A $560 million invitation-only grants program heavily favoured Labor-held seats, according to the Centre for Public Integrity. The controversy raises a broader question: should the Commonwealth control community grants at all?

The entry for ‘pork barrelling’ in the Oxford Dictionary says “N. Amer. Colloq. Government funds as a source of political benefit.”

Some fancy the term derives from the habit of American slave owners who, in the days before refrigeration, very occasionally provided barrels of salted pork for their captives. The obscurity of the derivation doesn’t matter, though, as the stench of pork barrelling in Australia is nauseatingly plain enough.

And the barrel keeps getting bigger and the pork is more recklessly dished out.

Recently the Centre for Public Integrity ran its nostrils over the Albanese Government’s ‘Major Local Community Infrastructure Program’ in which, over the last year, $560 million was up for grabs for things like team sports facilities, public parks, local clubs, walkways and swimming pools. The centre concluded that:

“grants were heavily focused in notionally ALP-held seats”

“marginal seats in which the ALP was competitive received disproportionately high funding” while some “safe ALP seats missed out”

“funding was geographically concentrated”, and

“the funding pattern does not appear to be explained by community need…”.

The grants program had politics at its heart.........

© Pearls and Irritations