The stack, the rort and the backhander: the self-serving plays corrupting government

Now that Porter-gate has reached the cover-up of the inquiry stage of proceedings, even the mainstream media seems to have gotten bored. Guess sooner or later that gaslighting “nothing to see here” coupled with the danger of defamation gets you down.

Problem is, both the government and too much of the media dismiss as mere process what’s at stake in those peculiarly Australian practices of the rort, the backhander, and the stack: are they interesting? Sure. Titillating? Maybe. Newsworthy? Sometimes.

They’re more than one-off self-serving plays or stumbles by this minister or that: taken together, they’re corrupting how government works by taking the ideological conflict out of politics, replacing it with debates about process and administration.

At the centre is the substitute of the grant — the privatisation of public services — for governmental action. The “rort” has come along with it, to describe the use of grant funding for electoral gain with a gun club here and a commuter car park there. (The United States, an early innovator in leveraging public funds for electoral benefit, call it “pork-barrelling” or, in infrastructure spending, the more neutral “earmarks”.)

What a wonderfully blunt Australian word “rort” is – the Rs and the O roll around the mouth, ending with the plosive T. Probably derived from a phonetic mis-spelling of “wrought” the old Middle English past participle for “work” — it’s about working the system to gain an advantage.

Why grants? For the same reason that robbers hit banks: it’s where the money is, particularly under Morrison. As the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) reported this week, in the three years since 2018, the federal government has handed out about 100,000 individual grants costing about $54 billion.

They’re the conservatives’ policy tool of choice, melding ideology — the belief that the non-government sector is both better and cheaper — with denial of responsibility for implementation. Best of all, they’re easy to (totally legally) adapt for political benefit. For example, why fund your own public broadcaster to cover women’s sport when you can pay Foxtel to do it for you, no questions asked?

All it needs is the magical incantation “ministerial discretion” to legitimise the rort, as Morrison said in dismissing concerns about carparks: “Ministers make the decisions as they should. That’s the proper authorisation of the process.”

Poor administration might get you rapped on the knuckles by the ANAO or a challenge in the Senate’s Expenditure Review Committee. Shrug. Then what? Real accountability requires what the law calls “improper purpose” — perhaps, say, using a grant to do a favour for a boyfriend?

Rorts can come with a “backhander” — not, in Australia, a slap, but a cash gift, perhaps concealed in metaphor: under the table, brown paper bag, blind trust. Take your pick. They can be paid to the personal benefit of the politician or, more usually, paid for campaign financing.

It’s a remarkable generosity of Australia’s laws that provided the gift (or campaign donation) is publicly declared, the law reckons: no harm, no foul. Taking gifts from billionaire mining titans while opposing action on climate change? Cop to it. It’s perfectly acceptable.

Of course, to get the backhander, you need to win preselection. With the hollowing out of Australia’s political parties, that calls for “the stack”, adding in a few extra party members to tilt the internal balance.

Flooding members into a party is not new. At it’s best, it’s activist democracy — community mobilising — in action. But, as party membership has collapsed, chicanery has come in to replace ideology as a driver of recruitment.

As the counsel assisting Victoria’s current Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission inquiry, Chris Carr, reckons, it’s fakery that turns community organising into stacking: “Branch stacking may be described as organising people to join a political party which they have little genuine interest in joining … So an integral aspect of branch stacking is the payment of membership fees by politicians, aspiring politicians, their associates or those seeking to obtain influence.”

It might not be a crime, but there are real victims of the fakery in the stack: the community activists, the true believers, who still form the core of each party’s membership.

Then, of course, there’s “the intervention” when questions over blossoming party membership encourage the central party to intervene and impose a safely acceptably candidate. Why, hello Scott Morrison.