Pork Barrelling: Mainstream Corruption?

By Elinor Bickerstaff-Westbrook

With the 2022 Federal Election around the corner, the routine of punchy ads with rhyming one-liners and politicians teleporting around the country to pitch their economic plans is in full gear. These campaigns have become predictable, with the major parties fixating on ‘marginal seats’. These are ‘swing’ seats, where voting statistics are too close to predict which party will win on election day. These are seats the parties want, as they are opportunities for more power in Parliament, and they generally determine the outcome of an election (who will win!).

Parties are willing to do a lot to ‘woo’ votes in these seats, including promising big local projects and grants that communities want. Parties will pledge hundreds of millions of dollars towards projects if necessary. This practice is known as ‘pork-barrelling’ and has become so common that few bat an eye at headlines such as ‘Coalition has promised voters $833m a day…’ and ‘…Albanese’s $250 million electric bus pledge…’. The Guardian even has a crude-sounding ‘Pork-o-meter’ dedicated to tracking party announcements.

At first glance, pork-barrelling makes sense. Parties want to be voted in, and voters want a good reason to vote for those parties. By giving voters things they can directly see and interact with, politicians can very effectively show voters that they are here to help and give them what they want. 

Politicians have tried to normalize pork-barrelling. While defending her pork-barrelling practices, former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian stated ‘At the end of the day… that’s democracy’ and ‘all governments… make commitments to the community… to curry favour’ – in a nutshell: It’s alright, everyone does it! Former NSW deputy premier, John Barilaro, was so proud of his pork-barrelling practices that he was nicknamed Pork-Barrel-aro.

However, the ethics of pork-barrelling has been questioned for decades, and push back against the practice is growing as politicians continue to brazenly flood money into marginal seats. It’s important to remember that money being spent on these projects is taxpayers’ money. Every dollar spent on these projects is a dollar that doesn’t go into education, public services, military spending, climate change, and so on. Politicians are sacrificing millions of dollars from their larger – and arguably, much more important – policies and national projects, to fund projects in electoral seats that are designed to win political power. Crucially, only people within targeted electorates reap any benefit. 

While some critics of pork-barrelling concede that the practice is technically legal, others have continued questioning the legal validity of pork-barrelling. Anne Twomey, a leading expert in Australian constitutional law, highlights how pork-barrelling breaches many decision-making and anti-corruption limits on Parliament Ministers within administrative, constitutional, and statutory law. Twomey states that the continuation of pork-barrelling stems from a lack of consistent legal challenging against the practice. Essentially, Ministers know they’ll get away with it. 

So, as we watch Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese scurry around Australia making promises of multi-million-dollar projects for the next three weeks, ask yourself: Why are they doing this, and who does it help?