Pernicious pork-barrelling auction

Your front page story on June 27, "Election promises tabulated", is making a disgraceful practice worse by reducing our national election to a pork-barrelling auction.

This triennial ritual of promising us back our own money for items that have suddenly become of vital importance after languishing unnoticed for three years is a sickening display of contempt for the electorate and of political cynicism.

When the principal election strategy seems to be the lavishing of $20 million of taxpayer's money on every marginal electorate that the government is desperate to hold, regardless of the fact that most of the promised funding doesn't even fall within the ambit of Federal powers, we are getting close to the nadir of political responsibility.

Instead of encouraging this appalling conduct, your paper should be refusing to publish accounts of this pernicious bribery from both parties, or, at least, it would be pertinent at the same time to publish a list of the previous electoral promises and match them against real action, to indicate the degree of confidence that can be placed on these brazen appeals to voter greed.

When a politician can say that any promised funding has been carefully vetted for the past three years and is allocated in the current budget, he will have my vote.

Email, 30 Jun 2016

Bruce Hyland, Woy Woy