While it’s Stuart Robert currently in the firing line over smoothing the path to access for corporate mates and large firms — via Nick McKenzie’s exposé of emails between Robert and lobbying firm Synergy 360 and its clients — there might be a few other backbenchers on the Coalition side sweating about what might emerge regarding their own efforts to connect big firms, often run by mates, with decision-makers.
Robert’s activities occurred when he wasn’t bound by the ministerial code of conduct, prompting suggestions there should be a backbench code of conduct, but the issues run a little deeper than that.
What McKenzie reveals is a smaller version of a large problem: the processes that go beyond simple lobbying to full-blown “state capture”, by which individuals and organisations are integrally connected with a political party, work in its interests, and offer a direct connection to decision-makers for corporate clients and donors.
The classic model is CIT Group, which is central to the political campaigns of the Liberals in Australia and the Tories in the UK, and often provides political staffers to Liberal and Tory governments while also leveraging its total access to those governments for clients. It’s a whole evolutionary stage beyond lobbying, and CIT Group has brilliantly turned it into a successful model of state capture.
Trade union links with Labor are a more formalised version of the integration between politics and lobbying. In Robert’s case, a smaller version of this is at work: Synergy 360, the firm Robert was happy to assist, is partly owned by John Margerison, a close friend and business partner of Robert’s who is a key fundraiser for him. Political campaigning and lobbying integrated into a seamless vehicle for access to decision-makers — but on the level of an individual politician.
But if it’s micro in scale compared to others, Robert has an advantage: he’s in Parliament himself. That he is a close friend of Scott Morrison, and at that stage was a former minister himself, made his status as an MP even more valuable because he knew how the system worked and knew key ministers well. But simply as an MP, he is afforded access few lobbyists can ever hope to obtain.
A government backbencher — even the lowliest, least connected one — sits in the partyroom, sits on parliamentary committees, deals directly with ministers and sees legislation before anyone else. Plus, ministers will pay far more attention to them than any member of the public or well-connected lobbying firm.
There’s nothing illegal about any of this. In the case of trade union links to Labor, it’s actually celebrated — the ALP is historically the parliamentary wing of the labour movement.
But it all illustrates Australia’s two-speed democracy. One democracy for big corporations, powerful trade unions, successful lobbying firms and the integrated campaigner-lobbyists, and one for the rest of us. One group can meet ministers, have their calls returned, even have ministers come to them, and help dictate policy.
The other group can email politicians, go to protests and rant on social media. One group can get meetings with ministers to obtain billion-dollar contracts; the rest of us struggle to get a phone call about a $668.40 dole payment.
There are no solutions — except disrupting politics via minority governments that have to deal with independents. But greater transparency helps. Ministerial meeting diaries would have told us about every meeting Robert and Synergy 360 helped organise with ministers like Peter Dutton. They would tell us who is trying to influence Labor ministers right now. Backbenchers might work to enable contacts between powerful interests and ministers, but we’d know about those meetings.
NSW and Queensland have ministerial meeting diary requirements. They work well and give us an insight into the soft corruption of pay-for-play political access and influence-peddling. They don’t stop it, but we have better visibility of it.
What’s needed isn’t an inquiry into Stuart Robert. He’s just one example. What’s needed is much greater transparency.
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