Mission creep. That’s the story of the Commonwealth government over the last several decades. Federal parliamentarians have become so accustomed to handing out cheques to local community groups that we’ve ended up with sports rorts and swimming cash splashes – including for communities that don’t want them. But they make for good stories in local newspapers and in the social media posts MPs send out on a daily basis. In the absence of a bipartisan reassessment, the scandals will proliferate and public trust in the political process will collapse entirely.
In the mid-1980s, one of Australia’s finest finance ministers, Senator Peter Walsh, argued in the expenditure review committee of cabinet that the Commonwealth should fund only the designated national highways and not state roads and highways. He lost the argument. Whether Walsh was right or wrong, for the last three decades the reach of the Commonwealth into the lives of Australians and the facilities they use has increased exponentially.
Nowadays, the Commonwealth duplicates the functions traditionally performed by the states, territories and local councils. As worthy as the cause is, should the role of the Commonwealth include providing women’s changing rooms at Rugby clubs (especially where the women abandoned the club a year ago following mistreatment by male players)?
And should the Commonwealth select and fund the construction of swimming pools, without consultation with the relevant local councils that are expected to finance their expensive upkeep on an ongoing basis?
Those ministers who designed the Community Sports Infrastructure Program established an arm’s length assessment process for competing projects to be undertaken by Sport Australia, but they gave themselves complete discretion to ignore the resulting rankings. They selected projects that Sport Australia ranked lowly, rejected projects that Sport Australia ranked highly and selected some that weren’t assessed at all.
Debates about the appropriate proportion of projects chosen by politicians and independently assessed and recommended by public servants or statutory bodies miss the point: why have an arm’s length process at all if it can be ignored? The answer is: to give political cover to the government of the day engaged in buying votes for its re-election.
The $150 million swimming pool cash splash was much more straightforward than the sports rorts program. As Prime Minister Morrison explained, it was a funding envelope for a set of pre-election promises. Despite indicating in a media release on 30 March 2019 that “further details on the change room and swimming facilities fund will be released later in 2019”, most of the $150 million program had already been committed by the time of the federal election. In making these political decisions, there were no guidelines, no application processes and no arm’s-length assessments. If you wanted to have a go but weren’t in the know you didn’t get a go.
Forewarned that a government will likely go to the next election with such barrels of pork under the guise of women’s health, children’s exercise, building stronger communities or some other worthy cause, the opposition of the day will not want to be caught flat footed in the contest for marginal seats. It, too, will have a strong incentive to announce its own program to be funded by taxpayers if elected, and to invite its candidates and members in marginal seats to nominate projects that would increase their chances of electoral success.
Following that election, trust in the political process will fall even further, if that is possible. And young people will increasingly question whether democracy is the best system at all.
If parliamentarians have any desire to avoid this dire outcome, they might consider the following options. Where a program is described as merit based, with public servants to be involved in the assessment process, politicians should stay out of the decision making. They would be free to draw proposals to the attention of the selection panel and to submit letters of support or of criticism, but they would be obliged to accept the outcome of the independent assessment process.
Where, alternatively, a program is in truth a set of election commitments with no opportunity for advocates of alternative projects to submit them for consideration, it should be so described. There should be no impression or pretence that it is anything other than using taxpayer funds to secure election or re-election.
Better still, federal parliamentarians might consider the limits of mission creep for political gain. At some point after taxing citizens to fund the basic responsibilities of the Commonwealth such as defence, health and aged care and education, voters might actually be better off deciding how to spend their earnings than federal politicians.
Craig Emerson is a Distinguished Fellow at the ANU, Adjunct Professor at Victoria University’s College of Business and Director of RMIT’s Australian APEC Study Centre.