1972 Corolla or 2023 Corolla – it matters

Nicola Willis struck down the project to upgrade the Interislander ferry service across the Cook Strait with the now infamous line of “the Ferrari is not the only car in the garage, I think it’s time to see if there’s a Toyota Corolla”.

For a party that pledged at their last party conference “we will build infrastructure for growth”, this decision begs some serious questions.

The worry is that there’s a massive difference between a 1-star safety-rated 1972 Corolla with a reconditioned engine, compared to brand-new 2024 Corolla with a 5-star safety rating. We have no idea which one we’ll get, or even if we’ll get one.

Needless to say, what the country needs is the latest, safest model. With the current fleet of three ferries all with their problems, we need above everything else a safe and resilient service. This is after all, effectively the state highway we’re talking about.

Changing from the current case of managed decline of the service is now time critical, with the three current ferries reaching the end of their 30-year lives.

Accepting that the cost blowout is outrageous and that it needs to be fully investigated, to solely focus on that, rather than the desired and required outcome, seems to me to be missing the point.

We need our two locally-based MPs to stand up and be counted for the region. While I accept that they at times have to toe the party line, now they should be working on behalf of their region.

Marlborough needs a resilient, safe and reliable service over the Cook Strait – in fact the entire South Island needs it.

Pete Coldwell, Marlborough Chamber of Commerce

Marlborough needs a resilient, safe and reliable service over the Cook Strait – in fact the entire South Island needs it.

There needs to be a plan and we need it soon. It would appear that someone presumed that any future government wouldn’t balk and back out no matter what the blowout.

They were wrong.

We’ve all read some commentators damning the investment in rail-enabled ferries, but they seem to be ignoring the fact that for many regions in the South Island, the need to get goods to the North Island for sale or for export is critical.

The Interislander ferries carry more than $14 billion of freight a year. Even if the new ferries aren’t rail enabled, updating them remains crucial.

A safe and reliable crossing for the hundreds of thousands of tourists who drive our local economies and for the massive amounts of freight, has to be a minimum standard.

You only have to look back to August 2022 to see how fragile the nature of our South Island supply chain is, with the short-term closure of both state highways 6 and 62 linking Blenheim to Nelson. We were cut off from Nelson and from export markets.

With the constant risk of quakes and storms there’s a need for another option for much of the freight that normally goes out of Port Nelson, the upgraded ferries would have provided that option.

Trying to future-proof for the next 100 years now seems to be a poorly thoughtout plan, which resulted in the ever-increasing blowout of costs. Now the Government needs to work swiftly with KiwiRail to get this critical infrastructure project back on track.

Let’s all hope that our two MPs from the region stand up and are counted.