This is the third and final Transport Minute drawn from Aka Raupapa, the inaugural Freight & Supply Chain Superhui at the University of Waikato on 1-2 July. I’ve covered our changing workforce and how Australia’s freight strategy model is showing us the way. This week, the theme underneath both: data. 

New Zealand’s freight and supply chain productivity is languishing, partly from piecemeal investment in infrastructure, warehousing and critical nodes like our ports, each assessed on its own merits, with little regard for what it delivers to the wider system. But mostly, it’s because we don’t have a centralised, reliable database to inform any of these decisions. You know how the saying goes: rubbish data in, rubbish outcomes out. That’s exactly where our freight and supply chain investment sits today.

Here’s how bad the gap is. For road freight, we don’t reliably know what is travelling where, when, or how much it’s worth. Government data is no better, we can’t even say how many transport operators there are, or how many people work in road freight and supply chain. When it comes to lifting freight task productivity, we are flying blind, which is a dangerous place to sit when our country makes its living selling goods to the world. 

The good news: there is a fix, and it isn’t complicated. Once again, humbling as it is, we look to Australia. Caveat: Australia doesn’t have the perfect answer. But it has something we don’t – a freight strategy with clear goals and a plan to get there, built on reliable data. That means they have a significant head start on us. 

That plan runs through the National Freight Data Hub (NFDH). Built on two years of industry consultation, it rests on three pillars: open data, data exchange and standards, and leadership and innovation. The NFDH gives government, industry and communities the information to plan infrastructure investment, run day-to-day operations, and measure how the freight system is performing. 

We don’t need to build this from a blank page. National Road Carriers is already working with NZTA on transport operators sharing trucking telematics data, incentivised through improved permitting and road access. And Transporting Certification Australia is showing us the way. 

But progress is slow. It needs to speed up. 

Every dollar we invest in a road, a rail spur or a wharf without good data behind it is more a bet than an informed decision. 

Let’s stop rolling the dice with the country’s freight network, and start deciding with the evidence we have. 

Justin Tighe-Umbers, Chief Executive, National Road Carriers Assn