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.
Author
- William Partlett
Associate Professor of Public Law, The University of Melbourne
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.
The politics of who gets what
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.
But it raises an important question that applies at state and federal level – how do we ensure spending decisions are driven by need, not political considerations?
Taken for granted, left behind
Pork-barrelling has a long history in democracies around the world, right across the political spectrum.
It can take many forms. At its most overt, the practice might involve a government promising funding for local projects in communities they want to win, particularly during an election campaign.
More covertly, it can take the form of bypassing competitive processes or overriding expert recommendations, again to the benefit of politically advantageous seats.
Unlike outright electoral bribery, pork-barrelling isn’t explicitly against the law in Australia. Some politicians have even defended this practice as necessary ” investment ” in local communities.
Over time, however, pork-barrelling invests only in particular communities: those in marginal seats. Communities in electoral divisions already securely held by one political party – so-called “safe seats” – miss out.
There is no clear political advantage in directing money toward them; their political loyalty is unlikely to change.
This neglect of safe seats is backed up by the numbers. A 2018 analysis of data collected from the Australian Electoral Commission and the Federal Department of Infrastructure show marginal electorates receive funding at a rate more than three times higher than that of safe seats.
The price of living outside cities
Pork-barrelling puts rural Australia at a significant disadvantage. The reason is that many rural Australian divisions are safe seats.
In fact, according to 2025 Electoral Commission data , rural divisions in Queensland (Maranoa) and Victoria (Gippsland) are two of the safest Coalition seats in the house of representatives. Both are held more than 20 percentage points. Other rural seats are safe seats held by independents such as Bob Katter, federal member for Kennedy in Queensland.
For rural voters, this kind of neglect can play out no matter who is in government.
Labor pork-barrelling spending programs are very unlikely to direct money to these kinds of safe seats. This is because Labor is very unlikely to ever have a chance of winning these seats.
Coalition pork-barrelling programs are more likely than Labor to distribute money to these rural safe seats (perhaps due to lobbying by the representative or a desire to win an independent seat). Over time, however, Coalition pork-barrelling programs are likely to focus more public money on marginal seats.
For instance, the Commonwealth auditor-general found Coalition pork-barrelling in its 2020 Community Sport Infrastructure program led to “safe” and “fairly safe” Coalition-held electorates receiving “14% less funding than if funding had been awarded on the basis of assessed merit”.
A concrete example
Just five days before she was critically injured in an alleged attack outside her Wangaratta electorate office, independent federal member for Indi Helen Haines met with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to ask for additional public money to help fill the $2.7 billion health care expenditure gap between metropolitan and rural areas.
A recent report by the National Rural Health Alliance found a rural Australian receives, on average, $1,218 less in healthcare funding each year than a city resident ($138 less than last year).
This was not a new issue for Haines. Before she was elected to parliament, she had seen the effects of this funding gap as a nurse, midwife, and in healthcare research.
The ABC reported the prime minister listened to her request and noted that “a lot of people ask for money”.
Recent research, however, raises questions about how fairly the Albanese government administers public spending. A September report by independent think tank the Centre for Public Integrity analysed how the government administered a $560.9 million community infrastructure program.
In the end, more than 70% of this public money was given to Labor-held electoral divisions. This included $6 million for a golf club in the prime minister’s own electoral division . This money could have been put to far better use in rural Australia.
Another reason to end pork barrelling
The problems of pork-barrelling are well canvassed. This misuse of public money damages public trust and corrupts democracy. It reflects a concerning trend in which governing parties use public resources to stay in power.
In 2022, the New South Wales state anti-corruption commission clearly stated that in some instances, pork barrelling can amount to corrupt conduct .
More recently, the Albanese government’s community infrastructure grant program has attracted the attention of the National Anti-Corruption Commission.
The health of rural Australia is another reason to end this practice.
Luckily, ending pork barrelling is easy to do. The government can simply commit itself to spending public money on the basis of proven need rather than political expediency.
This need-based public spending will help ensure that public money is spent for public purposes rather than partisan ones. This will not only help our democracy – it will also help rural Australians.
