The Post: Both political camps need to lose their illusions about lobbying

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Lobbying: the word inevitably summons a negative image. It suggests shadowy meetings, back-scratching, decision-makers for hire.

Its latest entry into our lives comes courtesy of the finance minister, Nicola Willis, who on Wednesday floated a supermarket break-up in the face of what she called the “full force” of the grocery sector’s well-resourced lobbyists.

The phrase reverberated because National generally denies there is any problem with big-money lobbying. Willis has lifted the veil on the brute reality of what is supposed to be a contest of ideas, but is too often a contest of cash. When needed change dies stillborn, it is often because moneyed interests have mobilised against it.

But the left isn’t necessarily in a better place. Whenever lobbying regulation hoves into view, our NGOs and trade unions pop up to say that, yes, of course, this sort of activity should be curbed – just not their activity. Lobbying, you see, is done by those nasty people over there, in shady corporate offices; the work of left-wing groups is something different, “advocacy” perhaps, an altogether purer activity.

Both sides are wrong. Lobbying is a basic reality of political life – but, like all things, needs regulation to keep it within proper channels, so that it contributes to, rather than distorts, the public good.

A simple definition is useful here: lobbying is nothing more and nothing less than the actions of individuals and groups contacting policy-makers with a view to influencing their decisions. It is carried out not just by third-party lobbyists – the guns for hire who advocate for their clients – but also by “government relations” employees in big firms, NGO advocacy leaders, and the heads of trade unions.

In this light, there is nothing wrong with lobbying per se. Politicians and public servants should hear from everyone, even well-resourced corporates, if they are to understand the likely impact of their proposed laws.

Where it goes awry is when lobbying is opaque, carried on without any public understanding of who is meeting whom; when politicians-turned-lobbyists sell confidential state information to their newly found private clients; when ministers and agencies become dependent on the analysis of lobbyists with an axe to grind; and, above all, when there is a massive imbalance in the lobbying efforts of the contestants, and ministers hear only from one side of the argument.

The problem, in short, is the lobbying done by vested interests: the groups with the political and economic power to shift decisions in their favour and away from the public good.

Earlier this week, my Victoria University colleague Lisa Marriott and I launched a report, Swimming in a Sea of It, which condensed the lessons of 30-plus interviews with current and former MPs, ministerial staffers and public servants. While some saw nothing wrong with the current situation, others talked about a “tsunami” of lobbying, an “avalanche”, a “pervasive” activity that could badly distort decision-making.

They talked about former ministerial staffers moving so swiftly into lobbying that when they rang up a minister on behalf of their new clients, the latter thought they were still down the hall working for one of his colleagues. They talked about lobbyists doing an “end run” around officials by going straight to prime ministers and getting them to agree to fund initiatives that agencies had rightly rejected as ill-conceived.

They talked about government departments hiring lobbyists to contact the minister supervising them; about agencies becoming so reliant on lobbyists that their advice was just “industry information but on officials’ letterhead”; about lobbyists ensuring that certain solutions were kept off the table before the public was even aware an issue was being considered.

The regulatory response is relatively straightforward, indeed is standard practice in most developed countries: an online register in which the public can see exactly who is meeting whom; an enforceable code of conduct to ensure lobbying is performed ethically; and “cooling off” periods that ensure ministers can’t become lobbyists immediately after leaving politics.

The lack of these regulations makes New Zealand an awful outlier: a recent OECD report ranked us last out of 50 major economies when it comes to the transparency of lobbying.

For any reforms to stick, however, we need unions and NGOs to stop pretending they aren’t lobbyists. Everyone’s activities must be in the register of meetings, so we can weigh the balance of influence. Otherwise the whole thing looks like a left-wing beat-up.

Both Opportunity and the Greens have good policy in this area. But we also need conservatives to acknowledge this as a major issue, one that is impeding good decision-making and hampering the nation’s prosperity.

In opposition, Willis called for all three of the above measures – a register, a code of conduct and a cooling-off period – but has, strangely enough, found them to be less urgent a priority when in power. One can only hope that being on the receiving end of the supermarkets’ lobbying has convinced her otherwise.