What amount, if any, of Interislander maintenance expenditure since December 2023 would not have been required had the vessels ordered under Project iReX been delivered in 2025 and 2026 as originally scheduled?

Answer

Maintenance is required whether ships are new or a century old. The exact amounts allocated to vessel maintenance is not able to be disclosed as Interislander competes in an open market. Also, those ferries might have arrived in 2026 but the infrastructure would not have been ready to accept them. Under the previous Government’s plan, four times as much infrastructure as we are doing would have needed to be built in two years, compared to the three years available under our no-nonsense scheme. Your ferries would have arrived and sat in Wellington harbour for years.