Pork-barrelling isn’t new money, it’s political theatre and Kiama deserves more than staged announcements.
Major projects like schools, hospitals, transport, and sporting facilities are not launched randomly. They are pre-planned and locked into the NSW State Budget, which operates on a four-year cycle. Each year, an Appropriation Bill is passed in Parliament to authorise spending for the upcoming financial year, while forward estimates forecast funding for the next three years.
This means even if a party wins a by-election, they cannot rewrite those allocations mid-cycle, because budgets are legally set and must follow the budget process, except in urgent, unforeseen scenarios.
What changes is the timing of announcements, not the funding itself. Politicians often delay revealing already-budgeted projects until campaign season, especially in marginal seats. That creates the illusion of surprise investment when, in reality, it is not new money, just political theatre.
That is why this by-election needs more than Band-Aids. We cannot keep mistaking staged announcements for new investment, or allowing political theatre to distract from the deeper, structural issues that remain unaddressed.
#KiamaByElection2025 #KiamaVotes #BeyondPorkBarrelling #PoliticalTheatre #PolicyNotPromises #BigPictureThinking #CommunityFirst #NSWPolitics
