CANBERRA: Australia’s plan to heed the International Maritime Organization’s call for a more lenient implementation of the Safety of Life at Sea container weight rule has a group of ports and maritime authorities questioning whether too light a touch will be taken starting July 1.
Ports Australia, a trade group representing Australian ports and maritime authorities is unsure whether the Australian Maritime Safety Authority has the resources needed to adequately enforce the new rule. The rule, passed in 2014 as an amendment to the SOLAS convention, aims to crack down on misdeclared container weights that have been tied to accidents by requiring carriers to receive a verified gross mass declaration before the shipment can be loaded onto a ship. “AMSA will initially take an educative approach to achieve compliance with SOLAS container weight amendments from the July 1 implementation date,” the authority said in a statement.
David Anderson, the chief executive officer of Ports Australia, questioned if AMSA’s enforcement would be enough and said a more deliberate approach to enforcement is needed. “We believe that AMSA should make allowance for a reasonable transitional period to bed in compliance and for shippers to continue to acquaint themselves with the essentials of compliance,” he said. “We are particularly concerned that this continuing level of uncertainty not lead to disruptions.”
Anderson also said that after meetings with AMSA he came away with the impression the agency did not have the resources for full enforcement and that it did not seem as though AMSA was taking an aggressive posture toward compliance. “Auditing was mentioned, but the overall impression was that AMSA will be waiting for reports of non-compliance, whether from the stevedores or from incidents at the terminals or on the ship. This approach may encourage a business as usual approach from some elements of industry.”
Anderson said that AMSA should consider a sampling approach to get a scope of the scale of the problem, and indicate how the regulator would deal with non-compliance. Any non-compliance and action taken “would likely impact on how seriously industry is going to take the attempt by the IMO to introduce greater rigour to the regime,” he said.
AMSA did not respond to the comments when contacted. In a circular to members, Rod Nairn, CEO of Shipping Australia, which represents international shipping lines in Australia, said the shipper’s obligation to provide a VGM of a container on the shipping documentation has always been a SOLAS requirement and the real problem has been a lack of enforcement.
He said SAL was pleased to see the IMO and AMSA were advocating a smooth introduction to the new VGM requirements. “Shipping Australia stands by the advice already provided to shipping lines,” he said in an industry newsletter this week. “To ensure that their cargo is carried to their destinations without delay, they should advise their global customers that containers shipped before 1 July, but arriving at a discharge port for transshipment after 1 July 2016, should have a compliant VGM declaration.”
