NEW ZEALAND: The government has announced an order for two rail-equipped replacement ferries for the Interislander service, along with agreements with the port companies and KiwiRail for associated landside works in Picton and Wellington which will reuse existing infrastructure where possible.
‘Two new ferries serving road and rail will enter Cook Strait service in 2029, thanks to a NZ$596m fixed price contract between Ferry Holdings and experienced shipbuilder Guangzhou Shipyard International’, Rail Minister Winston Peters announced on November 19.’The total programme will cost less than NZ$2bn, with the taxpayer contribution coming in under the NS$1·7bn allocated at the start of this year.’
Peters confirmed that the ferries to be supplied by the Chinese company will have rail decks, saying ‘we have never wavered in our support for rail. It is not an anti-truck position, is it simply common sense. If rail cannot haul heavy industries, then thousands of trucks as heavy as a small house would. More of those means more trucks adding road costs, road works and road cones. We are about balance: road and rail. We are about common sense: using what New Zealanders built to benefit New Zealanders, not leaving rail to waste on the side of the road.’
Welcoming the announcement, KiwiRail Chief Executive Peter Reidy said ‘the new ferries will ensure the competitive operating cost for rail freight and increased capacity for road transport operators and passengers’.
Prolonged process
The announcement is the latest stage in a long-running process to replace the ferries. In August, KiwiRail formally ended the previous iReX ferry replacement project in the face of increasing costs, terminating contracts which had been awarded in 2021 for South Korea’s Hyundai Mipo Dockyard to supply two ships.
Peters described iRex as a ‘pyramid scheme’, saying with the latest order ‘the taxpayer has saved NZ$2·3bn while still getting the ferries and infrastructure they want, because we have done away with the expensive consultants who hijacked the project by adding more and more infrastructure until Treasury warned the project would cost NZ$4bn.’
He said ‘funding spent on infrastructure will be recovered over the life of the new Interislander ferries and infrastructure through port fees paid from Interislander revenue, and Interislander will be expected to build sufficient reserves to buy new ferries again in 30 years — or put simply, structured like a normal business.’
