Sport and community fund overwhelmingly favoured Labor while 45 seats missed outExclusive by senior political correspondent Jake Evans
Posted Tue 8 Sep 2026 at 4:52amTue 8 Sep 2026 at 4:52amTue 8 Sep 2026 at 4:52am
An “invite-only” 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.
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.
“Prima facie, it looks like the misuse of public money or serious pork-barrelling, as it’s sometimes called,” Mr Whealy told 7.30.
“I think there’s a heavy onus on the government now to justify the process it has used. If they cannot justify that process, then I think the public in Australia would be driven to the conclusion that this is the misuse of public money at a serious level.”
An examination of the more than 220 programs invited to apply found 73 per cent of funds went to seats notionally held by Labor, compared to 23 per cent to Coalition-held seats, and 4 per cent to all others.
“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.
When broken down by how safe or marginal a seat was $493 million of the $560 million fund went to safe, fairly safe or competitive seats for Labor — while just $66 million went to seats where Labor was not competitive.
Dr Williams said if money had been distributed proportionally, marginal seats where Labor was competitive should have received $66 million less in total than they did, while non-Labor seats should have received approximately $116 million more.
The Centre for Public Integrity also examined whether the discrepancy could be explained by the relative wealthiness of seats using household income data, and found no link.
In fact, the poorest seats in the country received a below-average amount of grant funding.
The centre also found no link between “community connectedness”, a measure of infrastructure need, and where grants were allocated.
To date the federal government has not explained what process it used to identify projects for an invitation, or why it chose to use a closed, non-competitive process.
In a statement Ms King said the MLCI program was in line with longstanding practice and with the updated rules and principles for grants.
Ms King noted ministers do not make decisions on applications in their own electorate, with those decided by another cabinet minister.
The government says the MLCI program’s guidelines make clear only those who are invited can apply for funding, and the assessment criteria they must meet to receive funding, with all funding that is awarded published on AusTender.
Applicants are required to demonstrate the social and economic benefits of the project, its viability and the organisation’s capacity to carry it out.
Separately, it argues $1.7 billion in competitive and open grants was made available through the Growing Regions and Thriving Suburbs fund.
Marrickville Golf Club versus all others
Independent MP Helen Haines’ seat of Indi, in north-east Victoria, was one of the 45 electorates where no projects were invited to the scheme.
Ms Haines has been pursuing details of the scheme in parliament, but she says what the Centre for Public Integrity found surprised her.
“I was shocked by the scale of this, by the depth of this,” Ms Haines told 7.30.
“I feel very, very angry actually, and deeply disappointed, that we have a government who are using a grants program such as this for what they call election commitments … but what in plain language we know is pork-barrelling.”
Ms Haines said the scheme had come to her attention after a local golf club had contacted her to ask how it could be given an invitation to the MLCI program.
Rutherglen Golf Club is nearly 100 years old, and in need of a refresh.
Its walls are lined with asbestos, the wood is being eaten away by white-ants, and the floor is sloping and needs restumping.
But Ms Haines had to tell the club, which she had worked with in the past to try to help secure a grant, that there was no way to be considered this time.
Only one golf club was invited to the MLCI program: The Marrickville Golf Club in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Sydney seat of Grayndler.
The club received a $6 million grant for refurbishments of its clubhouse, including for an accessibility ramp and fixes to the septic system.
Ms Haines questioned what assessment determined an invitation for Marrickville Golf Club, with which Mr Albanese has a decades-long association, and not for the Rutherglen Golf Club or many others.
“There are golf clubs, football clubs, all sorts of sporting organisations in need of infrastructure support and funding, so why the golf club in the electorate of Grayndler was any different to those is a question that really needs to be asked of the prime minister I would say,” Ms Haines said.
Rutherglen Golf Club member Ian Grimes said it was frustrating that there was no opportunity for the club to make its case.
“It just feels unfair and frustrating, we’re not asking for special treatment,”
Mr Grimes said.
“We understand not everybody can get a grant, all we want to do is be able to put our case in front of people.”
7.30 put questions to the Prime Minister’s Office about the process used to identify Marrickville Golf Club for a grant, and if Mr Albanese or his department had any role in the decision to award it funding.
The Prime Minister’s Office directed 7.30 to a media release given when the funding was announced, which noted the grant would be delivered in line with the Commonwealth grant rules and guidelines.
Ms Haines has previously introduced a bill to end pork-barrelling, which would require clear and public selection criteria for grants, tougher rules for reporting decisions and a parliamentary oversight committee to scrutinise grant programs — but it has not been supported by the major parties.
She says as long as the current rules continue, it will corrode trust in Australia’s democratic institutions.
McKenzie takes aim at PM
In 2020 the Morrison government came under fire for its administration of a $100 million sports grants program, which Labor attacked as a pork-barrelling scheme, and later dubbed ‘sports rorts’.
A national audit office found the minister had bypassed Sport Australia’s advice in some cases on which projects to fund, and there was evidence of “distribution bias” in how grants were awarded.
Then-sports minister Bridget McKenzie, was ultimately forced to resign after she failed to declare an honorary membership to a gun club that had received a $36,000 grant under the program.
Senator McKenzie told 7.30 she chose to resign because she believed she had breached ministerial standards when it came to a perceived conflict of interest.
Now the Shadow Infrastructure Minister, she maintains that she had run an open, competitive program where she had clear responsibility for the grants awarded — whereas it was very unclear how MLCI projects had been chosen, or who chose them.
“The difference is you have got a half-a-billion-dollar program where it’s very, very opaque as to how and where the decisions were made,”
Senator McKenzie said.
“Delivering on election promises is an important part of trust in a democracy, however I think it is concerning that this is a closed program where there were no other invitees other than those who were selected by it seems the Labor Party.
“We learned only last Senate Estimates that Catherine King’s department didn’t have the list of projects that were requiring funding, they had to go to Prime Minister and Cabinet to get that list. That is a very unusual state of affairs.”
Senator McKenzie said it was also unclear what conflict of management processes were in place with the MLCI.
“There are, I would suggest, over 1,600 clubs that would have liked the opportunity to have applied for this grant program, and that opportunity was denied by the Labor Party,” Senator McKenzie said.
“It’s really up for the prime minister to answer what steps he took in assuring there was no conflict of interest with the awarding of a $6 million grant to a golf club in his own electorate, given his department was the one that provided the project list to minister King’s department for sign off.”
Ms King said the MLCI program followed grant guidelines, including value-for-money principles, and the delivery of the program was in line with the Albanese government’s commitment to transparency.
After invitation to the program, the Infrastructure Department is required to assess whether projects represent “value with relevant money”, and whether it meets the objective of improving community amenity, accessibility and liveability, and drives economic growth.
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