Coastal shipping funding omission slammed

<p>Coastal shipping’s failure to rate a mention in the AusLink II Budget, handed down on Tuesday (May 8), as it did in the original AusLink package, has drawn continued criticism from the sector.</p> <p>The apparent dismissal of shipping’s role as an economically viable, environmentally sustainable transport option was something shipping supporters wished to remedy, Australian Shipowners Association chief executive Lachlan Payne said at an ICHCA luncheon in Brisbane earlier this month.</p> <p>Sea transport as an option was rarely mentioned by the Government in its pronouncements on transport policy, he said.</p> <p>Advocates were now highlighting the mode’s virtual omission from billions of dollars of public AusLink spending.</p> <p>&#8220The continuing concentration of transport policy on road and rail might have created a habit of looking to the Government to fund infrastructure investment in land transport,&#8221 Mr Payne said.</p> <p>&#8220Australia offers nothing, zero, to shipowners,&#8221 he said.</p> <p>While rail infrastructure was built to stay and needed maintenance, the sea highway was not a permanent structure, Mr Payne said.</p> <p>Coastal shipping in 2004&#4705 carried almost a quarter of Australia’s non-urban freight (in tonne-kilometres) but consumed only 6.6% of the total fuel used to move cargo across all modes.</p> <br />