Luxon Christopher; Wood MichaelCHRISTOPHER LUXON (National—Botany): My question now is around ports and particularly the Port of Auckland because I think irrespective of the global challenges we're seeing on the supply chain side around the world there's no doubt that we've got pretty significant issues at the Port of Auckland and we're seeing it with respect to automation projects not hitting capacity and we've got serious safety issues there. We've got freight costs that are two to four times and now exporters/importers being hit with more uniform charges as they're containering from Tauranga to Auckland. And we've obviously got ships anchored outside of ports and that's manifesting itself where businesses are actually importing goods that they need for manufacturing and they're having to carry a lot of inventory. Likewise they hold a lot of finished stock inventory and inventory is cash in a business so it's impacting on cash flows really very strongly. It's also leading to the loss of some export customers for some businesses I've been talking to as well and I'm sure the Minister has as well.So I guess I have two questions. Can he tell us what's happening with the Port of Auckland and where it's really going? And a broader question: what is the strategic view around ports and what programme of work does he have under way to think about a ports strategy across the country?Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): I thank Mr Luxon for those questions. New Zealand is experiencing some of the downstream effects of the economic dislocation created by COVID at the moment. Ports all around the world are experiencing significant disruption and delays. The most recent numbers I saw which were admittedly about a month ago showed that the index of port reliability in the Asia-Pacific region was at about 13 percent. In other words vessels are arriving at port around the time we would expect them to about 13 percent of the time and this has led to significant backlogs shortages and supply chain challenges all around the world and we are obviously not immune to that. In fact in some respects we are more exposed to it than many other countries because of our geographical location.So we're having to work through that and I do want to acknowledge here the work the Ministry of Transport have been doing. They've been playing a really critical role in trying to bring together ports and other players across the supply chain to make sure that information is being shared as much as possible to make sure that we have as much alignment as possible and to make sure that we look at the kind of mitigations that might be able to be put in place to smooth things over. We cannot fix that fundamental international problem in terms of choked-up international shipping lines but we can try and make sure that people are working together as closely as possible here. That takes some work given that at the moment if you look across our supply chains we have ports who are by statute required to act commercially and in effect be in competition with one another and you have commercial relationships with other players in the supply chain. So it isn't necessarily an extant overarching strategy that requires them to work together from a sort of New Zealand Inc." perspective around these things. But I think everyone's been working with as much good faith as possible.Some of things we've done for example have been to work really closely with KiwiRail to make sure that they lift their capacity as much as possible. They've recently upped further the service they're providing to the Port of Tauranga for example to get more of those containers moved off the docks at the Port of Tauranga. This does bring to light the broader issues around the supply chain. So our policy as expressed at the last election which I intend to move forward with is to be developing a proper freight strategy for our country. I think the challenges we've faced over the last year revealed that we need that. We need that particularly in the upper North Island where there are a range of questions around ports and how the supply chain works together. But more broadly we need to build up a supply chain that is more resilient than the one we have at the moment and I'm confident that piece of work will help us to get there."