Regular readers will be well aware that I have commented on this subject several times previously. However, in yesterday’s news, we learnt of yet another insanely expensive example of government ferry owning folly.
Yesterday, the New Zealand Government confirmed the enormous costs involved in extricating itself from the completely and obviously inevitable KiwiRail/Hyundai Mipo Ro-Pax-train ferry debacle.
While the previous socialist undergraduate Ardern NZ Government was entirely responsible for the vessel’s acquisition, the current, grown-up, conservative government has been left to clean up the resulting financial mess and to wear its cost.
The news reminded me of previous comments I have made over the past 30 years about the perils of government ferry ownership.
As I have frequently reminded readers, governments should never own ferries. Ferries are free enterprise beasts best left to family-owned or even public companies.
Bureaucrats are bureaucrats because they are unsuited to the free enterprise world and completely incapable of realistic cost/benefit analysis. Ferry businesses require particular talents in both respects.
I can never understand why governments are so attracted to ferry ownership when it almost inevitably dooms them to disaster like moths to a flame. Nevertheless, they are particularly democratic governments and, more particularly still, Anglo-Saxon democratic socialist governments in countries like the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and poor New Zealand.
Perhaps it is because ferries are big, obvious and employ lots of people. That makes them attractive to socialist politicians who love to keep their union friends on side.
The list of such government ferry follies is long.
A few I can remember off the top of my head have been the ongoing Calmac mess in Scotland; Tasmania’s loudly and frequently predicted TT Line debacle; Sydney Ferries, perpetually; South Australia’s Port Lincoln service of yore; Washington State Ferries’ disposal of unsafe ferries to developing countries: BC Ferries attempts to do the same; BC Ferries’ widely heralded catamaran catastrophe; and, the list goes on.
In November 2023, I attended the Interferry Conference in Hobart where two of the more prominent presentations were made by executives of the soon to be ill-fated TT-Line Company and the similarly doomed KiwiRail. I remember commenting to my wife on the embarrassing hubris exhibited by those two executives who were not long for the “chop”.
They positively raved about the wonderful success of their companies’ ship acquisition processes, and their employers’ new ships, when many of us in the room were aware that the exact opposite was the case. While their ridiculous hubris amused us then, their incompetence was not so amusing soon after to their employers, their respective government’s taxpayers.
As I keep saying, governments should not be in the ferry business. It is a business that requires the best of free enterprise talents. It has been proved over and over again that bureaucrats do not possess those talents, no matter how smart they think they are. Their mistakes can be incredibly expensive and they, obviously, never have to wear those costs.
So, how to prevent such expensive follies from recurring? First, all governments that own ferry services should liquidate those services after giving six months public notice.
They definitely should not try to sell them to chosen “friends”. That would provide sufficient time for free enterprise operators to organise to replace them either by buying the ferry assets from the liquidator or by replacing them with other vessels.
Of course, the screams from the unions would be loud and vociferous, but they would settle down and the travelling public would enjoy better and probably cheaper services.
Best of all, the “dedicated” but completely incapable bureaucrats and politicians concerned would not have to bear the inevitable opprobrium arising from their equally inevitable mistakes.
We can only hope that the Tasmanian and New Zealand Governments and their counterparts in North America and the UK are capable of learning the very obvious lessons arising from the two recent Antipodean debacles.