New Zealand’s real conundrum with imports becomes obvious the moment you glance at a map. You don’t just end up there. Nobody accidentally washes ashore in Auckland. You go to New Zealand on purpose, and only if you have a damn good reason. Which makes transport a constant complication.
When I was working in South Africa, everyone used to grumble that the country was basically an island—surrounded by neighbors too dysfunctional to share the load of serious import infrastructure. But at least it had neighbors. New Zealand? Not even that. It’s not just an island—it’s a scattered handful of them, parked in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by thousands of kilometers of ocean and indifference.
Now if you want cheap imports, you need scale. And scale needs traffic. Especially when you’re dealing with something like LNG. Ideally, you’d want the flexibility to bring in standard LNG tankers and convert the contents into whatever end-use makes sense—power, fuel, heat. But if you’re only receiving one tanker every other month, your turnover is glacial. The tanks sit, the product sits, and you get boil-off losses stacking up while your accountants quietly bleed into their spreadsheets.
All of this adds cost. Not impossible—but definitely not cheap.South Africa felt like an island. New Zealand is a chain of them. Remote, logistically awkward, and—let’s be blunt—not exactly the first place on anyone’s route map. Charming? Sure. Strategic? Only if you’re a migratory bird.