Building Better Regions Grants sliced and diced

Some might say I got obsessive – I prefer the word ‘focussed’. Whatever. The fruits of that focus is that there are now multiple gadgets slicing and dicing the Building Better Regions grants from all directions.

The Building Better Regions Grants have been very controversial. The accusation is that they were pork-barrelling. Multiple articles have drawn that conclusion. But in keeping with what Political Gadgets is all about – letting you draw your won conclusions – we’ve pulled the data into one place.

At the heart of things is a database with each grant mapped to the electorate that received it. Thanks to the very bodgy way the data is published in the first place there’s a bit of art in this as well as a lot of science. The database allows you to look at how much money went where.

To cut to the chase – most of the money went to coalition seats – you can draw your own conclusion about whether that was justifiable. And just to be clear we’re talking about over one billion dollars in grants.

So, first there is the database.

Then we’ve got three maps:

• Heat map of the grant amounts by electorate.
• Map of the individual grants sortable by party.
• Map of the individual grants sortable by grant round.

If anyone has a different angle on this I’m happy to take a look – just get in touch. Now that the data has been wrangled into submission , creating alternate views is not such an issue.