Following Spirit of Tasmania IV’s successful testing in the Mersey, Labor is calling on the Liberals to update Tasmanians on the status of the sale of Spirits I&II.

There is no better case study in the importance of planning ahead than the way the Liberals handled the Spirits replacement project.

The Liberals’ failure to do so saw taxpayers lumped with over $700 million worth of cost blowouts, not to mention billions of dollars’ worth of missed opportunity for the economy.

Tasmanians have now been paying to keep four ships operational for over a year, despite only two of those ships being service.

We’ve also known for over a year that the existing ships will become surplus to requirement when the new ships come into service from October 2026.

Applying current rates of holding Spirits IV&V, every month after October that Spirit I&II haven’t been sold will cost Tasmania more than a million dollars in storage fees – a figure which will quickly eat away any value that could be salvaged from selling the old ships.

The ships need to be sold as quickly as possible, and taxpayers deserve to know how much longer the Liberals plan to hold on to Spirits I&II, and how much it will cost them to do so.

After 13 years of Liberal waste, Premier Rockliff has put Eric Abetz in charge of cutting jobs and services to pay for it.

There’s no greater example of this waste than the way the Liberals handled the Spirits, and the least they can do for Tasmanians is to be upfront about the ongoing costs and what they are doing to reduce them.