Industrial Action – Maritime Union

The Maritime Union continues their industrial action throughout the country. These actions effect a number of different Stevedores and are causing delays, not only in gaining time-slots but also in processing vessels.

The knock on effect is vessels are running later than originally advised and in extreme cases are changing their normal rotation around Australia to avoid further delays.

Please continue to speak to our staff to keep up to date with any changes to your container arrivals.

Weather and COVID Delays

We are experiencing a number of delays with both air and seafreight due to poor weather in Sydney and CO-VID outbreaks in Sydney and Melbourne. This includes delayed arrivals, availabilities, and checking in of airfreight.

As with the above industrial action we will keep you up to date with any delays on your scheduled deliveries and organise deliveries as soon as possible.

Increase Charges

The current spate of increasing of charges is continuing without any clear indication when they may stop. In the past week we have received increases in time slot fees, infrastructure fees and container chain fees (returning empty containers) in both Sydney and Brisbane.

Whilst we have tried to mitigate these fees as much as possible there will be increases which we need to passed through to cover the cost of these fees. Our industry associations are continuing to push Governments at both State and Federal level to get some halt to all these increases, however currently the Governments are not interested in helping industry.

We will continue to advocate to stop the level of increases and hope to have some news on this in the coming months (that does not include further increases).

Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment (DAWE)

We are now coming up to BMSB season where any goods leaving over 36 different countries around the world must be treated before release in Australia. The BMSB season commences on the 01^st September and runs through to the end of May 2021.

DAWE have also advised there is an additional threat of Khapra Beetle this year and they will be inspecting and potentially delaying containers which may be subject to infestation with the Khapra Beetle. As more information becomes available, we will pass this on.

Stay safe and should you have any queries please contact us directly