This is day three of The Dirty Country: Corruption in Australia. Read part two here, and the whole series here.
Pork-barrelling is the most costly form of soft corruption in Australia, totalling hundreds of millions of dollars a year in wasted taxpayer funds at the state and federal level.
And corruption it is: Transparency International defines political corruption as including “manipulation of policies, institutions and rules of procedure in the allocation of resources and financing by political decision makers.”.
Pork-barrelling involving the allocation of taxpayer funding away from outcomes in the public interest to partisan goals or to reward friends is merely a large-scale version of what is widely accepted as illegal if done on an individual basis.
Indeed, there are laws against what is termed electoral bribery: the Commonwealth Electoral Act outlaws asking for, receiving, giving, offering or promising “any property or benefit of any kind” in exchange for a vote, but “a declaration of public policy or a promise of public action” is exempted: bribery is prohibited, but announcing a policy to bribe is not. And, as legal researcher Susanna Connolly has pointed out, prosecutions under such laws at any level are vanishingly rare.
Moreover pork-barrelling punishes not merely taxpayers through misallocation of funds, but voters in electorates not regarded as meriting pork-barrelling — and particularly those in safe seats held by opposition parties.
In the case of the sports infrastructure grants funds rorted by Nationals MP Bridget McKenzie, both safe Coalition and safe Labor seats received less funding than seats the Coalition had identified as target seats in the 2019 election.
Indeed, pork-barrelling can in some polities transform into something much more sinister — the deliberate starving of funds of electorates that dare vote against a government.
Much of the research and analysis of pork-barrelling has been taken up with discussing whether pork is directed at safe seats or marginal seats. As Labor’s Andrew Leigh, then an economist, noted in a 2008 paper on pork-barrelling, there is extensive evidence for both kinds, as well as theories as to when either one might predominate.
But it’s probably more useful to understand that pork can be used for different purposes, both contrary to the public interest. It can be directed toward marginal seats for partisan purposes, as the sports rorts were, or it can be directed toward a party’s base — like regional projects, drought assistance, agricultural support and other National Party-driven programs — in order to reward core supporters.
In this context, it is noteworthy that as a rural and regional party, the Nationals are the only party in Australian politics that is explicitly and fundamentally sectional, rather than national, in its focus — unlike all other parties, the Nationals exist not serve the public interest, but a minority sectional interest. It’s not surprising that it’s the National Party, across political generations, that is most strongly associated with pork-barrelling and the rorting of grant programs.
At least in Australia, the most rorted programs related to infrastructure and regional development — which have been combined in a single department since the Howard years. Infrastructure programs have been heavily skewed by the Coalition toward Coalition electorates, usually with Nationals ministers holding the infrastructure/transport portfolio, and funding allocated, until the Turnbull years, on the basis that the Coalition refused to invest in urban infrastructure.
In recent years the Coalition also rejected the recommendations of the government’s infrastructure assessment body Infrastructure Australia and committed to a number of major infrastructure projects without an approved business case — a 2020 Grattan Institute study showed that of 32 major projects, the majority of which had a Commonwealth contribution, 24 had not been properly assessed at the time of commitment.
But politicians are insistent that they must be allowed to pork-barrel and take political factors into consideration in allocating resources, that such behaviour is the core of politics and of governing in a democracy.
In recent months, with the Morrison and Berejiklian governments becoming more and more openly engaged in pork-barrelling, there is less reluctance to be open about it.
“All governments and all oppositions make commitments to the community in order to curry favour,” said NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian. “The term pork-barrelling is common parlance. It is not something that I know the community is comfortable with. If that’s the accusation made on this occasion …. then I’m happy to accept that commentary.”
The NSW premier’s office had previously worked hard to cover up evidence of rampant pork-barrelling of the quarter-billion dollar Stronger Communities fund in NSW.
Pork-barrelling thus occupies an interesting space in soft corruption: the community regards it as inappropriate, and definitionally it is corrupt conduct, but politicians insist on the right to do it, and have shaped electoral laws to make sure they can, despite ritually denouncing it when in opposition.
The one government to substantially amend the rules around pork-barrelling was the Rudd government, which established what became the Commonwealth Grant Rules and Guidelines (CGRGs). That followed a review of grant administration in the wake of the regional rorts exposed by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) in the 2007 election campaign.
The rules have considerably tightened the administrative requirements for public servants in allocating grants and imposed obligations on ministers in regard to how they handle assessments of grants.
It’s significant that when the Morrison government set out to rort the sports infrastructure grants fund, it deliberately chose a body, Sports Australia, that at that point fell outside the application of the CGRGs. An attempt by the ANAO to expand best practice guidelines in grant administration further was also halted by the Turnbull government.
A persistent question is the extent to which such misuse of taxpayer funding is actually effective in delivering votes. Despite extensive efforts by researchers, the questions remains unresolved. When Andrew Leigh surveyed the literature as part of his own study, he found research showing both no effect and increases in votes for governments. However, his own study of four regional programs that had been disproportionately targeted to Coalition seats — though not to marginal seats — showed a statistically significant impact in the 2004 election, particularly for the Roads to Recovery program.
In contrast, in the wake of McKenzie’s rorting, William Bowe examined the impact of the sports grants on the 2019 election and found “when polling booth and sport grants data are aggregated into 2288 local regions designated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there turns out to be no correlation whatsoever between the amount of funding they received and how much they swung to or against the Coalition”.
In both cases, special circumstances might have applied at the relevant elections, but the results add to the persistent unresolved status of whether pork-barrelling even works — and if it does, whether it works in marginal seats.
Ultimately, any resolution of the problem of pork-barrelling lies with completely removing politicians from any grant administration, leaving politicians to “declare public policy” on what grant programs are for — and leave their administration to bureaucrats.
Next: conflicts of interest run rampant.
At the risk of sounding like a cracked record, I again note that Andrew Leigh is a great talent with a sharp mind, a wide range of economic and legal interests and the ability to communicate these well.
The ALP is not so overburdened with talent that it can leave him out of the shadow ministry, but it continues to do so because he is unaligned with any faction.
Before the 2019 ACT electorate boundary redistribution he was the HoR member for my electorate. At the recent ACT election I voted for the Greens – as, obviously did many others.
We need more people of Andrew’s abilities and range of interests in parliament for exactly the reasons this series is addressing. Pity both major parties are so self-satisfied.
And he answers emails.
Unfortunately he makes the original “desiccated abacus” look like Sponge Bob.
He can barely speak English – just reassembles jargon & buzzwords picked up during his extensive career (at Minter Ellison among other fine upstanding firms) peddling economic MPA drivel.
2 years at ME hardly extensive…. 6 years as Professor of Economics at the Australian National University and 1 year as Principal Adviser at the Australian Treasury more reflective of his skills and talents… a great asset to the ALP… where is the similar talent in the LNP… and don’t tell me its Josh from Accounts…
That you cite such a CV suggests a belief that economists should be fed, instead of put on a small island, preferably a tidal one, and told to wait for the business cycle upturn.
One problem with pork barrelling is some regions always benefit and some regions always miss out. We could get rid of this distortion if we replaced single member electorates with proportional representation, like many European countries have.
But that would be too fair.
Remember what happened to Bob Halverson, at the hands of Howard and Reith.
I’m with you..If we’re going to have pork barrelling corruption ,let’s at least have all round fair honest equitable pork barrelling corruption..But some may find that not so fair to their liking ../s
That’s the way it was with Federal government grants, until Howard meddled with the Public Service Act to allow politicians to take away the power to award grants from public servants and give it to themselves. Now everything goes through the relevant Minister’s office for ‘approval’.
Howard’s name always seems to pop up when the discussion turns to diminished standards of governance over the last 25 years.
Libs diminish standards, it’s in their DNA. And Howard was in power for most of the last 25 years so you’d expect his name to keep popping up.
A good piece on corruption in pork barrels, reduced to the “soft” type by this government and NSW, thanks, the record is important. But the largest most “costly” form of corruption lies in banks, insurance and real estate – FIRE. Ken Hayne said in some cases CEOs were breaking the law, so yes criminal acts; there was no “culture” of bank/FIRE misconduct (aka Turnbull) rather the banks etc aimed to make greater profits/dividends and CEOs and Board members also had personal interests aiming for high profits.Money laundering has been mentioned in Crikey as Australia’s world worst, and it’s definitely a crime. Frydenberg is not strengthening existing laws but weakening all of them against Hayne’s RC: all this amounts to massive amounts of incredibly costly corruption – to most of the population’s costs.
Yeh but now you’re really digging down into the prime layers of porked fat amongst the heavy pigs muck n gravy ..
True but encouraged by LNP Govt and also via leaving the old Newstart pay so desperate for many, and cutting this Keeper thing (which the unions demanded to Morrison’s and Porter’s disgust). So borrowing becomes essential to survive, and banks get away with usury, through to bankruptcy and impoverishment of so many.
How appropriate the NSW Government has leaders with relevant monikers. Gladys Pork Barreljiklian and John ‘Pork’ Barrel-laro.