If you still needed convincing that our politicians are hopelessly short-sighted, I hope you came to your senses late yesterday.

When Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced she was pulling the plug on the inter-island ferry upgrade. Or, more specifically, refusing to pour money into it which, KiwiRail says, gives it no option but to pull the plug on its mega ferries project.

There are big numbers involved. The last we’d heard from KiwiRail on the cost of getting the new ferries and bringing the portside infrastructure up-to-scratch was around $1.5 billion.

But that’s blown out to $3 billion and the Finance Minister has turned down the state-owned-enterprise’s request for more money, saying that Cabinet isn’t confident there wouldn’t be further cost blow-outs.

But is that the real reason? Really?

Well, it might be part of the story. But here’s something else the Minister said late yesterday when she announced there was no more money in the tin for KiwiRail. She said: “Agreeing to KiwiRail’s request would reduce the Government’s ability to address the cost pressures that are impacting on New Zealanders, fund other essential projects and get the Crown’s books back in order.”

So what’s really happening here, is the Government has chosen to put a major part of New Zealand’s transport infrastructure at-risk, so it can deliver one of the coalition partner’s election policies.

A policy that, as we now know, wasn’t even needed to get it elected into government. A policy that, we also know, most New Zealanders don’t support.

Yes, a key reason why the Government isn’t prepared to put more money into KiwiRail’s Cook Strait ferry project, is that it doesn’t want to jeopardise its stupid tax cuts. It is hellbent on them.

Tax cuts that are going to cost the country $14.6 billion over four years. Tax cuts that are going to cost the country more than four-times as much as what KiwiRail now says its mega ferries project is going to cost.

Tax cuts that the Finance Minister herself said pre-election would be delivered come hell or high water, or she would resign.

And so, because of that obsession with tax cuts - that most people don’t want anyway - KiwiRail is now in the position of somehow having to keep the ferry services running with ships that are going to reach their use-by date in a couple of years.

The same ships that are already packing a sad on a pretty regular basis.

I’m picking that the head honcho at KiwiRail will be the next Board chair to call it quits because of government policy. All the other board chairs who have quit since the election and have done it because they just don't like the direction the government is heading and they want to be free to speak out about it.

This is different, though. Because KiwiRail is the first to really get the chop. And I can’t see why the chair of the Board would stick around after this.

Nicola Willis has only been in the job five minutes. And what she did yesterday was amateur hour.

How she can possibly think it makes sense to bring such a significant infrastructure project to a grinding halt, I’ll never know.

Yes, KiwiRail may have undercooked the numbers to get the previous government over the line with its mega ferries project. Yes, maybe the Labour government was a bit gung-ho saying yes to everything KiwiRail was asking for. Because, apparently, it had even agreed in principle to the extra money the company was after.

Although, I heard last night that Grant Robertson decided that, since it was getting close to the election, he thought he should leave that decision to the incoming government.

So yes, KiwiRail and the previous government are not blameless in all of this.

But I can’t believe Nicola Willis didn't tell KiwiRail to go away and sharpen its pencil. To look into other options. To think about whether these mega ferries actually needed to run between Wellington and Picton, and whether it might have made more sense for them to run between Wellington and Lyttelton - where there is infrastructure already in place to handle ships of that size and type.

But no, she didn’t do that. Because she’s terrified she won’t be able to deliver the miserly tax cuts that most of us will qualify for under National’s tax plan. And which most of us don’t want anyway.

It is so short-sighted of this government to have done what it has.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.