It seemed the agreement for NSW to sell its share of the Snowy Mountains Scheme to the Federal Government had barely been finalised last week before the NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and her deputy John Barilaro were announcing that all the cash that would be made, all $4.15 billion of it, would be going to regional NSW.

Now there are two ways to see that announcement.

The first is that the NSW Government is satisfied with the major projects it has in play for Sydney and always planned on making the next spending priority the bush. So when the Snowy Scheme windfall came along, it just sped up the process.

The second – and more cynical – way to look at last week’s announcement is that the NSW Government had detected a rising sense of frustration in the country about the billions being spent in Sydney and felt something needed to be done to alleviate that frustration – and fast.

Either way, regional NSW now has a sizeable cheque to cash. And the NSW Government has its next problem: deciding how to spend it.

There is no doubt every Nationals MP will want some of that money going into their electorate – and, ideally, into as many of the towns and cities of their electorate as they can manage.

But dividing up that cheque into as many segments as possible is only going to ensure a whole lot of small projects get built that will soon be forgotten.

The riskier but more far-seeing option for the NSW Government will be to make a big splash with the cash and spend it on just a few major transport projects strategically placed around the state.

Mr Barilaro says he and the Premier will take their time to get the decisions right – and so he should.

What he shouldn’t do, however, is take so much time that last week’s announcement is allowed to fade completely from view.

This NSW Government has earned a reputation, quite rightly, for being a building government. But a lot of that building so far has been in Sydney.

Last week’s announcement seems to indicate that the earthmoving equipment will be moving out of the metropolitan basin for the next big projects.

So let’s see how long it takes before the first country dirt starts getting shifted around.