12/02/12, 13:03:19 EST

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Cruise ships locked out of Brisbane

news.com.au

The city has a cruise terminal without cruise ships.

IT'S 10 o'clock on a perfect spring morning and the sun is playing off the water's mirror finish along the river's Hamilton reach.

A handful of sightseers wander through the Portside complex, mingling with local business people clutching takeaway coffee as they head for their workplaces.

In a small retail travel office beneath a banner which reads Cruising Down Under, travel agent Ian Hunter is staring into a screen. The email he'd sent me a few days previously hinted at a crisis at Portside so he turns off his computer and we get coffee and talk.

The problem, he says, was that the government, through the harbour master, had set an arbitrary limit of 240m on the length of ships that could sail up the river and under the Gateway Bridge to dock at Portside.

As a result the city has a cruise terminal without cruise ships. The background to the issue, he says, was that the development of million-dollar-plus apartments surrounding Portside was approved by the government subject to the building of a cruise terminal.

The developer, he says, had made substantial profits selling the apartments but now the government, through the harbour master, was blocking international cruise ships from berthing there.

"Next week, the 279m superliner Rhapsody of the Seas will call into Brisbane but she's been deemed too long to navigate the river and will be relegated to Fisherman Islands cargo terminal. Her captain is more than happy to bring her up but is being prevented from doing so by government regulations.

"Yet the harbour master has previously allowed two P&O liners, the 260m Oriana and the 270m Aurora, to berth at Portside.

"That's what we struggle with in the industry – they've already set a precedent. Legend of the Seas is 264m long and she turned in the river but to this day, the authorities deny that she did that, but we have photographs of her doing it!" says Hunter with exasperation. "She just turned in the river and it took about 10 minutes."

"When you've got a swing basin in the river that allows 399m, there's plenty of room for them to manoeuvre."

He dismisses my suggestion that the height of the Gateway Bridge is an issue.

"There's no problem with the bridge. There's plenty of clearance so we just don't see why these ships, which are spectacular to see, are not being allowed to berth here so people can get a look at them.

"Our biggest embarrassment is going to be the Queen Victoria next February. She's coming to Brisbane on her maiden world cruise and she'll be relegated to Fisherman Islands! This is the creme de la creme!"

My attention wanders and for a moment I'm sitting in a bar on the Queen Victoria as a waiter pours Louis Roederer Cristal into my glass, but Hunter's rising exasperation quickly hauls me back to reality.

"She can get under the bridge and she can turn," he says. "She's 90,000 tonnes with about 2000 passengers, the next step up from the QE2 and just under the Queen Mary 2, but they won't let her come up under the present regulations, yet the technology is amazing now. These ships can turn in their own length.

"And the captains also cop a caning from their passengers on the comment sheets. The passengers forced to dock at Fisherman Islands say Brisbane's a hole.

"In the travel industry, we can't understand it. There's no rhyme nor reason for it, particularly when these ships will become the average size for ships in Australia at 260m. They'll be the norm within the next five years so what are we going to do?" Hunter asks.

"We have this fantastic complex here but at the moment, these ships are being sent to Fisherman Islands where they don't have a guaranteed berth and the operators at Fisherman Islands don't want them there.

"They have to spend too much time preparing for security and making safe walking areas for the passengers. They have to remove containers and line them up to make streets along the wharf.

"It's a container wharf. It's not a passenger terminal. Our biggest fear in the tourism industry is that the captains will start telling their head offices that it's too hard in Brisbane. Then we lose them all. Once they make that decision, they won't come back and these guys bring in a massive amount of income to the state.

"To me it appears to be bureaucracy at its worst. We just don't get it. We can only guess there's no understanding of the technology of these ships and how manoeuvrable they are."

I offer the view that perhaps the owners of the horribly expensive highrise apartments with their nice views of the river don't want cruise ship passengers tramping around the complex and have brought political pressure to bear to keep the ships down at the river mouth.

Hunter admits it could be part of the problem. "But this was always a cruise terminal first before anything else," he says. "At the end of the day, these people knew it was a cruise terminal when they bought their apartments and they're probably thinking 'now that we're here, we've parted with all this money and we've got some influence'.

"The authorities and the government need to stand up and be counted on this and remind these people that this is a cruise terminal and it can be a major source of tourism dollars to the state of Queensland.

"We went to a meeting recently at Tourism Queensland to establish an advisory body to advance the preparation of a white paper on the cruise industry in Queensland and there's not one person from the travel industry on that board," he says, his exasperation level again moving into the red zone.

I suggest to Hunter that his remarks are not likely to make him the most popular person in some circles and he shrugs. "We see the big picture. Cruising is the fastest growth area of the entire international travel industry and it's growing faster than the airlines."

 Printable Version  | published Oct 30, 2007