WE IMAGINE this newspaper's readers will be as excited as your columnist on learning that Spirit of Tasmania ferry fares are to be slashed because the carbon tax has been scrapped.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
A reduction of $3 a passenger one-way according to state Infrastructure Minister Rene Hidding.
All right, it does sound better if you say "wow, that's a whole 300 cents" but you can foresee the tax abolition's knock-on effect even if a so-called "Labor spokesman", with no apparent stab at humour, claimed the reduction was "a drop in the ocean".
There has as yet been no subsequent announcement that a bottle of cordial and warmed-over pie from the ferry's canteen will be any cheaper.
Perhaps with the inducement of reduced fares, Tasmanians will now travel across Bass Strait more often and treat the ship more readily as truly part of the nation's highway system.
"Frequent ferry points" anyone?
We do recall a local man who drove his utility vehicle from Launceston to outback South Australia - naturally using the Spirit for part of the expedition - just to shoot a deer.
The fellow returned home on the overnight boat with a representative of the ruminant quadruped community secreted under a tarpaulin.
Perhaps with the inducement of reduced fares, Tasmanians will now travel across Bass Strait more often and treat the ship more readily as truly part of the nation's highway system. "Frequent ferry points" anyone?
So much easier, you would have to agree, than dragging a bullet- riddled stag on to an aeroplane where fellow passengers may well have objected to being placed in seat 15C next to a full-grown, yet dead and bloodied, antlered forager.
Perhaps with such fiscal largesse granted to Spirit passengers, operators may like to further encourage mainland hunting trips.
Then there is the matter of other animals.
The Aberdeen Press and Journal reported that islanders from Uist, Barrar and Mull were entitled to travel by ferry to the Scottish mainland for the equivalent of $5, rather than the flat fare of $320, if they had animals with them to sell at market.
Yes, the canny crofters took their sheep to Aberdeen and left them in a field before heading off for a wee bit of shopping then reclaiming the sheep saying they had not been sold.
Mutton dressed as sham, you might say.
While on the matter of ferries (oh yes, and vehicles will travel on the Spirit of Tasmania for six bucks less, whoopee-do), it's funny how the old Tassie mindset kicks in here even when you have been transported to the dreaded mainland.
No man is an island, as 17th century Pommie poet John Donne succinctly put it, but there are times when we here on the island state feel that way.
Last week, this intrepid scribbler was on the son's property "out the back of Nowra".
"I'm headed across to Canberra next week," said the lad as we sat around a roaring fire. (Yep, inland New South Wales is just as cold as anything Tassie can offer.)
"So you've organised the ferry trip," yours etc blurted out before realising the error of his geographic ways.
"Naah, I'll take the back road out of here in the four-wheel- drive, it's under three hours straight through to the capital," he replied. Ah yes, for us not so much the tyranny of distance as the problem of Bass Strait.
My fellow Tasmanians, how much easier would life be without the need to cross the pond by air or ferry even at an undrastically reduced rate?
Thus we are bound.
And as a correspondent who has travelled across the foamy brine that separates Tassie from the mainland in every ship from the Taroona onwards, and every aircraft from a TAA DC3 to a Jetstar 737, any move to make that trip more frequent, or quicker would be welcome.
We wonder whether Infrastructure Minister Rene Hidding would accept the principle of a $5 return ferry fare should one have a sheep in tow?
