“Hey look, we know you’re busy violently oppressing people, but can you pay a bit more attention to our profits here?”

At the end of the day, infrastructure is an incredibly powerful driver of economic growth. Second and third order effects make infrastructure investments almost always worthwhile, even when they go drastically overbudget as is the case with HS2 and CAHSR.

A government makes money not only from the direct impacts (fares, electricity cost, etc.) but also the secondary impacts to industry and the tertiary impacts of stable supply driving new markets.