Both major political parties in Australia are pork-barrelling on promises and decisions relating to transport projects, a new analysis has found.

In its latest report, the Grattan Institute has undertaken a comprehensive analysis of election commitments and funding decisions on significant transport projects at a Commonwealth level over recent decades.

The report follows a series of scandals including the $660 million car park rorts scandal which have seen hundreds of millions of taxpayer funds diverted to marginal seats.

It found that both major parties had engaged in pork-barrelling which favoured either marginal seats or those which were located within their traditional heartland.

In particular, the report found that:

• Advice from the independent advisory agency Infrastructure Australia is being routinely sidelined in major project funding decisions. In the 2019 election campaign, just one of the 71 projects worth $100 million or more promised by the Coalition had an approved business case. For Labor, just two of the 61 projects which it promised in that same campaign had an approved business case. In terms of funding decisions, meanwhile, just six of the 22 large projects to which the Commonwealth has committed since 2016 had an independent business case published by Infrastructure Australia at the time of commitment.
• Commonwealth pork-barrelling on major transport projects routinely favours critical states. Queensland and New South Wales – where elections tend to be won or lost due to the high number of marginal seats – consistently receive more money on public transport projects whereas Victoria consistently receives less compared with what can reasonably be explained by any considerations of population, population growth, size of the road network, share of passenger or freight travel, or what it actually costs the state government to run the transport system.
• Spending decisions routinely favour marginal seats. These includes Lindsay in Sydney, Higgins in Melbourne, Moreton in Brisbane, Hasluck in Perth, and Boothby in Adelaide. The average marginal seat received $83 million from the federal $4.8 billion Urban Congestion Fund – which included the aforemtioned car park program. By contrast, the average safe Coalition seat received $64 million whilst the average safe Labor seat received just $34 million.

The latest report comes as confidence in the accountability of government funding decisions has been rocked by a series of scandals.

The most prominent of these was the aforementioned car park rorts scandal, in relation to which a damning Auditor General’s report found that there was a lack of transparent process and that projects were selected based on specific electorates which the Coalition wanted to win.

Prior to this, the sports rorts affair  which broke in 2019 saw grants which were provided to local sporting clubs to improve facilities being directed toward marginal seats in the lead-up to the 2019 election.

In its report, the Grattan Institute says the Commonwealth should stick to its national role focusing on nationally significant infrastructure and refrain from involvement in projects which are not part of the national network.

According to Grattan, much of what the Commonwealth spends on transport projects is outside the scope of its role as it has agreed with the states.

The federal government is supposed to focus on nationally significant infrastructure on the National Land Transport Network; state and local governments are supposed to be responsible for locally important roads and rail.

That hasn’t stopped successive federal governments since 2009 from funding nearly 800 roundabouts, carparks, and overpasses that are unconnected with the National Network.

Whichever party wins government in the upcoming election, the Grattan Institute says it should stick to its job of nationally significant roads and rail on the National Land Transport Network and refuse to become involved in funding more roundabouts, overpasses or carparks.

In addition, there should be a requirement that before approving any transport project, the federal government should have to publish an independent assessment of the project as assessed by Infrastructure Australia.

This would include the business case, cost/benefit analysis and ranking on national significance grounds.

Marion Terrill, report author and Grattan Institute Transport and Cities Program Director, says the pork barrelling needs to stop.

‘Politicians who insist on pork-barrelling are wasting taxpayers’ money, and the biggest losers are people who live in safe seats or states with few marginal electorates,’ Terrill said.