PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Mr SMALL (Forrest—Opposition Whip) (12:26): Labor promised to end pork-barrelling. Anthony Albanese told Australians before the election, in 2022, that he wanted to 'change the way that politics operates in this country'. Minister for infrastructure Catherine King promised 'no more colour-coded spreadsheets and no more pork-barrelling'.

But this government's record on infrastructure spending tells a very different story. We followed the money—you can't look at what Labor does, but you can look at what Labor spends their money on. It tells a very different story to the press releases and the media stunts.

So we looked at two non-competitive infrastructure programs worth more than $351 million of your taxpayer money. Across the two programs, 93½ per cent of funding—some $328.8 million—went to projects in Labor-held seats. That's more than nine in every $10 taken off Australians and funnelled into Labor-held seats.

Under Minister King's Major and Local Community Infrastructure Program, almost $223 million has been allocated—of which $207 million went to, you guessed it, Labor-held seats. That's almost 93 per cent of funding going to projects in Labor's own electorates. But, in 2021, on the Building Better Regions Fund, the now infrastructure minister said: 'Around 90 per cent of Building Better Regions funding went to coalition-held or target seats.

It wasn't about developing regional Australia, it was about pork-barrelling national seats.' My question to Minister King is this: if 90 per cent of funding to coalition seats was pork-barrelling, what does 92.9 per cent of funding to Labor seats make your own Major and Local Community Infrastructure Program? It doesn't end there, though. When it comes to the multicultural communities program, 94.2 per cent of funding has gone to Labor-held seats.

That's 84 out of 90 projects that were funded in the government's own seats. Indeed, more than half of the funding—some $67 million—went to electorates held by margins of less than 10 per cent before the 2025 federal election, and almost two-thirds of the projects were funded in marginal seats. These were the seats that were most likely to determine the outcome of the election.

Remarkably, the electorates most important to Labor's electoral fortunes just happened to receive the overwhelming share of funding. This hard, empirical data exposes Minister King as the new queen of pork-barrelling in Australia. Minister King, when in opposition, described these programs as 'industrial-scale pork-barrelling' and, just three years ago, declared that there would be 'no more colour-coded spreadsheets and no more pork barrelling'.

But I suppose Minister King has changed her position on that too, because neither of these programs were conducted via a competitive grants program. For both of the programs, the only organisations that could get funding were those invited by the Labor government to apply—and if your community wasn't on Labor's list, well, you didn't even get a look in, despite the fact that it's your tax money that's going into these programs.

When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promised to change the way politics works in this country, it seemed that the recipe could stay the same provided that it was him dishing out the money into his own Labor held seats. He promised Australians that his word was his bond, yet his government is now overseeing infrastructure programs where more than $9 in every $10 taken off Australian taxpayers is being funnelled into the government's own seats.

It exposes these programs for what they are. That's why I've taken the step of referring both programs to the Auditor-General. These programs ran through closed, noncompetitive processes where the only organisations that could apply were those invited to.

These programs carry an inherent risk that the funding decisions are driven by partisan politics rather than any assessed need. Indeed, these are the same programs Labor targeted in opposition and changed the Commonwealth grants program to allegedly address in 2023. Let's see what the Auditor-General has to say, because you can't listen to what Labor says but you can watch closely where Labor has spent.