Michael Pascoe, one of Australia's most authoritative financial journalists and commentators, has lifted the lid on what he says is the rorting within the Federal Government's Community Development Grants program - with the Hunter playing a key role in his case.
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Writing his regular column in the free online publication The New Daily, Mr Pascoe gets straight down to it from the get-go:
"The Community Development Grants program isn't the Coalition's hot $1.126 billion political rort - it's the Coalition's hot $2.5 billion-plus political rort. It's not 11 times bigger than #sportsrorts, it's 25 times bigger and counting.
"The government has a number of corrupt slush funds, but none more blatantly designed to buy votes with taxpayers' money than the CDG scheme purpose built in 2014."
Clearly he's not pulling punches.
And he could find no better electorate than that of Hunter - home of Federal Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon - to highlight the extent of funding bias towards Liberal and National held seats.
"Billions of dollars in corrupt pork barrelling can seem a little abstract, so using Vince O'Grady's spreadsheet analysis, I've chosen an example of a frontline seat and those that adjoin it to demonstrate how much an Australian Electoral Commission boundary costs or benefits communities.
"The Labor-held seat of Hunter abuts three National seats to its west and north.
"It is a particularly rich green line that separates Hunter from the Nationals' Calare, Lyne and New England.
"Since the Coalition invented CDGs in 2014 through to and including the 2019 election year, only $108,000 in CDGs show up on the GrantConnect site for the good folk of Hunter.
"If they just skipped across the electoral boundary to the west into Calare, they would have benefited from a slice of $6.1 million.
"If they moved north-east to Lyne on the coast, they would have picked up $14.9 million.
"But to be really 'lucky', they should have moved north to Barnaby Joyce's seat of New England to be showered with $28.9 million in CDGs."
Mr Pascoe points out that two nearby Labor seats - Macquarie and Dobell - fared much better. Macquarie had received a more than respectable $982,000 and Dobell an astonishing $9.45 million.
But he asked whether it was coincidental that neither seat could be considered 'safe' any more - held last election by wafer thin margins of 1.5 and 0.19 per cent respectively.
Mr Fitzgibbon said he was hardly surprised by the findings.
"The Turnbull and Morrison Governments have been pork barreling gold medallists and the CDG program is just another example," he said.
"It's a slap in the face for people who have the audacity to support the Labor Party and Scott Morrison must put an end to it. Projects should be based on merit, not the voting habits of local residents."
