Safe seats, shortchanged: why rural Australia bears the brunt of pork-barrelling

Résumé détaillé

Pork-barrelling does more than distort democracy. For already-stretched services outside our cities, it can deepen the funding divide.

Rural and regional Australia is chronically underfunded. From healthcare and education to public transport and community infrastructure, living outside a capital city too often means having to settle for poorer services.

Delivering services across vast and sparsely populated areas presents its own challenges. But that’s only part of the story.

Another, often overlooked, factor is “pork-barrelling”: the allocation of public funds not on the basis of demonstrated need, but to where they can help win votes.

In practice, it means taxpayer money is often disproportionately funnelled to marginal seats the government needs to win at the next election. And most of these electoral battlegrounds are in metropolitan or outer metropolitan areas.

The result is that rural and regional Australians miss out on funding that could otherwise help address chronic shortfalls in essential services.

With Victoria heading to the polls on November 28, questions about politically driven spending are back in focus.

Take health, for example. In June, community advocates accused the Labor state government of neglecting funding for hospitals in safe electorates – including West Gippsland, Mildura and Daylesford.

Advocates also pointed to the fact that in Mildura – a seat Labor hasn’t won for decades – the state Labor government spent $2 million on a hospital redevelopment feasibility study in 2021. Yet five years on, there was no funding commitment for a rebuild.

Labor has rejected the accusations. Further, this is not evidence of pork-barrelling in itself.

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