Vikki Campion: Bush cops pork barrelling hypocrisy from bureaucrats

Bureaucrats will splash a billion dollars on inner city academia— but those who fix dilapidated facilities in towns far away are accused of bribery or “pork-barrelling”, writes Vikki Campion.

It must feel good to sit in sandstone buildings on “perfectly manicured lawns” and preach to ICAC that faceless, nameless lanyard-wearing bureaucrats in a tower far away should decide if footy-playing kids in a town they’ve never seen deserve a change room.

Imagine telling Sydney Uni academics or ICAC lawyers to get changed under the bleachers in
the cold.

Enlightened alumni from a tiny pocket of land on the edge of the Sydney CBD call criminal bribery or “pork-barrelling” those who help fix dilapidated facilities in towns far away.

From this educational Monaco of taxpayer billions comes the judgment club, decamped all 3km to NSW parliament to belt up regional Australia, then go to lunch.

Sydney University’s Professor Anne Twomey’s claim that election promises are the “great escape from all scrutiny” is offensive to every council and community organisation that laid out their case for shade cloths, change rooms, child care, medical or end-of-life care.

The University of Sydney received more than $1b in grants. Picture: Paul Miller

Academics in the ICAC line-up seemed blissfully unaware of the enormous sums of public money their institutions have hoovered up, arguing that “public money should not be spent for private interests”.

Exactly.

So perhaps the $1,023,872,774.54 in federal grants to the University of Sydney, in a safe Labor seat, during the Abbott-Morrison reign of the Coalition government should be looked at first.

You couldn’t get a more abundant form of pork barrelling in Australia than $1 billion in grants for “72ha of state-of-the-art teaching and learning technology, including six libraries, art galleries, historical museums, perfectly manicured lawns” as described by Sydney Uni’s website and a small group of very well-educated people in Australia.

I’ll call it quits if you can find a single manicured lawn in regional Australia that got $1 billion of taxpayer funds in the same period.

Seeing as we are having a conversation about what is in the “public interest”, how about the nearly $2 million worth of grants into gender fascination at Sydney University, including $239,777 to assess “gender-based violence in Cambodia’s construction sector … with a focus on Cambodia’s cultural, political and economic context”? Or the $470,501 for a gender equality study that “expects to generate new knowledge about the gendered dimensions of workplace change”?

Regional Australia’s grants are labelled as “pork barrelling”.

Or the $1 million given last year to study gender segregation in the Australian labour market?

Do you think that study will have any effect whatsoever on Cambodia’s construction? That women in hi-vis in Phnom Penh are saying, “Thank you Australian taxpayers”?

Let’s open it up to voters to mark it.

A Sydney Uni study on Cambodia, or funding for the AEIOU Autistic Centre in Townsville, which gives respite to families and helps kids with autism – one of those election promises by the way that academics claim “escapes scrutiny”.

How about the $328.1 million in research grants to the University of NSW under the Coalition, in another Labor stronghold – where ICAC’s other chosen academic Dr Simon Longstaff hails from – including $338,927 for a study that “proposes that regional art museums, embedded in sites with shifting populations, should lead structural diversification in Australian art”.

Yet if we gave $300,000 to a regional museum, by their standards, it’s pork-barrelling.

Only 24 hours before this ICAC talk fest, $20.3 million was given to a few central postcodes for university research grants, including $345,000 for a study on why autonomous vehicles give motion sickness.

The main quadrangle building of the University of Sydney.

Prof Twomey argued politicians should be able to override public servants but only with other evidence to explain why the public servants got it wrong. They have no idea.

Walking down the street with politicians is where the requests for support begin.

From the volunteer sweeping leaves from the footpath outside St Vincent de Paul, asking for recycling pay machines so she can collect money for bottles without driving two hours.

From the cleaner at the motel, who breaks down in the laundry room as you wash your kid’s clothes, talking about the hospice that allowed her to spend time with her husband before he died.

How it needs more room and that the whole community has been raising money for it for years but a grant would fast-track that upgrade by a decade.

From the footy or soccer or netball mums begging for changing rooms so their children can have privacy.

It does not take folders of busywork to determine needs in a community.

Politicians run the parliament because they are elected and accountable – and we didn’t vote for the bureaucrats.

Bush communities don’t need a bunch of bureaucrats, writes Vikki Campion. Picture: Matthew Abbott

Name five heads of government departments? Name three? Even one? Exactly. No one knows who they are. If they deserve more power, they should be elected here as they are in the US.

The idea that you need a centralised bureaucrat in Canberra to tell you what you need in regional Australia will sadly become the norm under this Labor government, which has made a serious mistake making the Finance Minister, who holds the keys to the till, also the Minister for Public Service.

I doubt any grants to unis will form part of the pork-barrelling conversation.

Instead, these ICAC academics will turn their focus to the projects that make a real difference in improving families’ lives – such as a proposed splash park for kids in town with a 40C average temperature.

It’s OK for academics to get taxpayer funds, it’s OK for the public service to get $327 billion, but the kids in Biloela can go back to their bake stalls to buy their splash park.