{"id":9083,"date":"2014-05-28T11:08:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-28T10:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/portstrategy.nfdtesting.uk\/greenport\/2014\/05\/28\/asciano-boss-cautions-on-privatisation-downsides\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T14:48:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T13:48:29","slug":"asciano-boss-cautions-on-privatisation-downsides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/news\/oceania\/asciano-boss-cautions-on-privatisation-downsides\/","title":{"rendered":"Asciano boss cautions on privatisation downsides"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Chief executive John Mullen said there may be short-term benefits from selling public assets but long-term, there could be repercussions.<\/p>\n<p>Consortia who buy into ports have charged high rents to stevedores in order to guarantee their return on investment. Rental costs at one port had jumped 350%, said Mr Mullen. This in turn forced operators to pass costs on to importers and exporters.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It starts to become a tax on trade,&#8221; he told a business lunch. &#8220;Governments just want to get a fantastic price for it and use those funds to develop other things in the state and there is nothing wrong with that.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBut if the owner has to put prices up to try get a return, ultimately the consumer or manufacturers or exporters are paying that bill.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He suggested pricing controls should be included in the sales process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While the privatisation of Australias ports gathers pace, the head of ports operator Asciano fears the Australian economy may be suffering some damage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":9084,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-9083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oceania"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9083"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9085,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9083\/revisions\/9085"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9083"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=9083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}