Ferry Community Briefing Notes

Not just terminal versus terminal. The comparison should include vessels, fleet size, timetable, patronage, bus and train connections, charging infrastructure, capital and operating costs, safety, environmental impacts and loss of existing amenity.

The question is not whether JoJo’s is a better place to put PTA’s existing ferry system. It enables a materially different transport system. That complete alternative should be compared against the complete Matilda Bay system using the same assumptions and normal Treasury business-case rules.

JoJo’s emerged from the stakeholder process as an alternative. The multi-criteria analysis came afterwards and effectively screened it out as a terminal location before Government had compared what a different JoJo’s-based ferry system could actually deliver.

A different terminal can mean a different route, different vessels, fewer vessels, different charging infrastructure, different frequency and different connections with buses and trains.

The question is whether Government ever compared those genuinely different systems before locking in the current architecture.

The published business case was built around a 20-minute service. The current operating proposal points to about 25 minutes with speed exemptions and roughly 30 minutes at existing speed limits, with corresponding constraints on capacity.

A proper BCA also needs to include the costs and harms required to make that operating system work: safety measures, exclusion or displacement of existing users, loss of amenity, wake and erosion impacts, mitigation and future maintenance.

If the operating system has changed, both its benefits and its costs need to be recalculated.

Stakeholders were raising the shallow-water wake problem while the terminal decisions were still supposedly being consulted on. I specifically raised transcritical wake, and the risk to club infrastructure, at the stakeholder information session held on the day the proposed terminal locations were announced.

Detailed wake work came much later. When Government eventually presented its modelling to stakeholders, it was identifying significant shallow-water effects even under the operating case without the proposed daytime speed exemptions. The Development Application now identifies increased wake impacts at many of the same locations stakeholders had been warning about.

The question is not whether PTA eventually studied wake. It is whether the vessel, route, terminal and speed architecture had already been substantially committed before the wake problem was properly understood.

Government is not operating in a vacuum. It already licenses and leases parts of the river and foreshore for sailing clubs, rowing, moorings and other established activities.

If the new ferry operation creates foreseeable risks to people, prevents existing activities from continuing, damages boats or infrastructure, or accelerates erosion requiring future repair, ordinary questions of duty of care, negligence, nuisance, liability and compensation potentially arise.

Any private operator proposing a project with those consequences would be expected to identify, mitigate and cost those risks before proceeding.

So where are those costs in the project assessment? Who pays if someone is injured, a club can no longer operate, a marina is damaged, or decades of additional foreshore works are required?

Ultimately much of that risk may fall back on the taxpayer. It should therefore be identified, quantified where possible, and included in the business case rather than left as somebody else’s problem for later.