The review of public sector accountability in Queensland by veteran public sector expert Peter Coaldrake — forced on the Palaszczuk government by a string of integrity scandals — reveals a poor system of accountability and transparency around lobbying in that state, and recommends some important reforms.
Problem is, the Queensland system is far more transparent than that of other states — and light years ahead of the rotten system of accountability federally.
Coaldrake’s commentary on lobbying in Queensland deserves extended quotation, because he sums up an Australia-wide problem.
In recent times, Queensland has seen the rise of lobbyists unquestionably attached politically to the governing side of politics with understanding of the system. That has helped secure outcomes that might not otherwise have been possible. The growth of lobbying activity reveals what this Review believes is a market failure: the failure of government itself to be able to deal with business and community interests without the involvement of a paid intermediary. The growth of lobbying is entwined with the complexity of issues facing government, the increased hollowing- out of public sector capacity by use of external consultants and the sophistication of lobbyists themselves.
Coaldrake’s recommendations are intended to improve and tighten Queensland’s system of transparency around lobbying. He wants politically engaged lobbyists — like ALP campaign managers who also run lobbying firms — banned outright. He wants lobbyists in legal and accounting firms brought into the lobbyist register. He wants more detail to be provided by lobbyists in identifying their contacts with ministerial offices. And he wants all contact with ministerial offices, including with staffers, identified in Queensland’s existing system of ministerial meeting diaries.
The great majority of lobbying, he explains, doesn’t happen directly with ministers but with their staff.
All of these are good recommendations — although Coaldrake shies from requiring internal lobbyists to register, saying they would be caught by proper meeting diaries, and agrees with lobbying firms that the practice of lobbyists donating to political parties outright is relatively rare.
And Coaldrake doesn’t properly grapple with perhaps the most important point he raises: the toxic link between lobbying and influence peddling and the hollowing out (and politicisation, although he never uses that term) of the public service.
To put Coaldrake’s report in a broader framework — even if it’s not one he’d necessarily agree with or recognise — he’s detailing mechanisms of state capture. And the task of state capture is made significantly easier if independent sources of policy advice are neutered, removed from the policy process or politicised. That creates a space for those seeking influence — usually large corporations — to drive policymaking instead, using their access, achieved through political donations, the employment of politically connected figures such as former MPs and staffers, and through lobbyists. Hollowing-out the public service is a key element of state capture.
The issue of “lobbyists unquestionably attached politically to the governing side of politics” is crucial. The capacity of Labor-linked Queensland lobbyists Evan Moorhead and Cameron Milner to both work on Labor’s reelection campaign and then lobby for their clients afterwards — one of the scandals that prompted the review — takes lobbying to a new level. Indeed it is something quite different from traditional lobbying.
In buying access to those who help run the election campaign of the governing party, you are buying access not just to those with the ear of the most powerful government figures; you are buying into shaping democratic outcomes by partisan operators. Moorhead, Milner and others like them, instead of operating from outside the governmental system like lobbyists are normally seen to do, are part of the governmental system (and their influence hardly begins and ends when an election campaign is called and the return of writs).
This is a new kind of business model for state capture, in which the lobbyist is replaced with a seamless transmission point between the desires of the corporate client and the operation of the government.
Remember, this is in a jurisdiction where there are already high standards of transparency compared with elsewhere. There are near real-time donation reporting obligations and ministerial meeting diaries already in Queensland, and they simply don’t exist at the Commonwealth level. We have no idea who ministers (or opposition spokespeople, or swing vote senators) are meeting. Coaldrake’s proposed reforms would significantly improve an already best practice (by Australia’s low standards) system.
But he’s only playing catch-up to the techniques of state capture. Until the problem is seen in the whole, as about the mechanisms by which powerful interests influence policymaking, we’re trying to regulate yesterday’s problem. It’s no longer about lobbying — it’s about something much bigger and darker than that.
