Heather du Plessis-Allan: Nicola Willis is having a ferry problem

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

Be under no illusion about it - when that ferry ran onto the sand on Friday night, that became a massive problem for the person who is probably National’s biggest asset, Nicola Willis.

Because she cancelled the ferries, this is going to be on her.

Now I'm not arguing about cancelling those big ferries, I actually think she made the right call. The thinking behind buying them seems to me like a stupid idea.

Which was - you need those big ferries to to drive a train onto a boat, and then ship the entire thing to another island, and then drive it off again from the other side.

Now, think about how much redundant metal there is on a train, or how heavy it is before you even start loading it up. Now, you're paying the fuel bill to get it all across the Cook Strait. That's stupid.

Surely you’re better off unloading the thing and reloading another one on the other end.
Regardless of whether the call was the right one, Nicola made the call. But then she made a mistake - she didn’t provide an alternative.

You can’t cancel ferries we desperately need without replacing them with other ferries. Because we still desperately need them.

It seems to me there's only one way to fix this.

Nicola can’t go back to the big ferries she’s cancelled, that would be admitting she made a mistake and it's a bit early in the term for that.

She can’t buy replacements on the second-hand market, apparently they don’t exist at the moment.

She can’t leave us waiting, because those ships are already trouble on the water. Every single one of them have had a problem in the last 18 months, they will all be past their use-by dates by next year.

She’s going to have to buy us new ferries. I don't know how she does that, maybe renegotiate the contract with the Koreans for smaller ones if it's not too late, or maybe just start from scratch and get new ones.

But they'd better be here quick, because those big ferries were due to arrive in two years time.

Every day after 2026 that we're without new ferries is a day that we legitimately can blame every ferry problem on Nicola Willis.

She is smart enough, and National is smart enough, to know that by now.

So watch them come up with a solution real quick. Which, frankly, they should've come up with the day they cancelled those ferries.

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