00:00It's been the Labor opposition that's sort of chipped away at the story, uncovering,
00:06I guess, mess up after mess up with it all.
00:10You know, first we found out that, you know, all this bailout had been paid out to the
00:15Finnish shipbuilder who are building the new Spirits of Tasmania.
00:19Then these things started coming out where it was like, maybe the, you know, even though
00:22the ships were delayed, maybe the berth that was being built for them was actually not
00:28going to be ready in time for their arrival.
00:31Now, you know, through a lot of questioning in Parliament over months, it became clear
00:35that we'll, you know, the government was looking at an interim solution.
00:40Today we found out that this interim solution is not viable and is in fact unsafe.
00:46Now a bit of context here, Spirit of Tasmania ships, obviously they bring in like a whole
00:51heap of tourism, they're relied upon for freight and things like that.
00:55So, you know, a lot of people in the tourism industry have sort of described that, you
01:00know, within the, you know, the hardships of COVID, the idea of these bigger and better
01:05ships arriving was sort of this beacon of hope.
01:08Now what we've found out today is essentially this berth for the new Spirit ships won't
01:14be ready until February 2027.
01:16This is despite the fact the first of the ships was actually due to arrive in the state
01:21at the end of this year.
01:22So you're talking brand new ship with, you know, no infrastructure to operate from.
01:28Like I said, they were looking at an interim way to make that work.
01:31And today they've revealed that they can't even do that.
01:35So it means that we, you know, Tasmanians can't, you know, interstate as people visiting,
01:39they can't use these bigger and better ships until February 2027.
01:45So it's been, you know, it's obviously been, because we're talking like tens of millions
01:50of dollars, we're talking about lost tourism revenue.
01:52We've seen people stepping down across like the ferry operator TT line, you know, people
01:59in the TAS ports and even the infrastructure minister and deputy premier ended up sort
02:04of resigning over his handling of the whole saga.
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