New Zealanders want publicly-owned rail ferries! – MUNZ

New polling released on 15 October by the Maritime Union of New Zealand (MUNZ) shows the public wants publicly owned, rail enabled ferries.

The poll was conducted by Talbot Mills over the period of 2-14 October and asked:

New ferry options

As you may be aware, in relation to the Cook Strait ferries, “rail-enabled” means freight carriages can roll onto and off of the ferry directly rather than requiring unloading and reloading onto trucks as additional handling steps on each side of Cook Strait. The efficiency gains of being “rail enabled” is thought to add 10-20% to the overall cost to the ferries/infrastructure. The government is now considering three possible options for new ferries. Which of the following options is closest to the one you would support? 

Results showed a clear public preference:

Maritime Union spokesperson Victor Billot says “This shows that New Zealanders can see the terrible mistake the Minister has made in cancelling the new rail ferries and that is only going to get more obvious as the massive costs of this fiasco, like the cancellation fee of up to a half a billion dollars, come to light.

“Rail enabled and publicly owned ferries are vital to New Zealand’s domestic freight. No rail ferries would likely mean no viable rail system, and privatising would be like putting a toll booth on the strait and sending the revenue overseas.

“Unions want rail-enabled ferries, so do logistics companies including Mainfreight, New Zealand First has just said they want them, and now it’s clear the people of New Zealand want them too. The question is why is the Finance Minister so intent on forcing New Zealanders into a bad deal that nobody wants?”

Road-bridging – the practice of taking containers from trains and transporting them onto non-rail ferries adds up to $200 per container cost and takes up to three hours more per sailing. Industry experts have noted this additional cost would price rail out of the north/south freight market.