How Covid is Delaying Shipments into Australia

We all know how COVID and supply chain issues have been affecting almost every aspect of life – from empty shelves in the supermarket, to the lack of spare parts for cars or that long wait for your parcel from overseas. But now the COVID chaos is having a real impact on personal household moves to Australia.

The delays are almost entirely due to staffing and labour shortages due to COVID illness across the supply chain. This can be port workers unloading ships, truck drivers transporting containers, administration staff at government agencies like customs and quarantine.

According to Container Transport Alliance (CTAA) director Neil Chambers many industry players are facing the “hardest conditions they have ever encountered.” He expects the current supply chain delays to continue well into 2022 – if not 2023.

There is also a risk that some shipping lines will skip congested ports entirely as idle times in ports increase to commercially unviable levels. Fewer ships will just make a tough situation even tougher.

The impact on Conroy Removals

Conroy Removals is not immune to the delays or to the impacts of COVID on our field crews and admin teams. At the moment, we are experiencing delays with the time it take us to deliver a client’s shipment once it arrives at port in Australia. Normally it is about 1-2 weeks, but at the moment it’s more like 3-5 weeks.”

Making the situation worse is a backlog of customers whose moves have been on hold because of COVID lockdowns. The flood gates have now opened but there simply is not enough labour to meet demand.

While the Australian government is looking for ways to ease the extreme congestion, the human factor, the stand down periods for COVID are going to make the situation very unpredictable. “

We hope the delays will shorten, but it’s very unknown at this moment. Fingers crossed things improve..