Opinion: Voters aren’t stupid, we know pork barrelling when we see it

Sports Minister Bridget McKenzie – who, against advice, splashed $100 million in mostly marginal (and Coalition) seats – must now step down from her Agriculture portfolio while the parliament investigates some very questionable circumstances, writes Paul Williams.

I NEVER thought I’d say this but Pauline Hanson is dead right.

The Pauline Hansons’s One Nation leader is right to call for a Senate inquiry into how former Sports Minister Bridget McKenzie splashed $100 million in mostly marginal (and Coalition) seats just weeks before the 2019 federal election, and despite the advice of Sport Australia. McKenzie must now step down from her Agriculture portfolio while the parliament investigates some very questionable circumstances.

Scott Morrison backs Bridget McKenzie as outrage from sports grants continues

But a bigger problem is Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s blind loyalty despite mounting evidence of wrongdoing.

Can Morrison not remember back to late 1993 when the then-Sports Minister Ros Kelly was similarly pilloried in an identical set of circumstances?

A bigger problem is Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s blind loyalty [to Bridget McKenzie] despite mounting evidence of wrongdoing. Picture: AAP Image/Marc Tewksbury

Kelly was accused by the same National Audit Office which found she pork barrelled Labor seats twice as generously as Coalition ones.

Ironically, while it was the Coalition opposition that so damaged Paul Keating’s Labor Government, it was Keating himself who fanned the flames of Labor’s own 1996 defeat in refusing to sack Kelly for three agonising months.

It was, as a new Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop had said, “Yet another vote-buying exercise dressed up as looking after regions.”

But the damage was done by the time Kelly finally quit parliament nine months later, and Labor subsequently lost Kelly’s seat of Canberra in a by-election under a 21 per cent primary vote swing. The lesson is simple: voters hate cynical pork barrelling.

Just look at the criticism former LNP Premier Campbell Newman copped in 2015 following some very generous funding in his own seat of Ashgrove, and after promises of funding elsewhere but only if voters re-elected LNP MPs.

Morrison’s spin doctors will argue, of course, that Kelly’s sin was far worse – Kelly left no paper trail and instead made her calculations on a whiteboard later erased – and that McKenzie at least followed arguably vague guidelines. But that’s not going to mollify cash-poor clubs that have now launched a class action with a major law firm.

Put bluntly, a politician handing out public money disproportionately to one’s own side – and so close to an election – plainly fails the quintessential pub test. It’s also just one reason why Australian voters are now the least trusting they’ve been of political institutions since 1975.

The bottom line is that voters are sick to death of power-wielders corrupting what should be the noble art of politics and what should be the gentle and altruistic reconciliation of competing community demands for public money.

At a time of growing political mistrust and support for undemocratic forces, our major parties have no choice but to put aside short-term partisanship and end Australia’s political culture of self-service. That means both the Coalition and Labor must reach – and honour – an agreement to eliminate pork barrelling, to end taxpayer-funded government advertising, and refuse to find post-career jobs for party boys and girls. It also means establishing a federal anti-corruption body.

The ball is in your court, Mr Morrison and Mr Albanese. What say you?

Dr Paul Williams is a Senior Lecturer at Griffith University.