Ports of Auckland's chief executive is entirely blaming COVID-19 for delays, and says reporting of safety issues has been low because Māori and Pacific workers do not raise risks.
Importers are frustrated at the backlog of stock still at sea or stuck on the wharf as some shop shelves remain bare before Christmas.
Port workers have told Checkpoint they have ongoing concerns about safety at the port following two deaths there.
Auckland Mayor Phil Goff told Checkpoint he cannot express confidence in the chief executive until he sees things improve.
Ports of Auckland chief executive Tony Gibson told Checkpoint he himself was not happy with the port's performance.
"I think that we have to go back to the impact what COVID-19 has had on the organisation," Gibson said.
"We've had to keep our workforce separate. That's had an impact on productivity. And despite the fact that we're not as productive as we have been, we have got a motivated workforce to make sure we get things done.
"We get goods cleared, and once the ships are here we're getting good throughput through the terminal. The dwell time of the containers is around 1.8 days which by international standards is first class, and delivery on the truck grid both auto and manual as around the same."
Gibson said the Port of Tauranga was not struggling to process shipments because it had not had the same COVID-19 factors as Auckland.
"We are the largest import port in New Zealand, and of course there has been a rush of import cargoes.
"At the time of COVID-19 our customers told us that they would be at least 30 percent down in throughput. That didn't happen and no one saw the demand cycle coming. So we all misread the situation.
"We've also got a situation where eight months ago Treasury was predicting unemployment of 13.5 percent. And on that basis our customers were telling us 'you'll see a drop of 30 percent in imports'. We were expecting a terrible year."
Earlier in December in a Checkpoint interview Auckland Mayor Phil Goff would not express confidence in the Ports of Auckland's chief executive, saying he would wait and see when the automation process is running smoothly at the port.
"I read the headline of that story and it's classic clickbait media theatre," Gibson said in response.
"When you listen to what the mayor said it's fair enough. He wants to see the result end of automation. In any case, I talked to the mayor directly and we meet regularly, and I met him the day after your interview. It was a good meeting, I'm clear on his expectations and that's how it should be.
"I accept that our market share has been declining somewhat. That's our overall market share, but our import market share has been increasing.
"We've had so many, what I would call, port studies on the Port of Auckland… We had a port future study which put in question the geographical location of Ports of Auckland. And at that time we also gave away the ability to reclaim land. So that's how and why we had to automate so that we could increase our capacity from 1 million to 1.5m, to 1.8m."
The reason the port had lost market share was it does not have the capacity, he said.
With Christmas one week away, Gibson said it was possible many goods would not get to retailers before then.
"We still have delays. We have one ship outside today and that's been delayed four days but on average, we're about eight to nine days at the moment.
"I think you've also got differentiators with certain importers, and some are working on the 'just in time' principle. Others actually have buffer in their stock, and they are okay but it's obviously the ones that haven't got buffer and need their goods.
"But we're working hard to actually employ more people. So far we've hired 23 more people.
"We need 12 crane drivers and we need about 10 more straddle drivers… We're dealing with a very tight labour market. And what we're finding is that despite the fact we've got 23 FTEs through the door we're only having a 25 percent success rate."
However, Checkpoint has been contacted by a straddle carrier driver with more than a decade of experience at Ports of Auckland. The person applied for one of the recently advertised jobs and got an email back saying the person did not have enough experience. That email was shown to Checkpoint.
Gibson said it was not an issue of seeking workers who will accept lower salaries.
"Straddle drivers and crane drivers are paid very well. But we have a certain standard and skill set there's two things we're doing, we're employing from outside based on the skill set criteria, but we're also retraining people who have got the critical skill factors."
He said no staff numbers were rationalised or trimmed because of automation.
"We have the same staff numbers as we had a year ago, about 272.
"No one has lost their job as a result of automation, and the workforce has been told very clearly that we will only consider redundancies after automation is fully embedded.
"The other thing that we've told them is we would much rather build up the volume and keep the staff, and that's been communicated widely in the organisation."
The implementation of automation at the port has had problems, including a recent incident when a straddle went off course and hit a shipping container, forcing the port to halt all automated machine operation for several days.
Gibson told Checkpoint he was "very happy" with automation.
"We are meeting targets, in fact in the first week of automation, we achieved crane rates which was by far world standard. The only issue that we've got, is that we should have had full terminal rollout by now, but we had to put that on hold because of COVID-19.
"We couldn't get the software engineers and people from Konecranes out here, and we couldn't train people, so we had to put automation on hold.
"We're very happy with the way it's performing but it's a complex system, it's complex software."
On Monday, Checkpoint was informed by port workers that three automated cranes were shut down because they were becoming overloaded and had on average slow or low shifting rates - about four to six containers an hour. The port then moved to manual drivers to speed up processing.
Gibson said that was not correct.
"We had a three-hour delay with the cranes on Monday and it had nothing to do with automation, it was to do with a system called XPS which is related to our main terminal operating system, so it had nothing to do with automation."
On December 5, Ports of Auckland was fined $540,000 over a 2018 accident in which a young man was killed by a toppled crane. Then in August 2020 another worker was killed when he was crushed beneath a container.
Gibson said he believed workers at the port were safe, but the results of a recent survey showed the port had what he called "safety culture issues".
"What it boils down to is that there are some people that are not speaking up, and we encourage people to speak up when they consider that something or someone is working unsafely.
"We've been doing a lot of work in the last month to retrain, recalibrate and make sure that all our people are not fearful of coming forward and saying ... what they want.
"We have a large Pacific Island, Māori community, and very often they are what I would call shy in coming forward to address issues. We've spoken to them. And we want to ensure that through their leaders that they ... have an avenue to come through and express how they feel about safety.
"We want a no blame culture."
The recent survey showed staff enjoy working at the port, Gibson said.
"Despite the fact we have had what I would call a hell of a year, our people have been heroic, they've stood up, and despite the fact we've got some operational issues, they are delivering, and they're working hard.
"I have to take responsibility for the deaths and I have to take responsibility for the freighting delays, but COVID-19 didn't start at the Ports of Auckland."
"I'm working very hard to make sure we can get the operation back to normal, along with my team.
"I'm not happy with the port's performance… for four years in a row we have won best port in Oceania. So we're talking about one glitch here.
"This glitch … we put fairly and squarely at the feet of COVID-19."
RNZ
