Two legal scholars of repute brought some heft to the debate. AJ Brown described the current level of pork-barrelling as at “industrial scale”.

While Prof Anne Twomey, one of the nation’s foremost constitutional experts, was reported as follows: “It was appalling on two levels. One, it was an indictment in the integrity of governmental behaviour, but secondly – I say this as a former public servant – it was appalling, just in terms of terrible public administration,” she told the hearing.

MOOD

Let us hope that Twomey is correct about the mood of voters.

While there is no actual evidence of which I am aware that voters vote according to the level of goodies offered by each side, it is at least plausible that they might support those who will deliver them the bigger stash of goodies.

This is traditionally the way that national election campaigns are run. Each side seeks to outbid its opponent in promising the world.

Again, there is no firm evidence that this actually works. One way of testing this would be to undertake the sort of reforms that Twomey and others would support, to shift the needle a little towards less pork-barrelling and towards greater system integrity.

The Commonwealth’s own “adventures of Bridget McKenzie” demonstrate that the problem of questionable government spending – in her case on favoured gun clubs and the rest – is not confined to one State or one level of government.

Nor is it confined to one side of politics, though the Nationals are clearly “best in show”.

“Like many people I have been infuriated by ministers at both the State and the federal level, asserting that they have an unfettered ministerial power, and that there’s nothing illegal or corrupt about pork-barrelling. In my view both propositions are wrong.”

Twomey went on to criticise the current NSW ministerial code of conduct, which she described as “frankly useless”.

“They are deliberately written to allow as much misbehaviour as you can possibly get away with,” she said.

Twomey said, in some circumstances, pork-barrelling could already be considered corruption or even criminal corruption and would fall within the ICAC’s purview.

“Most voters, I think, are fed up with election bribes and the whiff of low-level corruption that they exude, which corrodes public trust in the system of government.”

CORRUPTION

I spent around thirty years working in regional economic development, and regional development is one of the best gateways to corruption going round.

One of my erstwhile descriptions of the then Carr Labor government’s regional policy was “a country marginal seats strategy”, for that is what it was.

You always started with the press release and worked backwards to the policy. Spending drove policy, not the other way around. That is system corruption.

The whole point of the Nationals (and the old Country Party, created a century ago in the 1920s) was a giant pork-barrelling exercise on behalf of non-metropolitan Australia.

And the Nationals have been part of every Coalition government we have had.

If this historically embedded corruption of public policy wasn’t enough, it was turbo-charged when two disgruntled country independents, suddenly, in 2010, found themselves in a position to exercise hard power in the Australian Parliament. And that power was used vigorously and, alas, without shame.

As a result, Tamworth got a new hospital and Port Macquarie a dual carriageway entrance into town.

They might well also have subscribed to the appallingly cynical proposition put forward by an old Nat member of the NSW Parliament, one Peter Cochrane, who wanted to turn every electorate in the State into a marginal seat, so that every government would have to give them “more attention”. In other words, more goodies.

Mercifully, “independents” of this kind only rarely are in a position of holding the balance of power.

PRIVATISE

The government of Mike Baird decided to privatise the so-called “poles and wires” some years back and during the NSW Coalition’s current term of government.

The sole purpose of this move – and sadly, not its only outcome, as the State’s energy supply goes down the drain – was to create a regional development fund of several billion dollars which would be controlled by ministers.

This has seen the biggest destruction of good governance in living memory, and makes Gladys’s little community grants schemes – yes, they were worth over $200m – seem like chicken feed.