The union believes an outer harbour in Kwinana could lead to job losses at Fremantle Port, and that any promised boom in jobs from the project – more than 11,000, according to some supporters – would be minimal. It has also backed environmental concerns, but a key issue is the price tag – billions of dollars is too much to fork out for a project that is not currently needed, it says. For its part, the City of Fremantle is adamant the port city’s defining feature will remain a working container port well into the future. In the wake of the Westport taskforce’s progress report release last year, Fremantle Mayor Brad Pettitt said the operational inner harbour was “central to our identity as a city”, and container handling should stay at North Quay, as long as onshore it had no more impact on the community than current operations. Among those advocating for an expanded outer harbour is the Western Harbours Alliance, which believes there is no time like the present to jump on trade potential open to the state.

Alliance chair Kim Dravenieks, a former co-ordinator of the Rethink the Link group which rallied against the Perth Freight Link and Roe 8, believes there is an “opportunity, with the view of what’s happening with our shipping infrastructure, to actually say what’s happening with WA”. Loading Currently, Fremantle Port is WA’s only container terminal, handling about 1000 ships and more than 700,000 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) a year. Outer harbour operations already in place in Kwinana handle bulk – such as minerals, grains, and petroleum – while Bunbury currently accommodates bulk and is also a passenger port for cruise ships. Fremantle also handles bulk and general cargo, including livestock and vehicles. Its southern Victoria Quay is a passenger terminal.

Eight options outlined in the Westport taskforce’s mid-term progress report in December range from working with what’s already established in Fremantle and transitioning to either Bunbury or Kwinana over time, to de-industrialising the port completely, or alternatively keeping Fremantle’s title as WA’s only container port. Westport's independent chair Nicole Lockwood is upfront that the earliest an outer harbour could be delivered in WA would be 2030, but depending on whom you ask government should already be planning. Just how fast is Fremantle expected to grow? A Deloitte Access Economics forecast for Westport looking ahead 50 years has predicted a long-term average annual growth rate of 2.8 per cent for container trade at Fremantle Port. The Westport interim report noted containerised trade had increased by 7.5 per cent from 2016/17-2017/18, but as Ms Lockwood points out, that 50-year outlook smooths out short-term peaks and troughs.

But it’s this 2.8 per cent figure which has North Fremantle Community Association convenor Gerry MacGill concerned. A former Fremantle North Ward councillor, Mr MacGill in March compiled a 22-page examination of the history and future of Fremantle Port along with fellow former councillor and resident Ann Forma. While the two are adamantly not “anti-port”, and wanted to stay out of the heated outer harbour debate, Mr MacGill says a historical lack of planning and environmental or social impact studies was paving the way for “more expensive band-aids and higher costs” as the port grew. He and Mrs Forma were spurred to compile their submission by the City of Fremantle’s assertion the port would remain a working container port into the future, before Westport had even delivered its findings. Using Fremantle Ports Authority data spanning decades, Mr MacGill calculated the historical average growth rate to be 6.3 per cent, with even a small departure from the 2.8 per cent figure putting further time pressure on the port, he says.

However Ms Lockwood says the forecast would not pan out to be completely accurate – it is a long-term average, smoothing short-term peaks and troughs – and stage two of the Westport taskforce is peer-reviewing the data to provide more clarity. But the end game of Westport is to provide government with an “interactive model” that can be adjusted to give accurate information when called on to plan for WA’s port future. What we want to make sure at the end of this ... that resource is there and it is ready to use at any point the government needs it. Westport taskforce independent chair Nicole Lockwood “We’re building all of our options out of a geo-spatial framework, and that allows us to input all of the data electronically and it will actually show us what needs to happen by when,” Ms Lockwood says. “If after two or three years it’s clear that we’ve had a big spike, [the government] might say ‘OK well let’s re-forecast and let’s now put in this growth rate, what does that then do?’

“What we want to make sure at the end of this is that no matter what the answer, that resource is there and it is ready to use at any point the government needs it.” Fremantle has the capacity, but access is key The pressure on Fremantle Port comes largely not from the port’s capacity itself, but from the infrastructure tasked with bringing trade in and out of the harbour. “We’re very comfortable that the port asset itself has room to grow – and the port’s done a great job of that – really we need to decide what capacity we need to grow the road and the rail network in,” Ms Lockwood says. It’s a point the union also argues in pushing against an outer harbour – Fremantle’s inner harbour can handle plenty more trade, it says, and that’s without infrastructure upgrades.

“Last year the port in Sydney traded 2.4 million TEUs for a population of around 5.5 million, so Perth has quite a long time before we reach that population and max out our current port facilities,” West Coast branch secretary Chris Cain says. Part of the solution, the MUA believes, is to grant the two current stevedoring operators at the port two seven-year lease extensions, and replace the ageing Fremantle Traffic Bridge – recently listed as a national priority by Infrastructure Australia – to include a dedicated freight rail line. Increasing the number of TEUs in and out of the port via rail has helped mitigate the growth of trucks navigating the congested roads in and out of the north quay. But a further increase in rail movements is constrained by the single bridge across the Swan River, shared by both freight and passenger trains. With regular rail services ferrying passengers from Fremantle to Perth and vice versa, there is little time for freight movements during the day. Ms Lockwood says the rail bridge was a “critical component”, and a government rail subsidy had paid dividends in the shorter term – the rail share was this month at 22.9 per cent, the highest in the country and highest Fremantle has ever seen.

“One of the options is to duplicate that bridge, which provides a dedicated freight path, which would definitely provide us an uplift,” she said. Loading From Westport’s perspective, growth going through rail is preferable to through the road. The road problem, Ms Lockwood says, is “much more difficult”. A planned upgrade to High Street, including the Stirling Highway intersection, was recommended for approval by the EPA only last month. It will help, but “incremental improvements” to the key route into Fremantle Port are what Ms Lockwood and her team are modelling. Truck movements, Ms Lockwood says, are often constrained to when customers want their freight delivered. Currently the majority of trucks operate between 6am and 6pm on weekdays.

“The biggest constraint at the moment is really the market and what it’s asking for, and the scale of Perth as well and how much these activities are happening at night – and they’re not really,” she says. To take advantage of quieter roads at night, there needs to be distribution centres happy to take goods out of hours, and technology is slowly curbing emissions and noise from trucks – a point of contention for residents living close to Tydeman Road, a key access point to the North Quay. “Spreading the container traffic is not going to be an easy job,” Mr MacGill notes. “You do hear it overnight ... [trucks] take no notice of the sign saying ‘respect residential areas’, you can hear them changing down as they cross [Stirling Highway] bridge.” It’s on this point many parties agree about the challenge faced at Fremantle – the port has capacity, but the road and rail infrastructure is the weak point in the chain.

The incendiary Perth Freight Link and Roe 8 proposals sought to address this problem of road and rail infrastructure, and a 2014 AECOM report found several road and rail upgrades and tweaks could have provided for a throughput of around 2.1 million TEUs a year at Fremantle Port. But, in citing that study, Westport’s interim report states; “it is important to note that the road network envisaged by the 2014 report is no longer state government policy”. In arguing an outer harbour is not needed, the MUA points out logistical efficiencies have seen about 580 fewer trucks a day visiting Fremantle Port, compared to 2014, despite a 10 per cent growth in trade. This is a bigger reduction than what the Perth Freight Link would have delivered, they say. For Mr MacGill, who has lived in North Fremantle for 40 years, there is no issue keeping the port as a working container port for decades to come – as long as government, both local and state, plan accordingly. “What we note in our look through the history was that never in half a century of container port development has there been a single environmental impact study of any kind,” he says.