Thomas Coughlan: Lobbying reforms substance or just ‘something’?

Lobbyists are being given the red light. Photo / Mark Mitchell

OPINION

The Government’s belated crackdown on lobbying is straight from the playbook of Yes, Minister, The Thick of It, or Australia’s Utopia.

The happenstance of Guyon Espiner of RNZ’s investigation into lobbying being released at the same time that one of the Government’s own ministers leaked confidential Cabinet information to donors created an inescapable momentum around the issue.

Something had to be done - and the Government’s four-pronged reforms are, by definition, something.

Lobbyists will lose swipe card access to Parliament - as Prime Minister Chris Hipkins acknowledged on Monday, this access is really more symbolic than anything else.

It allows lobbyists to skip security and head to public parts of Parliament like Copperfield’s cafe, Bellamy’s Restaurant and the 3.2 (Pickwicks) bar - a watering hole so beloved of the industry that one lobbyist even named their firm after it.

Bellamy’s and 3.2 are open to the public now anyway. There’s nothing to stop a lobbyist from walking into Parliament, stationing themselves at the bar and having a few rounds of drinks and 3.2′s famous chips with MPs and ministers.

But 3.2 isn’t what it once was. Shortages in food-grade CO2, thanks to the shuttering of the Marsden Point refinery, have led to beer taps running dry - wouldn’t have happened in Muldoon’s day I tell you, but there’s probably something in it for a lobbyist who can get the beer flowing again.

The swipe cards don’t get lobbyists anywhere interesting like ministers’ offices. Lobbyists must be invited to these.

The real work of lobbying happens over the phone, at dinner, and in meetings with ministers - or in the dully transparent grunt work of preparing complicated select committee submissions.

For better or worse, if the Speaker agrees to Hipkins’ recommendation to cut up lobbyists’ cards, none of this will change - it will be a symbolic victory, but nothing else.

All that will change is that lobbyists will spend more time in the parliamentary security line - very useful perhaps, if you bill by the hour.

The jury is out on whether the second prong of Hipkins’ reforms - a voluntary code of conduct for third-party lobbyists - will be any more effectual.

If the lobbying industry is scary and influential enough to warrant additional regulation, it probably isn’t appropriate to ask them how they want to be regulated.

This could have some effect at the margin by encouraging the top firms to make a virtue out of the way they conduct their affairs, but it could equally encourage more scurrilous and mercenary firms to make a virtue out of not being governed by the code.

There are businesses, after all, that are so results-focused they are somewhat agnostic about how those results are achieved. These are probably the kinds of firms from whom we most need protection through a code of conduct.

The fact that lobbying firms will be given free government support for their code of conduct is laughable.

If scarce public resources are to be expended on creating the code, it should be mandatory - if firms have no obligation to sign up to this code of conduct, then why should the public be on the hook for resourcing it?

The third proposal is to have new rules in the rewritten Cabinet Manual, to be published later this month. The Cabinet Manual is regularly updated and any changes around lobbying should be judged on their merits - but the problem with the Cabinet Manual is usually not that the rules themselves are weak, but that they are unevenly enforced.

It’s up to the Prime Minister to enforce the rules and therefore the enforcement will always depend on the political environment a Government finds itself in. Politically important minor coalition partners will get off lightly, for example.

Changing this is impossible. There’s no appetite for any kind of non-political, external judicial enforcement of the Cabinet Manual - moving to that kind of system would be a constitutional decision of an altogether different magnitude to what is now on the table.

Lobbyists Mark Unsworth (left) and Barrie Saunders.

The final proposal is the most substantial - and goes some way to clearing the Government of any embarrassment from its voluntary “code of conduct”.

This is a work programme headed by the Ministry of Justice for policy options to regulate lobbying with options due in 2024.

With no detail on what this might look like, it’s impossible to make a fair assessment of whether it’s worthwhile or not.

New Zealand is one of the least-regulated countries in the world when it comes to lobbying. It’s possible this review could pluck off the shelf the regulatory regimes of other countries: A proper register would be a good place to start.

Lobbyist Mark Unsworth of Saunders Unsworth told the Herald that the difficulty in the reforms would be trying to come up with regulations for the industry in defining who was a lobbyist, as it was in 2012, when Parliament last looked at lobbying regulation.

Hipkins said the 2012 effort had failed because it was too wide-ranging, but Unsworth said it “has to be wide”.

“You can’t just say environmental lobbyists aren’t real lobbyists, or trade unions, or doctors or lawyers or whatever, but big, nasty businesses are lobbyists. They’re all doing lobbying.”

He said if lobbying was someone’s principal job - no matter what field it was in - they should be on the list.

But Unsworth also questioned whether it was needed. “I won’t lose sleep about it, whatever is proposed. But we are not America, we are not Australia, we are not England.”

He said lobbying was done differently in those places and was much more involved in party politics.

“We don’t get involved in the same things. In many ways, it’s a solution for a problem which doesn’t really exist. To say we need it because other countries need it is not necessarily right. We might need it at times but we’ve got a pretty open, honest system.”