90 | Jud and Beau Duffy with a JCB tractor and spreader. Vaughan Greig, Stock Dispatcher. RURAL SERVICES » Andrews Transport Ltd • from page 89 Check out our new website: rockleyangus.co.nz Proudly supporting Andrews Transport “Now there are three big transport companies in the area all doing the same amount of work that there used to be, but it takes more people to do the job these days. There’s a farm I know of that used to be just the farmer and that was it, but today it’s a dairy farm employing five people. “New Zealand’s got so busy and so intensive, there’s so much going on, but we haven’t got the population to service it.” towards the end of last year while the labour force participation rate hit a record high of 71.7%. Dave cites the example in his own local trucking industry where Andrews Transport once had the Northern Southland market pretty much to itself. “Now there are three big transport companies in the area all doing the same amount of work that there used to be, but it takes more people to do the job these days,” he says. It was similar in the local building industry which also used to be served by a single company, “but now there are three, all with two or three workers themselves.” The spectacular rise of the dairy industry on Southland’s former sheep country has also impacted the labour market. “There’s a farm I know of that used to be just the farmer and that was it, but today it’s a dairy farm employing five people. “New Zealand’s got so busy and so intensive, there’s so much going on, but we haven’t got the population to service it,” Dave says. Andrews Transport has 27 staff across two depots, one in Riversdale and the other in Balfour, operating well over 20 trucks, plus ancillary equipment. It is one of Northern Southland’s oldest firms, keeping its name when it was taken over by H.W. Richardson about 2000. Dave Duffy and Keith Johnstone subsequently bought a quarter share each in it, and two years ago Keith sold his share back to H.W. Richardson, the country’s largest privately owned transport company, with 2500 employees and 48 subsidiary companies across New Zealand and Australia, and annual revenues of more than $2 billion. From 1960 until his death in 2004, the H.W. Richardson group was led by New Zealand transport legend Bill Richardson, the founder of Invercargill’s Bill Richardson Truck Museum, one of the largest such collections in the world.
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