Wooley: Ferries farce is so bad you couldn’t make it up

It’s just lucky that mainlanders have no interest in what we are doing with the $5.3bn we get from the Aussie taxpayers, writes Charles Wooley

As we all know, the Tasmanian treasurer and deputy premier Michael Ferguson has resigned as the result of an unbelievable debacle involving the botched handling of the state’s billion-dollar Bass Strait ferries.

Fortunately, like the new Spirits of Tasmania, this story is unlikely to soon make it across Bass Strait. And a bloody good thing. Do we really want the rest of the country to know how we are spending Australian taxpayers’ money down here?

Let’s hope they stay disinterested.

As my old 60 Minutes boss, the legendary John Westacott repeatedly told me: “Mate, stop trying to sell me stories about your crumb-bum little mendicant state. There’s not one bloody ratings point in it.”

“Mendicant state” is a particularly hurtful term which we don’t like to hear in Tasmania. The treasurers of the other states, especially of Western Australia, use it against us all the time.

It suggests we are beggars with a convict ancestry and Tasmania is an economic ball and chain around the leg of Australia.

But after reading Mervin Reed’s well-informed opinion column in the Mercury last week, I am prepared to concede that Tasmanians should thank Australian taxpayers for supplying our government with about 70 per cent of the revenue used to run our state.

The botched handling of the state’s billion-dollar Bass Strait ferry service – including the commissioning of the new vessels, such as the Spirit of Tasmania IV (seen here on a sea trial, in Finland, above) – was so spectacularly hopeless you couldn’t make it up, according to Charles Wooley. Picture: Spirit of Tasmania

Even if we have to say, “Thank you for the $5.83bn and sorry but we will need a bit more next year”.

The good thing is the average Australian has no idea about the grants council’s funding of our state. Nor do they really care.

Average Tasmanians also have little idea. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics more than 50 per cent of us are “functionally illiterate”. So, no matter the revelations of David Killick, Mervin Reed et al, half of Tasmania will never read about it.

No wonder recent opinion polling shows Labor is getting little traction.

Just to recap, the government’s biggest infrastructure spend in the state’s history has been a $1bn investment in two new Bass Strait ferries.

The Liberal government firstly blew $40m when they tore up an initial contract with a German company and another $40m on a failed plan to build locally.

Finally, they employed the Finnish shipbuilder Rauma Marine Constructions, which soon got into financial trouble and the government had to fork out a further $80m over-contract payment to keep the company afloat and complete the job.

That was all kept quiet until after the state election on March 23 when the Liberals were only narrowly able to maintain a minority government.

And then the problems multiplied.

Former treasurer Michael Ferguson, who was forced to resign from Cabinet, following scrutiny over his handling of the rollout of the new Spirit of Tasmania vessels and port infrastructure, this week. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

In all the excitement the government completely forgot that the new ferries would need somewhere to berth.

Tell me it’s all fake news that the much bigger new ships might now have to be stored in Singapore – or perhaps we could hide them in Port Davey, no one ever goes there – for as long as it takes to construct a port in Tasmania. And that the cost of that build has blown out from a reported $90m to $375m.

Now we certainly don’t want horrified mainlanders asking obvious questions like: “Why can’t the ships be anchored in the Derwent?”

We’d have to explain there’s another election in the wind and that would be a constant reminder to locals of what a complete stuff-up the government has made of the ferry project.

Though no one should be surprised to learn that the Labor opposition is quite happy to leave this sinking mess with the Liberals for as long as possible.

Upgrades to the Port of Devonport, in order to adequately accommodate the new Spirit of Tasmania ferries, have been delayed. Picture: Supplied

In times like these the art of opposition politics is to wait until things have got so bad they can only start to get better again. In Tasmania we haven’t got there yet.

There was a time when I would have keenly told this sorry tale to a mainland audience. In the early 1980s when I was younger and even more foolish I made a documentary for the ABC’s Four Corners program telling how much back then Tasmania cost the Australian taxpayer.

My report had an amazing effect. It actually united the whole Tasmanian parliament. I was condemned on a bipartisan basis by opposing members of the lower house who otherwise passionately hated one and other.

My work here was finished.

I was branded “a traitor to Tasmania” and told to “leave the state immediately”. Which I did.

The ABC took pity and moved me to London as a foreign correspondent.

Now I’m back home and I’m not snitching to the mainland, though the ferry story is such a good yarn I am tempted. Nor have I been indiscreet about the billion-dollar football stadium those generous mainland taxpayers are going to help us build on the Hobart waterfront?

That would certainly take their minds off the ferry debacle. But older and wiser I have decided that mum’s the word.

As a devious old Tasmanian premier once advised me: “Mate let’s just keep it in the family.”

Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist