Madness to cancel ferries

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

It’s always dangerous territory to enter when a politician seems to start truly believing in their own spin, as it can have the unintended consequence of portraying the politician as being just a tiny bit thick.

Take for example Finance Minister Nicola Willis’s statement on the Cook Strait ferry replacements, about needing a Toyota Corolla rather than a Ferrari. A staggeringly ignorant analogy when in fact neither of them is in any way useful — the Corolla would be hopelessly inadequate and all a Ferrari does is go fast; neither is in any way fit for purpose.

Just ponder for a moment, had she been in a position to do so, she would probably have cancelled the Sydney Opera House project as being way too costly — after all, it had a 1300 percent cost overrun. Would anyone care to calculate the lost opportunity costs for the Australian economy if it had indeed been canned?

The same goes for the Cook Strait ferries. What are the long-term costs of cancelling? Huge. And it’s not as if there is a viable plan B in place.

Let’s hope all is not lost. After her dopey analogy whipped up a storm, we are now to have a review where all options are on the table.

But don’t hold your breath that commonsense will prevail on this. It’s such a critical piece of infrastructure that it would be an act of madness to cancel the ferries. They are, after all, to be purpose-built for Cook Strait and have large capacity to service the needs of passengers, rail and road freight well into the future.

Thick as.

Bruce Holm