Updated item.
The grounding of the Aratere, our country’s only rail ferry, because of a steering failure on Friday night , highlights the fragility of the connection between our two main Islands.
The ship is now refloated and it is a relief that no-one has been injured and the vessel has not taken on water. This incident does however point up the problem of how our country largely depends on the Cook Strait ferries for moving goods around our country and calls into question Finance Minister Nicola Willis decision to refuse KiwiRail’s request for funding assistance with port-side infrastructure as part of plans to replace the ageing Interislander ferry fleet and this effectively put an end to the Mega Ferry project.
A $551m contract was signed with a South Korean shipyard back in 2021 to build the new ferries. The termination of that contract will be costly to taxpayers. How costly? Finance Minister Willis refuses to say because of ongoing negotiations .. However we know a reported $424 million has already been spent not including the penalty payment on the ordered ferries.
It is an open secret that the Interislander Ferries are aging which is why we are seeing so many breakdowns, and given the Cook Strait can be a very rough stretch of water the risk to lives of a disabled vessel is obvious.
So why is the National/Act/NZFirst coalition letting the service run down?
I suspect the answer lies in the power of the trucking lobby and in documents released to The Herald last December which contains the following dieological recommendation in a document written by “Transport Ministry officials” which reads:
“The Interislander business could be separated into another State-Owned Enterprise or sold via a trade sale.”
This is classic neoliberalism. The ideology is that governments should not be in business because business knows best and are so much more efficient in running services than government owned enterprises. So, let’s manufacture a crisis to convince the public of the truth of that mantra by deliberately running down the service so we can sell it off.
Last year I went aboard the Moana Chief to do an interview for my Food Crisis documentary. I learned that the ship carries 1000 containers on each run between Auckland and Lyttleton. That’s 1000 trucks off our South Island roads.
Given that Cyclone Gabriel wiped out some of our highways the need to return to the days when our cities were connected by a fleet of coastal ships seems obvious, but it would require an investment in portside infrastructure which the current government is clearly not willing to do.
Why? Because not only it would be contrary to their own nothing ideology, but the promised tax cuts have to be funded from somewhere.
And don’t get me started on how the trucking lobby will be pleased to see problems with the nation’s rail connection. But that pleasure could be short -lived as the other aging Interislander ferries breakdown.
The failure to invest in infrastructure in general is yet another example of a government that is only interested in what its donors and their lobbyist want and not what our country needs.
An integrated transport strategy costs but that investment pays huge dividends in increased employment, new businesses and productivity.
This government & Luxon in particular bang on about these very subjects but it’s all hot air. They are landlords at heart so their aims are clear.
Waiting now for all the gaslighting from Willis and Brown - how this is all the previous governments fault🙄 We should really highlight Bishops words ‘shoulda done it sooner’🤷🏽♀️😅