> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Not Even a Whiteboard This Time - URL: https://goodoil.news/not-even-a-whiteboard-this-time/ - Published: 2026-09-09T04:00:40.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-09T04:00:39.000Z - Description: Labor’s Sports Rorts 2.0 is even dodgier than before. - Author: Lushington Brady - Tags: AUS Politics What is it about on-the-ropes Labor governments and rorting sports grants to desperately buy votes? > [An “invite-only”](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-08/labor-mlci-grants-marginal-pork-barrelling/107116982?ref=goodoil.news) grants program was overwhelmingly directed into safe Labor seats and marginal seats the party wanted to win at the 2025 federal election, a Centre for Public Integrity investigation of the $560 million program has concluded. It’s largely forgotten now, but back in the early ’90s, the Keating government was in dire trouble. Having narrowly deposed **Bob Hawke** as Labor leader and PM, **Paul Keating** had the good luck to face off against **John Hewson** at the next election. Hewson not only lacked charisma but made the fatal mistake of being honest and laying out his policy agenda in wonky detail well over a year before the election. The trouble for Keating was that, having won the election he quickly lost the electorate. So, he started trying to buy votes. Sports Minister **Ros Kelly** plunged $30 million of taxpayers’ money into marginal Labor seats ahead of the looming 1993 election. When called to account, she argued that the 2,800 submissions had been decided either verbally or short-listed on a “great big whiteboard” in her office, having been erased without permanent record once the decisions were made. Kelly was forced to resign, precipitating a by-election that lost Labor the normally safe seat of Canberra. The result became a harbinger for **John Howard**’s triumphant 1996 general election victory. Labor are up to their old tricks again, only bigger and more blatant. > While projects in safe and marginal Labor seats sometimes received grants worth tens of millions of dollars, 45 electorates were not invited to the Major and Local Community Infrastructure (MLCI) Program and received no funding. > > Labor promised more than half a billion dollars in upgrades to sports facilities, parks and other community infrastructure at the election, and Infrastructure Minister **Catherine King** has said the MLCI was set up to pay for those promises. > > The Centre for Public Integrity’s chair, former justice **Anthony Whealy**, said it appeared the program had been used to pork-barrel seats Labor wanted to win. In the same way it appeared that Al Capone’s enemies had a habit of getting themselves gunned down in back alleys. The centre’s executive director, **Catherine Williams** put the arithmetic in language even a Labor backbencher could follow without resorting to playing with Ooshies: > “To put this another way, for every dollar spent in a coalition seat, $3.20 was spent in a notionally ALP-held seat,” the centre’s executive director, Catherine Williams, said. Some $493 million of the $560 million went to seats that were safe, fairly safe or competitive for Labor. Seats where Labor was not competitive received $66 million. Need did not enter into it. The poorest seats in the country received a below-average serve. ‘Community connectedness’, a weasel measure if ever there was, showed no correlation either. What correlated was the colour of the seat. Only one golf club in the country received an invitation: Marrickville, in **Anthony Albanese**’s own Grayndler. Six million dollars for a clubhouse, an accessibility ramp and a septic system. Rutherglen Golf Club in independent MP **Helen Haines**’s Indi, with asbestos walls, white ants eating the timber and a floor that slopes was told to sod off. > “I was shocked by the scale of this, by the depth of this,” Ms Haines told 7.30. Then she hasn’t been paying attention. How rattled is Albanese that he is pouring pork into his own barrel? One Nation is chewing through Labor’s outer-suburban and regional vote with alacrity. Voters are counting down to late 2027 with brickbats at the ready. Does the prime minister lie awake fearing a repeat of 2007: not merely losing government, but losing Grayndler the way Howard lost Bennelong? Down in Macquarie Street, NSW Labor’s hideout, **Chris Minns** is running the same playbook at state scale. His $37 million Local Small Commitments Allocation was $400,000 of taxpayer cash for every Labor candidate to wave around before the 2023 election. The parliamentary inquiry called it what it was: “a publicly funded Labor party election slush fund”. The premier’s office unlawfully redirected $6.4 million. A minister misled parliament. Staffers made false statements under oath. Minns’s response was vintage Labor. He shot the messenger. > [NSW Premier Chris Minns](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-13/chris-minns-public-accountability-committee-report/106675206?ref=goodoil.news) has attacked a parliamentary inquiry that branded a Labor grants scheme as anti-democratic and an improper use of taxpayer funds \[…\] > > “Scooby-Doo’s Mystery Incorporated has more credibility than Abigail Boyd’s upper house committee,” Mr Minns said. In other words, he would have got away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids. But Minns is more allergic to accountability than cartoon fans are to Scrappy-Doo. In just the past week alone, he has hand-waved the 2023 Opera House antisemitism as the stumble of a “baby premier”. That must be the longest political infancy in history: he’d already clocked up 20 years in politics and seven months as premier. Like Dictator Dan in Victoria, it’s always someone else’s fault, not the guy whose desk is where the buck stops (conveniently unmarked, unsequential, and in an Aldi shopping bag). Most telling of all: while Labor lectures the rest of us about social media, ‘online harm’ and who may speak, the NSW government was conducting its own business on disappearing apps. > The use of Signal (and other similar apps) can only be seen as hiding information from the public. Even Ros Kelly used a whiteboard. Today’s Labor uses the tools of drug dealers and terrorists – then tells the rest of us to hand over our phones. --- 💡 ****If you enjoyed this article please share it using the share buttons at the top or bottom of the article.**