Auckland port boss on why the world calls us 'No Zealand'

Wednesday, 26 November 2025

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A blunt Roger Gray took aim at Kiwi ‘no’ culture and the tourism dollars he reckons it’s costing us - and gave a downbeat prediction for the City Rail Link, writes Jonathan Killick

“They call you the people of ‘No Zealand’, because you just say no to everything,” a frank and unfiltered Ports of Auckland boss Roger Gray told a crowd at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron.

Auckland had been let down, said Gray at a community meeting last week, when it came to cruise tourism business - with visits from 4500-passenger megaships at their lowest since their first arrivals.

Gray said he had gone to Miami to speak to four major cruise lines to find out what the problem was: and our apparent naysaying was the answer.

Cruise itineraries are scheduled several years in advance, and in recent times the liners have faced community protest of ships visiting Milford Sound, being rebuffed for dirty hulls that don’t meet strict biofouling standards and steadily rising fees.

“And the government was anti cruise … Jacinda [Ardern] called them petri dishes,” claimed Gray.

In contrast, the new coalition Government had a “much more customer-focused positive attitude,” he said.

“If you wonder why I have a bromance with the prime minister [Christopher Luxon], he used to be my old boss,” Gray added, after a video played showing the pair embracing.

The port was the first to benefit from fast track legislation with consents approved for extensions to Fergusson North and Bledisloe wharves.

The process, which cut out public submissions (although the port did “engage” with community), was a far cry from the “not one more metre” protest campaigns which met previous applications by the port to extend Queen’s Wharf.

“I’m very critical of New Zealanders being so sour on the economy,” Gray told the audience, saying there was plenty of business to be done - if only the public would stop protesting it.

For example, last month was the best in terms of container volumes that the port had seen in nine years, Gray said. What’s driving growth? “It’s coal,” he claimed, telling the crowd: “All of you driving electric cars, you’re driving on coal, so keep doing so.”

Car imports, meanwhile, are also back up, with around 8000 to 10,000 vehicles offloading at the supercity each week.

As a result, the port delivered over $90 million to the city last year, including a $52 million dividend and $45m in profit from a sale of shares in Whangārei’s Northport.

And the cherry on top of the new approximately $80 million wharves project is a new cruise terminal to be housed in the bottom floor of the port’s multi-storey carpark.

The terminal will be able to handle around 1500 passengers an hour, with the aim of loading passengers on board ships via an “air bridge” within nine minutes of drop off.

Its value to the city in economic output would be much more apparent than the City Rail Link, claimed Gray, which he declared was “going to be a disaster”.

“It [CRL] is not going to be the game-changer, but when you’ve sunk as much money as politicians and council have, they have to say it’s amazing,” he said.

But, members of the crowd at the community event raised their concerns with the new terminal: including the apparent loss of a rooftop garden on the existing structure, built under Gray’s predecessor in 2020 using labour from prisoners at Paremoremo.

“It’s a solar array now,” said Gray. “I wont promise you it will be the second-largest hanging garden in the southern hemisphere … but it won’t be ugly.”

A member of the crowd asked what the port was doing to help improve the environmental health of the harbour.

Gray said the port continued to give $100,000 year to a trust for research, but he wouldn’t shy away from the blunt truth.

“It [the harbour] has been abused for a century. We’ve only been focussed on health for three years,” he said. “Don’t expect it to have changed.”

But Gray said “we let some of the staff fish at the end of the wharf, and some of the sizes [they catch] are fantastic.”

An audience member retorted: “That’s anecdotal”.

And the crowd was reminded that the council had an outflow pipe beneath the wharves that the port had no control over.

“We’ve only had one instance of a major sewage outflow,” said Ports infrastructure general manager Alistair Kirk. “Our linesman had to deal with lines dragged through that.”

Gray said the port “wasn’t the police” over pollution.

“When you overreach, you get into issues of liability. I’m not going to be liable for what comes out of it.”

Added Kirk: “All we see is seagulls dying, and a brown haze on the sea.”

Gray did conclude by saying he realised that the port held a privileged position at the base of the city, and would continue to consult the community in such meetings.

“We want the community to understand now is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to invest … $400m through revenue and debt,” he said.