Integrated plan to keep Tasmania connected
Ports are central to Tasmania’s way of life and economy.
Ports are central to Tasmania’s way of life and economy and TasPorts plans to make them even more so as freight volumes increase.
“Being an island state, everyone in the community is so reliant on the services and facilities that we own and operate,” says chief executive Anthony Donald.
TasPorts is not a typical port company.
Not only does it operate 11 ports around the state, it is also vertically integrated, which means it manages a pilot service and a towing service and is the also the marine safety regulator on behalf of the Tasmanian Government. It also owns and operates the Devonport airport; the Bass Island Line, which ships between King Island and Victoria; and the Burnie Chip Export Terminal.
“We’re quite diverse. We’re geographically spread across quite a large area and the functions and roles that we play vary,” Donald says. “And the integration of all those roles and functions really work together to deliver the 99 per cent of goods that are delivered in and out of the state for the benefit of the community.”
The ports also handle containers, exports for sectors including agriculture, forestry, seafood and mining, and bring in food and consumer goods.
While TasPorts will soon report a profit drop for the past financial year due to the COVID-19 crisis, the results come after four years of rising profits at the government-owned port company and Donald expects that to continue as freight volumes rise.
“The freight story for Tasmania continues to be a positive one,” he says.
The ports have more than 4700 vessel movements a year and move more than 15.5 million tonnes of freight.
Along with maintaining and operating its infrastructure, TasPorts is now working beyond the port gates as well, so it can better understand the origin and destination of its freight and its customers.
“Often, if you look at the traditional port model, the stakeholder relationships are with the shipping line and/or the terminal operator,” Donald explains.
“Certainly, we’ve got great relationships with those two industry groups.
“But from the Tasmanian perspective, we felt that it was just as appropriate to develop stronger relationships with the ultimate customers being the farmers or the industry groups that are wanting to deliver better supply chain efficiencies or understand their aspirations for change and/or growth.”
Donald says ports are a volume business, and the more freight TasPorts can move through its ports the more efficient and productive they will be, which will ultimately result in lower costs for customers.
TasPorts was established in 2006 following the amalgamation of local community-owned ports which had previously all competed. As a result, the individual ports have fewer shipping movements than many comparable ports elsewhere in Australia. But this creates its own opportunities.
“We do have capacity within our network to increase our shipping frequency,” he says.
“The types or the blend and the diversity of the commodities that we ship in and out of the state and the growth that we have been seeing over the last two to three years, we actually don’t have a berth within the state today that doesn’t see a movement.
“We continue to see positive growth and positive trends and a lot of optimism and we’re clearly seeing a number of businesses challenged through COVID-19, but we’re hopeful that we’ll work with those customers directly and indirectly so that we can ride the waves, so to speak, and come out the other side for the better.”
Under its Port Master Plan, TasPorts will invest more than $200m in infrastructure during the next 15 years, including working to increase the size of ships it can receive.
It is developing the Port of Burnie as part of the Burnie Export Gateway initiative, which it says will bring significant trade and economic benefits to northwest Tasmania. The plan will include capital dredging to accommodate larger vessels and port infrastructure development to increase volume of on-port cargo operations.
‘We see our role as continuing to facilitate freight movements and really driving better supply chain efficiencies such that we can reduce the cost of freight movements’
At Devonport, in the north of the state, it will extend berthing facilities for passengers and container freight, with larger vessels expected from 2021. Shippers such as TOLL and SeaRoad will take advantage of the larger capacity.
In Hobart, increased investment will boost the tourism, trade and Antarctic sectors, in particular to accommodate the Australian Antarctic Division to support the new Antarctic icebreaker, RSV Nuyina. At 160m long, it is a significant increase on the 95m-long Aurora Australis that came before it.
In fact, the cruise sector is growing in importance. In the five years from 2013/14 to 2018/19, the number of annual cruise ship visits to the state increased by 68 per cent to 106.
The company is currently investing to upgrade the cruise terminal and berthing infrastructure in Hobart in response to the continued growth.
“This will ensure capacity for larger cruise vessels is maintained and a proactive approach is taken to increase passenger dispersal to regional areas, in turn preventing destination overcrowding,” the most recent annual report states.
“TasPorts is becoming a very strategic and commercial business, but very much aligned to the benefits of the State of Tasmania and the broader community,” Donald says.
“We see our role as continuing to facilitate freight movements and really driving better supply chain efficiencies such that we can reduce the cost of freight movements in a manner that encourages our existing customers to grow, but it also encourages new customers to come and talk to us and to move new products to new markets.”