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Lobbyist registers: a perspective from Down Under
This is a blogpost by Jayne Dullard, CEO of Hotwire CPR, Australia, reproduced with her kind permission. The Hotwire blog can be found here
As the CEO of Hotwire’s CPR business in Australia, I thought it would be useful to share a perspective on what we have learnt from the implementation of lobbyist registers in Australia.
The Bell Pottinger story has prompted further calls for regulation of the government relations industry in the UK that will no doubt resonate with voters and particularly with journalists. But do the available tools work?
Lobbyist registers are the obvious salve: free, publicly accessible websites on which agencies, their staff and all their clients are required to be listed by law. They have proliferated in Australia over the last four years, typically in the wake of political crises involving ex-ministers who have moved directly from government into consulting. In this heavily regulated market, we now have registers applying to the Federal Government and to each of the six State governments.
In our experience, the registers have not affected client demand or, looking more broadly, the way the sector operates. They have certainly not reduced the number of lobbyists, which have proliferated. And they fail to capture lobbying work done by the big accountancy firms and other professional services which are not covered by the legislation (or, come to think of it, by journalistic inquiry).
Some Australian State governments have introduced, supplementary to a register, laws that require political staffers to publish details and minutes of scheduled lobbyist meetings online or which prohibit MPs or political staff from lobbying former colleagues within 12 months of leaving government. Those initiatives make it harder to liaise with government via formal channels, which is precisely where you will not find a lobbyist.
But despite the weakness of the model, lobbyist registers are a good thing. More scrutiny and more accountability cannot be bad. And a cleaner, prouder government relations industry would be a good thing too because, believe it or not, we actually do good work: helping healthcare not-for-profits to access funding; helping poorly resourced communities to force governments to deliver infrastructure and services; protecting important industries and institutions from competitors who do not play by the old, trusted rules.
Before we get too carried away by the allure of regulation, however, it is worth noting that none of the ‘revelations’ of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism sting would be captured, revealed or prevented by a lobbyist register or similar policy initiative.
That was just a bunch of guys in suits talking up nothing much in order to make a sale. And that happens, everywhere, every day.
