Two candidates are suggesting work needs to be done on an old South Westland cattle trail in case the state highway falls into the sea near the Knights Point lookout at Haast.
The huge slip at Epitaph Cutting below State Highway 6 fell away in 2012, and ever since has left the tourism industry on edge.
If the hillside coastal highway slips into the sea, there are fears the road from the West Coast into Wanaka and Queenstown will be closed indefinitely, which could devastate tourism businesses.
Labour MP Damien O’Connor said recently he would be making a site visit with officials.
Meanwhile, independent candidate Patrick Phelps and National MP Maureen Pugh want to see investigations into using the inland Haast-Paringa Cattle Track as a potential backup.
Mr Phelps said he wanted all options on the table.
Re-routing the highway away from the coastline needed to be "seriously considered".
With coastal erosion, exacerbated by climate change and severe weather, the sustainability and reliability of the coastal route was in doubt.
"One option, which will not be without controversy, is to abandon the coastal route altogether and re-route the highway through the Haast-Paringa Cattle Track.
"[It] served as the path for transporting livestock from Haast through to Paringa up until the 1960s when the highways from the north and south were connected.
"It’s surveyed, it’s a defined path, and it’s a decent grade.
"The cattle track ... is about 33km, which could replace the existing coastal route of 29km.
"There may be less drastic ways to re-route the road, but benching further and further into the hillside — with slips below and high cliffs above — simply isn’t sustainable."
A proactive consideration of all options was needed if the people of South Westland were to have the assurance of a constant and reliable connection to the north and south, he said.
"If the Cattle Track stacks up as the best option, retreating from the coastal route and rewilding the coastline would serve as something of an exchange of one wilderness for a highway and vice versa.
"The tramping track could become the highway, and the highway could become the new tramping track.
"There’d be some dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s, but where there’s a will there’s a way," Mr Phelps said.
Mrs Pugh said she wrote to Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) about it more than 10 years ago, and again more recently.
She had also suggested it looked at using the inland trail.
"NZTA have reassured me that they are monitoring that piece of road [Epitaph Cutting].
"My suggestion was, why wait?
"Why not have an alternative route roughly prepared?
"Use Haast-Paringa maybe as a resilience exercise."
If the highway failed, it would not have to start doing survey work and geological testing.
After the damage done to the West Coast tourism industry when the Waiho River bridge washed out at Franz Josef Glacier in 2019, closing SH6 for three weeks, they had to prepare so it did not happen again, she said.
