The sports grants scandal: Constitutional protection of socioeconomic rights as a remedy for porkbarrellling

Pork-barrelling, defined as the allocation of public resources for the purpose of securing political advantage, is rampant in Australia. Inquiries by the Australian National Audit Office have revealed that funds from numerous grants programmes have been abused in this way. The most prominent recent occurrence was the scandal that occurred following the revelation that the Coalition government led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison had engaged in blatant pork-barrelling in the allocation of funds from the Community Sports Infrastructure Grant programme. This article discusses the phenomenon of pork-barrelling in Australia and the inadequacy of legal remedies to prevent it. It then examines how constitutional protection of socioeconomic rights could provide an avenue for the suppression of pork-barrelling by showing how courts in South Africa have interpreted socioeconomic rights provisions in that country’s Constitution in such a way as to require that government funding spent in fulfilment of socioeconomic programmes be allocated in accordance with a standard of reasonableness. The courts have also created novel remedies which require the executive to revise the way in which it distributes funds within programmes in cases where the standard has been breached. If socioeconomic rights were protected in the Commonwealth Constitution, and grant applications which had been denied funding as a result of pork-barrelling but which would have been successful had the criterion of reasonableness been complied with, courts could mandate that the state adjust its distribution of funds so as to ensure that all applications that met objective criteria were funded. The availability of this remedy would constitute a powerful disincentive against governments using public funds for political purposes.