A local political insider summed up the latest Canberra grants controversy rather neatly when I spoke to him this week.

“Why did we only get a lousy $1 million?”

It’s a fair question.

Marrickville Golf Club in the Prime Minister’s electorate gets $6 million, while Ballina Shire gets $1 million for a CCTV network across two towns to help police fight crime.

Perhaps we’ve been doing pork-barrelling all wrong.

Or perhaps there’s another explanation.

Maybe Labor figured Justine Elliot needed less help holding off the Greens’ Mandy Nolan in Richmond than Anthony Albanese needed holding off the Greens in his own seat of Grayndler.

There is, of course, a serious issue underneath the political theatre and scuttlebutt.

Both sides have form.

Labor gave us the original “sports rorts” affair under Ros Kelly and her infamous whiteboard in the 1990s.

A quarter of a century later, the Morrison Coalition had “sports rorts” all over again, with the Auditor-General finding its Community Sport Infrastructure grants increasingly favoured marginal and targeted electorates.

Now Labor finds itself defending invitation-only programs that overwhelmingly benefited electorates it held or wanted to win.

You’d like to think there’s a fairer and more transparent way forward. But maybe there’s not.

I for one don’t want to live in a country where politicians can’t make promises at elections and have some leverage to deliver them if they win.

That’s part of democracy. And MPs should be close enough to their respective electorates to have some idea which projects are worthy of funding.

Anthony Albanese came to Lennox Head and promised Ballina Shire $1 million for community safety. His government was re-elected and it delivered the money.

I struggle to see anything inherently corrupt about that.

The problem is establishing why one project deserves $1 million and another deserves $6 million.

One solution could be putting election commitments through some form of independent assessment for genuine community need, value for money and the capacity to actually deliver results.

But that sounds awfully messy and complicated.

There’s an old saying comparing politics to making sausages: you might enjoy the final product, but you probably don’t want to watch how it’s made.

Take the politics out of government spending altogether and we risk taking something important out of elections as well.

Which brings us back to that lousy $1 million.

Maybe we should have asked for another million to extend the cameras to Alstonville and Wollongbar.

But that falls into Kevin Hogan’s electorate of Page, so perhaps it would have been wiped from the whiteboard.

Better still, what about reinstating the North Creek bridge connecting the airport side of Ballina with Lennox Head?

Now there’s an election promise I’d like to hear.

With Tamara Smith retiring and the state seat of Ballina genuinely in play next March, here’s hoping Labor and the Nationals make a heap of promises to our electorate. Over the coming six months.

And here’s hoping whoever eventually wins goes on to deliver them.

There’s certainly no shortage of worthy local projects.

RELATED STORY: Ballina’s $1m CCTV grant caught up in Labor ‘rorts’ row

MAIN IMAGE: Prime Minister Albanese is welcomed by local MP Justine Elliot as he arrives in Lennox head for the CCTV announcement in February 2025 (photo: NBN News)