Chris Mackenzie: Ferry Holdings Chair on the new Cook Strait ferry plans

Ferry Holdings' Chairman says he's more confident in the new Cook Strait ferry plans than the ditched iRex project. 

The Government's officially signed a fixed-price contract with a Chinese shipbuilder for two new rail-enabled ferries. 

It's now securing teams to build the required infrastructure at Picton and Wellington ports. 

Winston Peters claims the total cost will come in under two billion dollars and will be delivered on time in 2029. 

Ferry Holdings Chair Chris Mackenzie told Ryan Bridge the iRex project would have required a lot more work to be done on the ports. 

He says the new plans don't need much to be moved as it's re-using as much as possible from existing infrastructure. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fairy announcement bit light on detail about the land side
construction costs. That's the part that blew out acourse some
of the original Irex project, not the cost of the
vessels themselves. Winston Peters reckons overall we'll save two point
three billion bucks or thereabouts. Chris McKenzie is chair of
Ferry Holdings Limited with me this morning, Chris, good morning,
Good morning. So do we have any where have those

(00:21):
estimates come from for the infrastruy, you know, the land
side infrastructure.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
We have done a considerable amount of work with both
Picton and Wellington. We have identified as as probably you've
seen the chart NOE out of the drawing to the
two ports. We have determined the cost of the wharf
that's being demolished and then replaced in Picton, so we

(00:47):
have a rough costing of that. We have a rough
costing now of the other what's called the nesting structure
where the fairies reverse into and were going out shortly
Again with the rough costing on the link spans both
in Wellington and Picton, and just as an aside, that's

(01:09):
one of the ways in which we are making some savings.
We're now going to have linked spans in Wellington and Picton,
which are essentially the same, whereas previously under IREX. There's
a link span being built for Picton and there's a
link span being built for Wellington. So we are saving
some money by getting identical link spans in both Victim

(01:30):
and Wellington.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
It's all a but boo tricky. But the cost of them.
I mean you're saying rough costs, and people at home
will be going, oh, well, I've heard this before, because
remember how much this project was meant to cost to
begin with, and then what it was going to end
up costing, and most of that was landside. Of eighty
percent of it was chewed up by landside. So how
you know how confident are we look?

Speaker 2 (01:51):
I think I am more confident than we were with IREX.
And the reason I can say that is we have
identified exit exactly what is the work we are doing
in both Wellington and Pickton. The ports have agreed with
that work. And therefore one of IREX's issues was we're

(02:12):
going to put a temporary wolf here. Oh, we'll need
to do this in roading and we'll have to shift
the rail yard here and there and so forth in
this project because we're using a maximum reuse. We don't
have to shift railway yards, we don't have to shift roading.
All we are doing is building the structure for the
wharves that the vessels will come in the existing rail

(02:36):
yards and Pickton and Wellington will need to be just
tweaked where they connect with the new vessels, and apart
from that, we're not diverging from that at all. So
we have a set engineering project in both Wellington and
Picton and as a board we are not going to

(02:56):
deviate from that. Yes, there'll be people who say, oh,
if we put this over here, we could do such
and such. We are not going down that track. We
are going exactly as the plans that were in that
release yesterday and nothing else.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
Chris appreciate it and hopefully we will see this thing
getting off the ground soon. The Faery's not coming till
twenty twenty nine. Chris McKenzie, Chair of Ferry Holdings Limited.
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