A member of the public reaches out to touch the bow of the stranded Interislander ferry Aratere, Picton. Photo / Tim Cuff
The Government is being warned that it must invest in New Zealand’s ageing infrastructure - or face the prospect of a major disaster.
It comes after a week of infrastructure woes, with the Defence Force plane breaking down, a track fault cancelling all trains in Auckland, widespread power cuts in Northland, and an Interislander ferry running aground.
On Friday, the Aratere Interislander ferry was on its way to Wellington when it experienced steering failure just outside Picton.
It’s the same ferry that lost power in February last year when 538 people were on board.
The previous Government ordered new mega ferries to replace our ageing fleet - but Nicola Willis pulled the plug on them after KiwiRail asked for an extra $1.5 billion for portside infrastructure.
It put an end to a deal penned in 2021 with South Korean company, Hyundai Mipo Dockyard - with KiwiRail signing on to build the mega ferries without having sorted out the portside infrastructure needed to accommodate them.
NZ Herald Wellington reporter Georgina Campbell told The Front Page the only way to fix the ongoing issues with our ferries is to replace the Interislander fleet.
“The mega ferries were not due to arrive until 2026, so the Aratere grounding would not have been prevented if the mega ferry project was still going ahead.
“But, the ageing and increasingly unreliable Interislander ferries have been running on borrowed time and it has felt like a serious incident like this grounding has almost been inevitable.
“The Government’s worst nightmare would be something more like last year’s Kaitaki incident if that ferry had not narrowly avoided disaster. There were 864 people on board, the ship lost power in Cook Strait and started drifting towards Wellington’s rocky south coast and issued a Mayday call.
“Thankfully, power was restored and the ferry limped back to Wellington. It could have been one of New Zealand’s worst maritime disasters though. We know Wellington Hospital was put on standby for mass casualties in preparation for the worst.
“I think the Interislander fleet cannot hang on much longer and no one wants to find out what a third serious incident might look like,” Campbell said.
Infrastructure NZ’s policy director, Michelle McCormick told The Front Page a cross-party, long-term plan for the country’s infrastructure would make sense.
“We’ve just been with a delegation over in Denmark and they have a much more varied coalition government, but their infrastructure is not something they have a political debate on.
“All the parties in government get to decide and are involved in developing the projects right from the beginning. So they have buy-in about what Denmark needs, and then as these up-to-70-year plans are put into place, there’s political agreement and support right across the board from the planning right into the development and implementation.”
New Zealand has under-invested in core infrastructure for years, well below the average OECD spend. ASB estimates it is going to cost about $1 trillion to fix our infrastructure and bring it up to standard.
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The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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