Smith StuartSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): Thank you Mr Speaker. Well today I'm going to talk about two projects in Marlborough that were cancelled unfortunately by our Government. We were forced to do that and I want to give a bit of background to that.The Marlborough colleges project was to set up two colleges on one site and take education in Marlborough forward quite significantly. Unfortunately the project blew out in cost by 300 percent—300 percent. Unfortunately the then education Minister knew about this going on and in fact didn't inform his Cabinet. It's all reported in an article by Andrea Vance which I encourage people to read. It is a tale of woe about how things could get out of control.I note that Tim Burfoot who's the chair of the Marlborough Boys' College said We went through a process of a lot of consultation with the ministry and the other schools on the design … the design concept was very good. There was just no talk about [a] budget at [the] time". That's underlined further by a former head of Naylor Love who was their proposed constructor who said "There seemed to be no accountability for managing the budget … When prices went up no-one said: 'How can we bring this back down?' It snowballed." and boy did it snowball.It got to the point where when the Government was formed and education Minister Erica Stanford took over the portfolio she was actually almost floored when her officials came to her and said "Look we've got this project there is no money to build it and it's snowballed from what it's original cost was by 300 percent." So unfortunately I went with the Minister to front up to these schools and to talk it through with them and I'd have to say the one thing that surprised me: they weren't surprised. They knew this was coming. As my friend and colleague Jamie Arbuckle will attest to the people on the street knew it was coming because the cost had just got so much out of control.The other project is what's known as the Inter-island Resilient Connection Project or publicly more thought of as the mega-ferry project. That was absolutely another case of mismanagement. I knew a year before this came out that things were in trouble. I had contractors coming to me and saying "I'm pulling out." I said "Why are you pulling out?" And he said "Well I was asked to price a construction job as part of that project where" he said "I only had 50 percent of the drawings. And I said 'I can't put a price in because I don't know what price to put in.'" He was told "Don't worry about it. Just put any price in and we'll sort it out later." and that's the sort of thing that was going on.Other small contractors had similar stories and they got so worried about it that they pulled out of it and you can see why. Again one of the businesses that was benefiting quite significantly from it—I don't want to mention the name of it but the owner of it said to me "Look I saw this coming. I'm really missing out on a lot of business as a result of that but I knew this was coming anyway and it was going to end in tears." But he's now got to meet his budget some other way.So it's pretty bad really but I also knew early on that the port was going through an assessment process to ascertain what was the maximum size of ships that they would allow to navigate through Tory Channel. I was so concerned that I talked to KiwiRail and I'd like to thank them publicly. They invited me to travel on the bridge with them through Tory Channel. It is a dangerous stretch of water. Now the harbour board have put a maximum size on ships that can navigate through that of 187 metres. You might be surprised to know the size of the new ships was going to be 220 metres. They would not be able to actually navigate through that channel. It would have made it uneconomic anyway.So it is all a moot point and I think it all came back to KiwiRail mucking around trying to put rails on the ferries. No one in the world is now building rail ferries except for KiwiRail. And now unfortunately that's not happening either. So I hope we get three small roll-on roll-off ferries and fix this mess up. Thank you."