Heard the one about the ethical lobbyist?
In an ideal world, good, evidence-based public policy proposals would be assessed on their merits by governments, alongside bad proposals with no credibility, in a contest of ideas. Governments would also consult the community, transparently, about proposals, reaching out to affected sectors and seeking their input on the nature of the problem being investigated, the solutions that might address it, and their cost.
OK, stop laughing, no such world exists. Governments do assess proposals on their merits and consult via transparent public processes, but we know there’s little in the way of a contest of ideas. Business interests buy access to policymakers via donations; lobbyists use both their understanding of how governments work and their connections within the public sector and political spheres to elevate proposals; revolving doors between government and the private sector skew the process in favour of big players; well-resourced proponents can hire a consulting firm to “model” a proposal to deliver whatever results they want; threats of hostile PR campaigns can be used to enhance the appeal of ideas.
Lobbying — trying to manipulate the public policy machinery on behalf of a vested interest — is inherently risky ethically. But if we accept a political reality in which people have to engage in such manipulation lest they watch what they believe are good ideas expire for lack of interest from policymakers, how do they avoid the ethical risks?
A case study was presented earlier this year by the Ethics Centre, which, in collaboration with the University of NSW and the University of Sydney, put forward a proposal for a $33 million grant to establish an independent “Ethics Institute” to offer “disinterested, expert advice … coordinate national efforts to strengthen and reinforce the nation’s ethical infrastructure and decision-making”. The proposal was backed via an open letter by some business and union luminaries and crossbenchers in Canberra. As we know from the budget, it was unsuccessful.
The Ethics Centre’s push for an Ethics Institute took a common form in terms of lobbying. It engaged a lobbyist, GRACosway, and accompanied its pitch with an independent report from Deloitte, which claimed to have found that lifting trust levels in Australia would generate economic benefits of $45 billion.
The hiring of GRACosway is potentially at odds with the Ethics Centre’s position on lobbying. In 2019, it made a submission to the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, which stated:
In our view, ‘lobbying’ is best understood as a service — based on certain skills as well as access and influence — sold to third parties as an alternative or complement to their own attempts to engage with public officials. We think that lobbying — as understood in this third sense — gives rise to particular ethical risks.
Those risks relate to the relationship between lobbyist and public official — the capacity of the former “to establish relationships that amplify access and influence beyond the levels available to citizens or the direct representatives of organisations”.
The Ethics Centre isn’t using GRACosway quite in this way. GRACosway is handling the media side of the proposal and, according to the Ethics Centre, has scheduled meetings with MPs. However, it has been the Ethics Centre’s Dr Simon Longstaff, aided occasionally by representatives from UNSW and USyd, who has directly met with policymakers (as Longstaff has pointed out, one of the difficulties the proposal faces is that it’s cross-portfolio with no natural home within government, thus complicating the lobbying task).
This kind of lobbying is not uncommon — some “lobbyists” only ever advise clients on how to get access to policymakers and make their pitch, and never set foot in meetings themselves. Longstaff also told Crikey that GRACosway is working for them pro bono, though you can only find out about its role if you check the federal or state lobbyist registers — the Ethics Centre and the universities didn’t reveal the firm’s role in the material accompanying the proposal, beyond the listing of GRACosway staff as media contacts.
The Ethics Centre’s Deloitte report is also unusual in being not directly linked to the proposal: according to the Ethics Centre, it was commissioned, using donated money and at a discount rate, from Deloitte in 2020. It doesn’t directly relate to the proposal for an Ethics Institute — that was developed in 2023 by Deloitte based on an examination of different models of financial independence (the Grattan Institute model was particularly influential).
But the 2020 report suffers from some of the same flaws as traditional “independent” reports touted by vested interests. It’s based on using the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics (HILDA) survey to connect individual’s expectations of ethical behaviour with their health and employment outcomes, thus deriving a quantifiable economic impact from better ethics. That’s about as reasonable an answer to the question “What is better ethics worth?” as you’re likely to get, but still implausible as a credible basis for concluding a dollar value. We know greater trust and robust public institutions that enforce it reduce economic frictions, but purporting to quantify that looks like drawing a long bow.
That’s not to deny that an independent national body devoted to ethics would be valuable. If anything, it’s the public sector, not the private sector, that is in need of greater ethics — corporations are way ahead of parliaments and political parties in relation to their handling of workplace behaviour, for example, and are much more tightly regulated already on misleading conduct and adherence to contractual obligations.
But clearly it was not an idea that carried weight among policymakers. It may be a case of chickens and eggs: a public sector needs to be more ethical in how it considers policy proposals before it will consider ways to improve ethics.
