Pork barrelling – who’s worse, the Coalition or Labor?

The Coalition and Labor have preferentially allocated more money to marginal seats in grant programs, despite both parties accusing the other of pork barrelling.

Labor said the Coalition used the Community Development Grants (CDG) program as a “slush fund” to shore up votes in marginal electorates, based on a Labor analysis of grant fund distribution by electorate.

The Coalition responded by saying Labor’s analysis was wrong, and that a large proportion of the funds to be distributed under the program would go to 55 projects allocated under Labor’s Regional Development Australia Fund (RDAF) and 17 under the Community Infrastructure Grants (CIG) scheme.

So who’s right here?

To find out, we did our own analysis of the CDG projects. We assigned each project to an electorate, and used a list of RDAF and CIG projects to determine which had been carried over from Labor’s scheme.

We then used the Australian Electoral Commission’s seat status list to classify each entry as marginal, safe or fairly safe based on the 2010 election results, since many of the CDG projects were announced as election promises during the 2013 election campaign.

You can read more about the methods at the bottom.

From our analysis it looks as though both parties have been targeting marginal seats with grant funds.

For projects approved under the Coalition’s CDG scheme, both the number of projects and the amount of money allocated is overwhelmingly concentrated in marginal seats:

Although marginal seats make up only 38% of electorates overall – compared with 41.3% safe and 20.7% fairly safe – 69.8% of the funding for CDG-approved projects went to marginal seats.

This isn’t surprising, because we already know Tony Abbott had made more election promises in marginal seats during the election campaign.

For projects approved under Labor’s schemes, the distribution is similar but less pronounced, with the bulk of funds (49%) going to marginals :

The number of projects is also the highest for marginals, but there’s not as much of a difference as for the CDG projects. Possibly this would be different if we looked at a larger list of older projects actually funded under the RDAF.

We also looked at who held the seat going into the 2013 election. The number of CDG-approved projects was highest in Coalition-held marginal seats, which might indicate the Coalition was attempting to shore up votes in seats they were in danger of losing.

The pattern isn’t the same for RDAF and CIG projects, with the highest number of projects by party going equally to Coalition marginals and safe seats.

Here’s a map showing the distribution of funds by electorate, so you can see how your local area did:

Methods

We assigned each project to an electorate. The information on each project varies so a few electorates might be incorrect, but we ended up with only two “unknowns”, and one of these was Norfolk Island, which allows voters to determine which electorate their vote counts towards.

Here’s our list. If you think we’ve got something wrong, please get in touch and we’ll update this post.

Unfunded RDAF projects were identified by comparing the list of funded projects here with the originally announced lists archived here. We identified all but one of the 55 RDAF projects.

A list of projects approved under the CIG scheme but funded under the CDG scheme was provided by the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development.

Electorates were scored as either marginal, safe or fairly safe using the AEC’s seat status list, which is based on the 2010 election results.