1 week Ago By Shane Wright
It was US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who coined the term “I know it when I see it”. In that particular instance, Stewart was ruling on the difference between pornography and art. But I reckon the good judge would struggle to discern the distinctions between bribes, pork barrelling and “rewarding a hardworking community” – all three of which are dominating the federal election campaign (and also dominated the 2022 election).
Let’s put it this way: should candidates for federal office be promising money to projects such as a community garden ($165,000 on offer from the Liberal Party for the seat of Eden-Monaro) or a community playground in outer-suburban Perth ($67,000 from Labor in the newly created seat of Bullwinkel)? That $67,000 commitment seems a steal when compared to the $1 million playground upgrade the LNP is promising on the Cairns foreshore, which just happens to be in the marginal seat of Leichhardt. But why stop at $1 million for a new swing set? How about $5 million for some basketball courts in Tasmania, which you can then link to the property market, as shadow treasurer Angus Taylor did. “If you want more housing supply, you’ve got to have the infrastructure being built alongside it.
Transport infrastructure, community infrastructure, sporting infrastructure,” he claimed, while standing in the marginal Liberal-held seat of Bass. Meanwhile, Labor is promising $750,000 for a skate park in the seat of Bendigo, $744,000 for the Kokoda Memorial Walking Track in the Sydney electorate of Reid, and $10 million for some new traffic lights in the Melbourne seat of Aston. What a coincidence, Deidre Chambers – all three of those electorates currently have ALP local members.
And the National Party, which has a long and rich history of finding ways to throw money at regional communities, has gone on a binge with promises that include roofing livestock sale yards, renovating an old railway trestle bridge, and committing $21,295 for a machine that flings clay targets into the air for trap shooters. Before the 2007 election, then-Labor leader Kevin Rudd declared that “this sort of reckless spending must stop”. In the 18 years since, not only has it not slowed down, the accelerator has been pumped.
In fact, it’s accelerated into areas well beyond the normal remits of a federal government. At the 2022 election, for example, Labor promised two dog parks while the Coalition promised one. All three were earmarked for marginal electorates.
Ultimately, those dog parks, playgrounds and trap-flinging machines – and all the other election commitments that get over the line – will be paid for with our taxes. And in the 2023-24 financial year, taxes collected by federal, state and local governments reached a record 30 per cent of GDP – or a lazy $801 billion. It’s not just the major parties, though.
The Greens have a swag of redistributive tax policies that would “raise” hundreds of billions of dollars in extra revenue, but they’ve no idea how these would interact with each other, nor how they would affect the economy. On the far right, Clive Palmer reckons he can build fast train lines from the CBDs of major capital cities to satellite cities, halve the cost of housing construction, and forgive all university and TAFE debts. Not one mention of how to pay for it.
, as part of her plan to “make Australia great”, wants to axe excise on alcohol and “abolish, cut, kill” the Department of Climate Change as part of her plan to save $90 billion in what she claims is duplication and waste across the public sector. It’s Elon Musk without the trip to Mars. What’s clearly missing from all this blatant pork barrelling is a simple equation.
If both sides of politics focused on ideas that would enable the economy to grow faster, that helped our society as a whole become richer, there would be more cash available to community groups to buy what they want, rather than relying on taxpayers to foot the bill. But putting in place the policies that would give us that stronger economy – even if there is pain for some – is a much harder sell than just standing on a netball court or next to some goal posts with a promise of “vote for us and this is what you’ll get”. It doesn’t require the mental bandwidth to explain the trade-offs between relative policy positions.
Maybe it’s partly due to how society has evolved and the increasing complexity of the issues we’re facing. John Curtin and Robert Menzies faced a binary world, where the economic ground rules were largely agreed upon. That evolved under Bob Hawke and then John Howard, who rode waves of economic reform, the rise of the Baby Boomers (a demographic tsunami), and the emergence of China, which underpinned their approach to governing and budgeting.
But the world handed to Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison and now Anthony Albanese has many more problems – relating to climate change and demographics – where solutions may require huge changes to long-standing traditions. The lingering mess of the Global Financial Crisis, the mass retirement of Boomers, changes in the media landscape and greater understanding of climate change have weighed on the past 15 years. That, however, is not an excuse for Labor and the Coalition to try to buy our votes with ideas seemingly taken from a local council meeting of angry ratepayers instead of selling difficult but desperately needed reform.
Justice Stewart was right to say pornography, or art, was in the eye of the beholder. In the case of Australian election campaigns, what’s on offer would make an OnlyFans star blush..
