer, cleaner, more efficient and resilient transport sector. The pandemic, the global fuel crisis, the decarbonisation of the economy and the transport sector itself were huge challenges, and the key to overcoming them lay in working together.
He said pressures were persisting longer than the government had hoped and, to date, the cost of the concession to the government was $1 billion. He stressed the National Land Transport Fund (NLTF) budgets had not been impacted and that the government had underwritten the shortfall.
Resilience “One of the things that surprised me somewhat when I came into this role is that New Zealand doesn’t have an integrated freight and supply chain strategy.” Minister Wood said that although the transport sector was adaptable and pragmatic, Covid-19 had demonstrated there was work to do in terms of resilience, with the flow of freight at times “dicey” during the height of the crisis. The Ministry of Transport has been leading work on addressing that, he said, and it was important there was a coherent strategy across all modes, linked by clear workforce, infrastructure and decarbonisation strategies. He pointed out that if the government and industry worked together, the government, local authority, and the private sector could be guided on investment as we move forward.
Fuel
Issues
Minister Wood said supply-chain constraints and the war in Ukraine were the roots of the fuel-pricing issues. “That’s why in March this year, we did move decisively to do what we could as government through the 36% reduction across all legislated rates of road-user charges.” He acknowledged that the government didn’t remove all of the impacts, but it did help, saying concessions would remain until 31 January.
“We launched the issues paper for the freight supply-chain paper earlier this year and we’ve had strong feedback from your sector and other parts of the freight sector. That feedback is now closed. I think we had 83 substantial submissions.” He said the next stage would be analysing and developing a draft supply-chain strategy for release later this year, intending to finalise in early 2023. The key issues are:
110 New Zealand Trucking
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Michael Wood.
• Need to develop a resilient
workforce • Need to decarbonise • Need to make sure the supply
chain is well integrated. Minister Wood acknowledged road freight would continue to carry the lion’s share of the freight task, but the supply chain would be more robust if all modes were optimised. Recent investments in shipping and hubs such as Ruakura and Bunnythorpe were all about allowing modes to better integrate. “We see an important role for government in getting that co-ordination working well. “The government recognises that one of the biggest strategic – and I would say moral – challenges we face is the need to take action on climate change. This isn’t a future problem,” he said, citing unprecedented, repeated, extreme weather events both here and overseas. “Our heavy-vehicle fleet does have an important role to play here, making up about 3.5% of our total transport fleet. But it currently contributes about 25% of total road transport emissions, and that percentage is forecast to increase as the light-vehicle fleet electrifies in the coming years.” He continued that although roads carried 92.8% of freight volumes,
