Parliament House can be a strange place to work.
In one particularly memorable moment of my seven years in the building I found myself passionately singing Love Is in the Air to the Labor powerbroker Stephen Conroy.
The occasion was a recording industry event at parliament’s Queens Terrace cafe on an evening in late March 2018.
John Paul Young was on hand to sing his big hit, which had recaptured some of its anthemic glory from frequent plays at yes rallies in the marriage equality campaign.
Conroy, who resigned from the Senate in September 2016, was no stranger to parliament in the months and years after – one of the orange sponsored pass class who has permanent access to the building.
He and I were evidently both big fans of the song and John Paul Young, because we’d jostled our way to the front of the stage.
Although I was there with friends who worked in parliament, none of them had joined me right at the front, so when the chorus dropped and I couldn’t contain my excitement I turned and sang it to … a similarly enthused Conroy.
I understand this makes me a member of the Canberra bubble – I’ve learned over the years to use that proximity to try to hold power to account.
I remembered this encounter shortly after interviewing the independent MP Monique Ryan about her lobbying (improving government honesty and trust) private member’s bill, which she will introduce on Monday.
Ryan says she is “shocked” by the amount of access lobbyists, who outnumber politicians 15 to one, get in Canberra.
But asked to think of a particular episode or incident, the member for Kooyong says it is more how “pedestrian” it all is, that it is so “entrenched in the culture” that people “don’t think twice” about lobbyists “roaming the halls in Canberra, secretly meeting with ministers”.
Ryan cites Joel Fitzgibbon’s advocacy against banning native forest logging “day in day out”. The former agriculture minister has acted as interim chief executive of the Australian Forest Products Association, and from June 2022 was on the lobbyist register as special counsel for CMAX Advisory.
She also recalls the Pharmacy Guild offering to host a dinner for MPs after their first year in parliament, at the same time she was having some “fairly challenging interactions” with them about Labor’s 60-day medicine dispensing reforms.
But my mind went to Conroy, who went to work for the gambling industry body Responsible Wagering Australia after he left parliament and also appears on the lobbyist register as having worked as an advisory board member for TG Public Affairs.
One of the central elements of Ryan’s bill is to stop the revolving door between politics and lobbying by requiring ministers and senior public servants and staffers to wait three years before they work as a lobbyist in areas they previously had official dealings.
Ryan says this will prevent use of “insider information” and conflicts of interest such as seeking commercial advantage from their previous government roles.
That section wouldn’t apply to Fitzgibbon or Conroy, who both quit parliament several years into Labor’s stint in opposition, after losing power in 2013. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing on their part but it does highlight how “inequitable”, as Ryan puts it, access to power is.
The bill might have captured a case like Bruce Billson, who began drawing a $75,000-a-year salary from the Franchise Council of Australia before he left parliament in 2016.
Billson was cleared of breaching ministerial guidelines but censured by parliament for “failing to declare private sector payments made to him while he was still an MP, paid to him for work he was doing on behalf of a key stakeholder group he had engaged with when he was the minister for small business”.
The main thrust of the bill is about transparency. Ryan wants to improve the lobbyist register by including in-house lobbyists, and to open up ministerial diaries so everyone can see who they are meeting with, and why.
If it was fair enough for Mark Dreyfus when he was pursuing then attorney general George Brandis’ diary through freedom of information laws, it should be easy enough for ministers to publish them as a matter of course.
And, Ryan argues, imagine all the parliamentary time that would have been saved if the transport minister, Catherine King, had just published her diary instead of answering a litany questions about meetings related to the Qatar airways decision.
“It will also change behaviour,” Ryan says. “People will think twice about who they meet with, if they have to answer to their constituents.”
I’m not really sure what Conroy was doing in the building in the week of our karaoke special. The bill would help me and our readers to know.
But the bill is not about banning lobbying. Ryan says it is “absolutely fine” that people and groups, including industry, get their point across.
A quick Google reminded me that John Paul Young had an ulterior motive for serenading me and the former Labor frontbencher.
The event was the Parliamentary Friends of Australian music’s Rock the House, and he was there to make a point about better protecting artists’ copyright.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence policy but when there’s lobbyist love in the air we need to hear about it.
