Gone By Lunchtime: A plan to have a plan about some ferries

Ready the lifeboats: the coalition boat appears to be listing.

Twelve months after the coalition government torpedoed the new ferry plan it had inherited, along with a wild cost blowout, from the previous government, a much heralded announcement finally arrived on Wednesday, and it provided plenty more questions that it did answers.

In a new episode of the Spinoff politics podcast Gone By Lunchtime, Annabelle Lee-Mather, Ben Thomas and Toby Manhire gather on deck to check whether the autopilot has been properly disabled and assess this latest chapter in a long-running saga. What does the latest instalment in the great ferry saga tell us about the state of the coalition, with David Seymour getting publicly ticked off by the new minister for rail Winston Peters? What kind of ferries will we end up with? And will they ro-ro or won’t they ro-ro?

Plus: what does a glut of new polls tells us about the state of the government as we approach Christmas, and did Christopher Luxon fail to adhere to his own big rock philosophy in coalition negotiations?

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