The Government will not sell KiwiRail despite the failures within the state-owned enterprise, senior minister Paul Goldsmith says.
"There are no plans to sell KiwiRail, it's a state-owned enterprise - we're not selling our state-owned enterprises," he told AM host Lloyd Burr.
Questions have been raised about KiwiRail's management, with revelations of eye-watering contractor spending by the state-owned enterprise which Newshub understands topped $8 million. Last week, one of KiwiRail's Cook Strait Interislander ferries, the Aratere, ran aground near Picton - raising concerns about the age and maintenance of the state-owned ships.
Earlier this week, PM Christopher Luxon refused to rule out privatising KiwiRail - but Goldsmith, the State-Owned Enterprises Minister, said there were no plans to do so.
"We're not going to be selling KiwiRail, absolutely," he said on Thursday. "We need to get some new ferries and, frankly, all options are available when it comes to replacing the ferries and we're working our way through the options.
"What we're dealing with, of course, is another financial bomb we inherited - where we had this ferries project that blew out... We had to stop that and now we're taking stock and we've come up with some options to replace those ferries."
The Coalition has stood by its decision to scrap a contract for two new Interislander ferries and terminal upgrades locked in by the previous Labour Government despite last week's Aratere debacle.
"We're a country of infrastructure, we want to build infrastructure which means you can't waste money on stupid ideas," Goldsmith said of the scrapped contract. "We're just focused on getting the best bang for the bucks that we've got and we'll come up with some new ferries which are similiar size to the current ferries, so you don't have to totally rebuild the ports."
Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced late last year the Coalition wouldn't contribute significant new funding for the previous Government's project, after revelations it had quadrupled to about $3.2 billion.
