Minister for Rail Winston Peters has announced the two new Cook Strait rail-enabled ferries will be named Kupe and Cook, delivering the naming decision alongside a suite of operating arrangements and infrastructure contracts in a speech to stakeholders at Parliament on 17 July 2026.

The ferries are being built by Guangzhou Shipyard in China and are expected to arrive in 2029, at which point KiwiRail will operate them. The total project cost is NZ$1.924 billion, according to BusinessDesk, which sits under the $2 billion cap Peters set for the replacement programme.

Peters framed the names as a bridge between New Zealand's maritime past and future, calling them "a look to the future with positive recognition of the past" and tying the decision to the country's seafaring heritage. He did not shy from anticipating controversy over the name Cook. Peters said he expected pushback from critics he described as "snivelling wokesters" who considered Cook "a harbinger of colonisation."

The naming breaks from the convention applied to every previous rail-enabled Cook Strait ferry, all of which carried the Ara- prefix. The Interislander service itself has been operated under KiwiRail and its predecessor entities, New Zealand Railways, TranzRail, Toll, and KiwiRail, for 64 years.

The operating model Peters confirmed gives KiwiRail day-to-day running of the ferries, with the arrangement scheduled for review in 2039, ten years after the vessels enter service. KiwiRail will also be required to build up a reserve fund so it can directly purchase replacement ferries in 2059, a mechanism designed to break the cycle of politically negotiated capital funding for the next fleet replacement.

KiwiRail will pay commercial port fees to CentrePort, Port Marlborough, and Ferry Holdings under the new arrangement.

On the landside, Brian Perry Civil has been contracted to deliver ferry infrastructure in Wellington, and HEB Construction will carry out the equivalent work in Picton. Both contracts form part of the wider port-side upgrades needed to accommodate the new vessels.

The announcement closes one chapter of a politically fraught replacement process. The coalition government cancelled the previous government's iReX ferry project upon entering government, citing cost blowouts it said had reached $3 billion. The cancellation itself came at a direct cost of $671 million, including fees paid to Hyundai-Mipo shipyard for the cancelled build.

Labour's transport spokesperson Tangi Utikere said the government had wasted three years and hundreds of millions of dollars on the ferry replacement process.

The broader context here is a programme that has now been through two full design and procurement cycles under different governments, with the sunk cost of the iReX cancellation layered on top of the new build. The $1.924 billion figure for the replacement fleet and associated infrastructure, while under Peters' cap, does not capture the $671 million already written off from the cancelled project. The full public cost of resolving Cook Strait ferry capability therefore sits well above the headline number for the current build.

The reserve mechanism aimed at the 2059 replacement is the structurally significant element for those watching the long-term economics of the service. If it functions as intended, it would remove the need for a future Cabinet to negotiate a fresh capital injection at the point of fleet replacement, a scenario that has repeatedly produced political deadlock and delay across multiple administrations and corporate owners of the rail freight business. Whether the reserve accrues adequately over a 30-year horizon, through freight revenue and operating margins that have historically been thin on the Cook Strait run, is the question that will determine whether this arrangement holds.