Gladys Berejiklian and Daryl Maguire (Images: AAP)

A long-awaited report by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption proposes a radical overhaul of lobbying and transparency regulation in a state well known for persistent corruption and influence-peddling all the way up to the premier’s office.

It also serves to demonstrate just how primitive and corruption-centric Commonwealth requirements around lobbying of decision makers are.

NSW has a legislated framework for lobbying, established by the O’Farrell government after ICAC made a major series of recommendations in 2010 in response to years of corruption under the NSW Labor Party. Barry O’Farrell’s successor, Mike Baird, established a requirement for ministers to publish quarterly meeting diaries online. Both put NSW far ahead of the Commonwealth in relation to transparency and lobbying regulation.

But that NSW framework does not incorporate all ICAC’s 2010 recommendations and, after reviewing both the operation of the Lobbying of Government Officials Act 2011 and recent corruption scandals, ICAC has issued a report that recommends going significantly further in three key areas:

  • A massive expansion of lobbying regulation so that all lobbyists — in-house and third-party — must register and report; that public officials must comply with requirements around communicating with lobbyists; that all lobbyists report all meetings with officials in detail; that local government officials be included in the scheme; that a full-time lobbying commissioner be established to enforce the system, with powers to force officials and ministers to hand over documents
  • Ministerial meeting diaries to be made a legislative requirement, and expanded to include the reason for each meeting, to be made easily searchable online, to be published monthly, and fundraisers involving ministers be included in diaries as meetings regardless of whether lobbying takes place
  • That revolving-door regulation be tightened significantly so that senior officials as well as ministers are subjected to a cooling-off period before working in areas related to their former public role.

The reporting requirements for both lobbyists and ministers proposed by NSW ICAC would be a massive expansion in transparency around who is seeking to influence decision makers in NSW, addressing major gaps in the current framework. Local government officials would be brought into the lobbying framework; all lobbyists, including property developers lobbying for themselves, would be required to register and publish details of every meeting they have with officials and politicians, and ministers would be required to publish greater detail about their meetings and publish details of their increasingly frequent selling of access for donations (though, problematically, oppositions would not be subject to the same requirements).

Voters, oppositions and the media would all have far greater detail about all of those who seek to influence decisions and when and why they are doing it.

The proposals reject the argument put forward by academic and Game of Mates author Cameron Murray that greater transparency around lobbying is either ineffective or might even have a perverse outcome of serving as an advertisement for successful lobbyists and a display of what politicians could expect if they left public life to exploit their connections on the part of the private sector.

Murray instead argues that the only way to properly address corruption is to remove the structural incentives for it by limiting the profits lobbyists can secure from decisions (e.g. the amount developers can make from zoning decisions) and to insert independent external experts into decision-making processes.

Compare and contrast the Commonwealth, which doesn’t even have an ICAC to make such recommendations, years after Scott Morrison promised a federal integrity body, and which has next-to-useless lobbyist register requirements, easily evaded revolving-door rules and no transparency of any kind around meetings between ministers, donors and lobbyists.

Even so, the NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s former partner Daryl Maguire is subject to a continuing ICAC investigation, and her own personal standards around pork-barrelling, document destruction and turning a blind eye to potential corruption all recall earlier eras of NSW politics when corruption was a way of life in Macquarie Street.

A pale shadow of O’Farrell and Baird, Berejiklian may have little interest in exposing to greater scrutiny what goes on inside her office and those of her ministers.