The Labor government came to office promising higher standards of integrity, transparency and accountability after almost a decade of Coalition government corruption. Four years later, those promises are becoming harder to reconcile with the way Labor is actually governing.
A $560 million infrastructure program that directed roughly three-quarters of its funding towards Labor-held electorates before the 2025 federal election has revived the politics of “sportsrorts”, while an invitation-only $6 million grant to Marrickville Golf Club in Anthony Albanese’s electorate raises further questions about how public money is allocated and who gets access to government funding programs.
The central issue is not simply whether these decisions technically comply with existing rules. There needs to be transparent selection processes, independent scrutiny and confidence that taxpayers’ money is being distributed according to public need rather than political advantage. Labor understood this principle perfectly well when it attacked the Morrison government over sportsrorts, commuter car parks and politically targeted grants. Is it now prepared to apply the same standards to itself?
This controversy also points to a wider problem in Australian politics: a political culture in which questionable behaviour can be defended because it has been declared or falls within parliamentary rules. Transport Minister Catherine King’s acceptance of a lifetime Qantas Platinum membership shows the weakness of that defence. Declaring a corporate benefit does not resolve the underlying question of whether ministers responsible for regulating powerful companies should be accepting valuable benefits from those companies in the first place – if the rules permit relationships that undermine public confidence in government, then following the rules is not enough, and the rules themselves need to change.
Changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme from 1 October bring another familiar argument back into Australian politics: that social programs must continually demonstrate affordability, sustainability and value for money. When disability services, Medicare and other social programs are discussed, restraint and value for money always dominates the conversation. When defence spending is announced, those restraints seem to disappear completely.
The contrast is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Another $2.4 billion has been committed to Australian air and missile defence, with tens of billions more expected over the coming decade, while the enormous long-term cost of AUKUS continues to expand Australia’s military commitments. Social expenditure is treated as a budget problem requiring restraint; military expenditure is always a place where money can always be easily found.
The big issue now is whether Labor is meeting the standards it demanded when it was in opposition, on pork-barrelling, political integrity, corporate influence, transparency and responsible government. If Labor condemns one set of political practices when the Coalition uses them, but finds reasons to defend similar practices once it controls the money and the machinery of government, the problem is bigger than hypocrisy. It suggests that changing governments has done much less to change the political system than voters were promised.
