DP World Australia has again infuriated the trucking industry by signalling it will all but double the contentious infrastructure fees it charges freighters carrying containers to and from its terminals at Australia’s three biggest container ports.
And, in an important shift in public narrative, the nation’s biggest container stevedore is no longer seeking to justify the fee hikes at terminals in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane as simply a means of recovering increases in costs like port rents, labor rates or electricity bills.
The DP World view is that infrastructure fees are an appropriate mechanic for what is a necessary restructuring of the way the stevedores earn their revenue.
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