@Dave When I worked as a press secretary in Parliament many years ago, I had an unofficial policy of not supporting lobbyist meeting requests. I would defer to the groups they were representing. For a hypothetical example, when I worked for the Minister of Agriculture (John Falloon - yes, a National MP - don’t hate me), and the e.g. Vegetable Growers Federation wanted to have some influence on new regulations, if we got a request from some PR firm to meet with the Minister, I would tell them to send representatives of the group along instead. They could attend as advisors, but the minister would want to hear from real people in the industry about their experiences and reasons for the position. That’s much more useful to a minister who doesn’t want information filtered through a third party.
From my observations, there is a difference between smaller industries and trade groups that want help with a significant and specific issue and big industries hoping to influence major policies. For example, petrol companies want to influence climate change policies, which will impact much larger parts of society.
Groups confident in their positions and what they want should be bold enough to front up to ministers to state their case. Ministers respect that as long as the groups clearly articulate their wants. They don’t need someone else clipping the ticket along the way, although the PR firms and lobbyists can help develop clear messaging. It becomes tricky when they want to hide behind someone else and don’t want their influence to be exposed. It seems this is the type of potential corruption this report is pointing out.
@Dave John Gerritson’s discussion on Morning Report this morning was pretty good. This looks like the outcome will be the worst of all possibilities. Not enough children get fed to make a difference in anything, cost cutting means the lunches that are available aren’t good quality, and the whole thing is a failure. Sadly, that would provide the ‘evidence’ the government needs to cut the programme entirely.