Embedded Pork Barrelling
If the appalling behaviour of Australian governments during the Covid non-pandemic taught us anything, it is that executive overreach is the number one political problem in this country. An issue, alas, simply not addressed during the recent election campaign.
It is therefore highly reassuring to see at least one agency (the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption) doing something about one of the State’s chief weapons of overreach. I speak of pork barrelling, the use of the public purse to favour specific geographical locations (electorates) to curry political favour with voters.
https://www.icac.nsw.gov.au/education-and-events/forum-on-pork-barrelling
Or as Anne Twomey defines it:
‘Pork-barrelling’ involves the exercise of public powers, such as the making of grants or commitments to build infrastructure, in a biased or ‘partial’ manner that favours the interests of a political party, rather than in the public interest. Politicians on all sides engage in such behaviour, asserting that it is not unlawful and that it is ‘just politics’.
If only ICAC or some similar body would turn its attention to some of the other tools of overreach employed by our governing class, like crony capitalism, generally described euphemistically as “public-private-partnerships”, the outsourcing of core government functions to inept, bureaucratic, often foreign-owned corporations who simply wreck the whole sector into which they have been thrust, the unfettered power of lobbyists, not to mention the whole sorry saga of privatisation (to which I will return), and, of course, big government itself.
ICAC probably got especially interested in New South Wales pork barrelling, not only because senior members of the NSW Government were caught doing it in decidedly shady ways, but also because they were bragging about it! The unlamented former Premier, who perhaps might best be remembered as the Minister for getting goodies for the marginal electorate of the bloke with whom she was shacked up, tried the lines, “they all do it” and “it is all part of politics”. Gladys opined in late 2020:
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has accepted the government's controversial $250 million council grants program may have shored up Coalition votes, insisting the practice of pork barrelling was "not illegal".
Ms Berejiklian said grants handed out through the program went to 95 per cent Coalition-held seats, because, she said, "Guess what? There are more Coalition seats than any other."
Well, actually there are not more Coalition seats than others, certainly not now (and certainly never in the ratio of 95 per cent Coalition seats to 5 per cent other). The NSW Government is a minority government.
More significantly, her dubious claim about legality seems not to be shared by ICAC:
Independent Commission Against Corruption chief commissioner Peter Hall said the $250 million Stronger Communities fund had clearly crossed “the line”, while another legal expert said the process was an “appalling” indictment on the integrity of the NSW government.
Berejiklian’s Deputy Premier even revelled in the nick name “Pork Barellaro”. This accidental political truth-telling may well have miffed those in government and near to it who actually retain a vestigial regard for good governance, ministerial responsibility, the prudent disbursement of taxpayer funds and old-fashioned public service.
The brazen justification of corrupt practices by senior NSW politicians demonstrates the extent to which pork barrelling is embedded in the system. It is baked in. By “embedded”, I do not just mean widespread. I mean systemic. We have reached the point where members of parliament and, sadly, many of their voters as well, see their role as getting “stuff” for their electorates, and the parliamentary process as one giant auction. This, I have termed elsewhere, is “the tyranny of the announceable”. The former NSW Premier, Neville Wran, not for nothing regarded as the most successful and most feared politician in our short history, once said, “if something is worth announcing, it is worth announcing seven times”. Well, just before the 2019 State election, out of curiosity, I looked up the press releases of the then Member for Lismore over a period of a year. Every single one of his media releases was the announcement of grant funding for his electorate. Every single one. I suppose he regarded himself as highly successful as a result of his endeavours. This announcement effect of public spending that is part of the cargo cultism of the modern polity is one contributing factor to the fiscal incontinence that is also now par for the course. Covid had politicians like ScoMo (remember him?) salivating at the prospect of “saving” the economy through bribes, in his case not just of electorates but of workers and employers. More corruption and waste duly ensued. Now the nation’s debt sits at around one trillion dollars.
Pork barrelling is a bastardisation of representative democracy, and sadly, simply getting rid of such practices at the overtly corrupt end of the spectrum may well leave the rest of the system relatively untouched. It isn’t just the political advantages thought to be gained by the politicians engaging in it that is the system-wide problem. It is changing the whole process and the purpose of government that should worry every thinking Australian. Of course, whatever they might say, all politicians always oppose with all the vigour they can muster any suggestion of winding back their power to curry favour with voters in this way.
The British political philosopher and politician of the late eighteenth century, Edmund Burke, had important and relevant things to say about the nature of representative democracy and the role of the member of parliament:
Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament.
Burke’s admirable thesis on the role of the parliamentary member has been well and truly superseded in this venal age, much to our cost. One Burke scholar has noted:
Burke was the great eighteenth-century theorist of parliamentarism. He also struggled with the great challenge of parliamentarism–ministers holding power through the corrupt use of patronage–and it was in response to this challenge that he offered his famous theory of political parties.
I wonder what Burke would make of current practices in New South Wales. Bastardised isn’t the word.
The recent ICAC public forum on pork barrelling was well reported, at least in some areas of the legacy media. This is a start.
Two legal scholars of repute brought some heft to the debate. AJ Brown described the current level of pork barrelling as at “industrial scale”. Professor Anne Twomey, one of the nation’s foremost constitutional experts, was reported as follows:
“It was appalling on two levels. One, it was an indictment in the integrity of governmental behaviour, but secondly – I say this as a former public servant – it was appalling, just in terms of terrible public administration,” she told the hearing.
“Like many people I have been infuriated by ministers at both the state and the federal level, asserting that they have an unfettered ministerial power, and that there’s nothing illegal or corrupt about pork-barrelling. In my view both propositions are wrong.”
Twomey went on to criticise the current NSW ministerial code of conduct, which she described as “frankly useless”.
“They are deliberately written to allow as much misbehaviour as you can possibly get away with,” she said.
Twomey said, in some circumstances, pork-barrelling could already be considered corruption or even criminal corruption and would fall within the ICAC’s purview.
“Most voters, I think, are fed up with election bribes and the whiff of low-level corruption that they exude, which corrodes public trust in the system of government.”
Let us hope that Twomey is correct about the mood of voters. While there is no actual evidence of which I am aware that voters vote according to level of goodies offered by each side, it is at least plausible that they might support those who will deliver them the bigger stash of goodies. This is traditionally the way that national election campaigns are run. Each side seeks to outbid its opponent in promising the world. Again, there is no firm evidence that this actually works. One way of testing this would be to undertake the sort of reforms that Twomey and others would support, to shift the needle a little towards less pork barrelling and towards greater system integrity.
The Commonwealth’s own “adventures of Bridget McKenzie” demonstrate that the problem of corrupt government spending – in her case on favoured gun clubs and the rest – is not confined to one state or one level of government. Nor is it confined to one side of politics, though the Nationals are clearly “best in show”.
https://www.thefreedomsproject.com/item/489-the-wages-of-spin
I spent around thirty years working in regional economic development, and regional development is one of the best gateways to corruption going round. One of my erstwhile descriptions of the then Carr Labor Government’s regional policy was “a country marginal seats strategy”, for that is what it was. You always started with the press release and worked backwards to the policy. Spending drove policy, not the other way around. That is system corruption.
Hence the worst aspect of pork barrelling is not, as you might think, the corrupt behaviour to which it inevitably leads (see under Gladys Berijiklian) but rather to the system damage it inflicts on the body politic.
The whole point of the Nationals (and the old Country Party, created a century ago in the 1920s) was a giant pork barrelling exercise on behalf of non-metropolitan Australia. And the Nationals have been part of every Coalition government we have had.
If this historically embedded corruption of public policy wasn’t enough, it was turbo-charged when two disgruntled country independents, suddenly, in 2010, found themselves in a position to exercise hard power in the Australian Parliament. And that power was used vigorously and, alas, without shame. As a result, Tamworth got a new hospital and Port Macquarie a dual carriageway entrance into town. They might well also have subscribed to the appallingly cynical proposition put forward by an old Nat member of the NSW Parliament, one Peter Cochrane, who wanted to turn every electorate in the State into a marginal seat, so that every government would have to give them “more attention”. In other words, more goodies. Mercifully, “independents” of this kind only rarely are in a position of holding the balance of power.
The Government of Mike Baird decided to privatise the so-called “poles and wires” some years back and during the NSW Coalition’s current term of government. The sole purpose of this move – and sadly, not its only outcome, as the State’s energy supply goes down the drain – was to create a regional development fund of several billion dollars which would be controlled by ministers. This has been the biggest corruption of good governance in living memory, and makes Gladys’s little community grants schemes – yes, they were worth over 200 million dollars – seem like chicken poo. The scheme to privatise energy essentially freed up previously inaccessible assets for venal ministers to play with. Vanity projects like the George Street light rail and the ludicrous proposed tunnel from Blackheath to Little Hartley under the Blue Mountains, the latter now seemingly frozen by Infrastructure New South Wales, are merely two of the more disastrous examples of the genre.
So, well might ICAC do some digging in this pile of fetid rubbish. And, since the new Government in Canberra seems to have made a Commonwealth Integrity Commission a policy priority, a refreshing improvement in the quality and honesty of governance in this country might just be afoot. Those on the right (and on the left, for that matter) opposed to a Canberra version of ICAC might care to remember that integrity commissions wouldn’t be needed if politicians weren’t, you know, corrupt, and if the whole system wasn’t corrupt as well.
Paul Collits
16 June 2022