The magic bullet solution to pork-barrelling and "sports rorts" that nobody talks about: electoral reform

Pork-barrelling is out of control in Australia. Grattan Institute aptly summarizes the extent of the problem in their recent report:

Coalition and Labor federal and state governments have all used grants for infrastructure and services to ‘reward’ voters in government seats and ‘buy votes’ in marginal seats. This means worthy projects in other electorates miss out.

Of 19,000 grants allocated by the former federal Coalition government under 11 grant programs between 2017 and 2021, $1.9 billion went to Coalition seats but only $530 million to Labor seats.

Across a sample of programs in the three biggest states, government seats got more than $1 million on average, compared to just over $300,000 on average for opposition seats.

Pretty shocking stuff. However, I was surprised to see the report’s recommendations suggest solutions like more more transparency and removing some of the decision-making power from ministers, when there’s a much simpler, more powerful solution, already successfully implemented in other countries: Electoral reform.

A brief look over the Tasman Sea, for instance, would reveal that this problem simply doesn’t exist in New Zealand, thanks to New Zealand’s proportional voting system.

How it works in New Zealand

In previous posts, we’ve looked at how Australia’s single member electorates create a massive amount of wasted vote, which means some votes (and voters) are a lot more influential than others over the final result.

New Zealand’s MMP (mixed-member proportional) system, however, means that the geographic location or dispersal of voters doesn’t matter. Each vote for a party counts equally in determining the number of seats allocated to that party in parliament, regardless of where that vote is located.

(New Zealand still has electorates, but except in rare edge cases, electorate votes do not affect the number of seats the party is granted in parliament, only the composition. Also, sometimes parties with a low vote count are excluded from a proportional allocation of seats based on a threshold. These quirks aren’t relevant to the point being made here, and aren’t essential elements of the system, no nitpicking please.)

So why is nobody talking about this?

Australia’s wasted vote problem is nothing less than the root cause of pork-barrelling and sports rorts. Because any additional votes gained in safe seats are wasted (1000 additional losing votes or winning votes doesn’t change the final result at all), all the focus, both in campaigning and location-based funding goes into swing seats.

“Sports rorts” was a major, ongoing scandal at the last election, with a huge amount of coverage, but nobody ever connected this to its root cause - Australia’s terrible, non-proportional electoral system.

Solve wasted vote - solve pork-barrelling. It’s that simple.