The Port of Tauranga has been granted fast track approval to extend two of its wharves by a combined 700 metres, ending a consenting fight that has run for the best part of a decade and clearing the way for New Zealand’s biggest port by volume to take on shipping services it has been turning away.
Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop and Regional Development Minister Shane Jones announced the decision on Monday. The Stella Passage development is the 34th project to be approved by an expert panel under the Fast-track Approvals Act 2024.
The port told the market the approval was subject to conditions, and that it and its advisers were still working through the final decision in detail. Appeal rights under the Act remain open.
The work involves extending the Sulphur Point container berth by 385 metres in two stages and the Mount Maunganui wharves by 315 metres, by converting cargo storage land the port already owns inside its existing footprint. Behind each new stretch of wharf the port will reclaim land, and it will dredge the Stella Passage itself so that bigger ships have enough water under them to berth. The port’s own project material puts the dredging at about 1.5 million cubic metres of material taken from roughly 10.55 hectares of harbour bed, with about 1.8 hectares of reclamation at each end.
The number that matters commercially is the container ceiling. The port says Sulphur Point is currently limited to about 1.2 million twenty foot equivalent units a year, and that the extension lifts that to approximately 2.0 million TEUs per annum. In the year to 30 June 2026 the port moved 1,213,494 containers. It is, in other words, already through the ceiling.
That is not an abstract constraint. In its annual result last month the company said its container terminal was essentially at capacity and unable to accommodate any new shipping services because there were no berths free. Transhipment volumes, the boxes that come in on one ship and leave on another, fell 5.5 per cent over the year, which the port put partly down to berth capacity constraints in Tauranga. Those are cargoes that can and do go elsewhere.
Chair Julia Hoare described the expansion at the time as “critical, national infrastructure that will pave the way for the next stage of growth at the Port, and for all of its cargo customers”.
Chief financial officer Simon Kebbell said the approval was very welcome news. “The Stella Passage development is vital strategic infrastructure to support future freight growth for New Zealand. It will improve the resilience and efficiency of the international supply chain and lower costs for importers and exporters,” he said. “The development is urgently needed so it is a great relief to reach this important milestone.”
Bishop said the port handles roughly a third of all cargo moved in New Zealand, and that activity at the wharves was held back by limited container capacity, vessel congestion and the age of the existing infrastructure. “The Stella Passage Development will address these constraints by enabling larger ships and almost doubling the handling capacity at the Port,” he said.
Getting to this point took a long time. Bishop said the project spent roughly seven years working through standard Resource Management Act processes and Environment Court hearings. It applied to be referred to the Covid era fast track system in 2021 and was declined. When the current fast track regime opened, the port applied again, and in August 2025 the High Court quashed the referral. In Ngāti Kuku Hapū Trust v Environmental Protection Agency, Justice David Boldt found the Environmental Protection Authority had gone beyond its powers in referring an application that was not solely within the project as listed in the Act, because the listing did not expressly cover the Mount Maunganui wharf extension.
The port withdrew and lodged a fresh application in January 2026. An expert panel released a draft decision supporting approval on 17 August, and the final decision followed three weeks later. Bishop said the whole substantive process took around five months from the appointment of the panel, against an average of 118 working days for fast track decisions once officials confirm an application is complete and in scope.
Jones said the development was “exactly the type of project Fast-track was designed to enable infrastructure that delivers enduring economic value, supports regional development, and keeps New Zealand open for business”.
Tauranga Harbour, Te Awanui, is of long standing significance to local iwi and hapū, and hapū opposition is the reason the first attempt at fast tracking failed in court. The panel’s approval carries conditions the port is still assessing, and the decision can still be appealed, so the shape of what actually gets built is not entirely settled.
For shareholders the timing is comfortable. Port of Tauranga reported a record underlying net profit after tax of $155.3 million for the year to 30 June 2026, up 23 per cent, on revenue of $486.5 million, and lifted its ordinary dividend 22.8 per cent to 20.5 cents a share. It managed that while moving less cargo, with total trade down 3 per cent to 24.6 million tonnes, by charging more per tonne and working its existing berths harder. Chief executive Leonard Sampson said average crane productivity rose 9.9 per cent to 30.8 moves per hour and ship rates rose 13.6 per cent to 76.5 moves per hour. You can read our earlier coverage of that result here.
Squeezing more moves out of the same concrete only goes so far, which is the argument the port has been making for years. The company has said construction will be staged to match market conditions and customer demand rather than built all at once, so the extra capacity will arrive in pieces rather than in one go. It has not put a start date on the first stage.
What it does mean is that the physical limit on how much containerised freight can move through the country’s largest port is finally going to shift. For exporters in the Bay of Plenty and Waikato sending kiwifruit, dairy and logs, and for importers whose goods come in through Sulphur Point, that is the part worth watching.
What do you make of the approval, and of the seven years it took to get here? Leave a comment below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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