From the New Zealand Herald today:
Greater Wellington Regional Council chairman Daran Ponter says KiwiRail “must be s***ting themselves” over the escalating cost of portside infrastructure needed for Cook Strait’s new mega ferries. Finance Minister Nicola Willis has revealed the potential cost to the taxpayer is now “many times” what the Government initially signed up to.
“The financial situation of this project is extremely troubling,” she said. The matter appears to have been considered so pressing that Willis met with the state-owned enterprise’s top brass about it before she was even sworn in as the Finance Minister, the Herald can reveal.
KiwiRail is replacing its increasingly unreliable and ageing Interislander fleet with two new rail-enabled ferries under the Inter-island Resilience Connection project (iReX). The last publicly available cost estimate for the new ferries and the portside infrastructure was $1.45 billion.
The stakes are high after Kaitaki narrowly avoided disaster this year when it lost power in the middle of Cook Strait with 864 people on board and started drifting towards Wellington’s rocky South Coast.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/kiwirails-cook-strait-ferry-cost-blowout-lands-with-nicola-willis/HP7LVCPQBBE7NAOWZXCCHQEUQM/
This is our 34th report on troubled ferries across the globe with no sign so far of a better ferry service than CalMac in Scotland, Northern Europe.
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
So we have the best ferry service in the world
But we are also the only country in the world to discover huge oilfields and gas and become poorer
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Maybe if we did a crown funder for Martin Williams of the Herald we could send him there to understand his subject matter better. It doesn’t have to be a return ticket.
I know, I am just being cruel, but if Martin could do some proper journalism for a change, like an article or maybe an exclusive series on Michelle Mone and her luxury (note the word) yacht that would great.
I live in expectation 🙂
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