Integrity Briefing: The Silent Death of Lobbying Reform in NZ

The Government has quietly frozen the development of policy work promised to fix New Zealand’s wild west lobbying sector. The policy research was previously carried out by a team of analysts at the Ministry of Justice. But Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith has put that work on indefinite hold, stymying those wanting to clean up the political process so that corporate lobbyists don’t run rampant.

Whether that lobbying reform work ends up being restarted will depend on public pressure and whether the Government feels vulnerable to concerns that it is too close to corporate and lobbying influences. The Integrity Institute will now campaign vigorously on this, including launching an “Unauthorised New Zealand Lobbying Register” soon.

What happened to the Government lobbying reform programme

In the dying days of the last government, government officials were tasked with researching how best to regulate lobbying in New Zealand. This came after several lobbying scandals negatively impacted the Labour Government. The “Political Lobbying Project” was launched at the Ministry of Justice and could have delivered some vital work. However, after the change of government, the research and consultation came to a halt.

However, the first piece of work was delivered – a voluntary code of conduct for lobbyists, which was established last year. This was always going to be the weakest part of the Political Lobbying Project because it was an attempt to get the lobbyists themselves to draw up a self-regulating mechanism. The result was farcical, with the lobbyists creating something less than useless. The code of conduct became a window-dressing exercise, or perhaps even “integrity washing”. There has not been any apparent monitoring of whether lobbyists use or abide by what they agreed to.

The next piece of lobbying reform work was an “Issues paper” for the Minister of Justice, Paul Goldsmith. This paper was supposed to be a comprehensive outline of all the reform options for regulating lobbying in New Zealand, including the introduction of a mandatory lobbying register and stand-down periods for politicians and public servants before they could shift from the Beehive to lobbying firms (to fix the “revolving door” problem).

The deadline for this was 28 February 2024, but one year later, there’s no sign of its existence. Instead, on the Ministry of Justice website, the officials stated they would “help determine next steps” for the Justice Minister in progressing change. Those next steps never occurred. In fact, on 31 August last year, the Ministry closed off the public's ability to register to receive further updates or be involved in consultation about the reforms.

Lobbying reforms frozen

The Ministry of Justice has previously been putting out frequent updates on its lobbying work programme. It’s been sending these out as emails to the 200+ individuals and entities that had registered for consultation. It also published updates and documents on a dedicated Ministry of Justice web page. All this appears to have stopped in June last year, suggesting the reform had run out of steam.

Fortunately, Newsroom journalist Sam Sachdeva has looked into this, reporting today that a recent Cabinet Paper on Foreign Interference Laws provides a clue as to what’s happened – see his article: Govt criticised for go-slow on lobbying reform (paywalled)

Sachdeva writes: “Goldsmith said lobbying regulation was not a priority for 2024”, and he quotes the Minister’s report in which Goldsmith says he intends to “consider the status and timing of this work later in the parliamentary term, relative to my other justice policy priorities”. The Minister also responded to questions from the journalist with the brief statement that he was “actively considering the best way forward on lobbying”.

That makes it clear that the government has frozen the work, yet isn’t prepared to kill off the promised programme definitively. Sachdeva interviewed me for his article and quotes my response: “It seems like a way of killing off a reform workstream without actually getting the bad publicity for having done so – just by kind of freezing it and going to ground and ghosting everyone on it.”

Lobbyist Holly Bennett of firm Awhi is also quoted saying: “if they no longer intend to advocate for improved transparency in the lobbying sector, the Justice Minister should say so.”

Have lobbyists lobbied the Government to stop lobbying reform?

Why has the National-led Government dropped the ball on lobbying reform? Previously, National and its spokesperson on these issues, Nicola Willis, had been entirely on board with the need to fix the problems. Willis promised her government “would impose a 12-month stand down period for former ministers and introduce a compulsory register of lobbyists, rather than a voluntary code of conduct.” She even committed to introducing “a transparent, publicly accountable register of who’s doing the lobbying and who they’re lobbying for”.

The coalition has shifted quite dramatically on lobbying issues since coming to power. First, Speaker Gerry Brownlee reversed the swipe cards for lobbyists and associated regular visitors to Parliament. Instead of automatically removing the access cards from the lobbyists, Brownlee decided to make the list of lobbyists with access to Parliament private.

Since then, many decisions have been made in the mining, fisheries, oil exploration, alcohol, and tobacco sectors, suggesting that lobbyists are incredibly influential on current cabinet ministers. Therefore, it’s not implausible that those lobbyists close to the Beehive have simply lobbied to freeze the reform programme. After all, one of the revealing parts of the Ministry of Justice's consultation with lobbyists last year was the severity of their opposition to regulation of their own sector.

Paul Goldsmith also explained last year that the lobbying research had to be evaluated against other Ministry of Justice work, stating that it was “one of many priorities the Government must consider, and specifically in the Justice portfolio where it has a heavy work programme”. And we now know that Goldsmith has directed the Ministry of Justice officials – and presumably the same Democracy and Electoral unit of the Ministry – to progress work on extending the parliamentary term to four-years.

Therefore, instead of lobbying reforms, New Zealand gets the option of fewer elections. This seems similar to what happened under the last Labour Government, which promised to reform and improve the Official Information Act, but ended up putting Ministry of Justice resources into the ill-fated hate speech law reform agenda instead.

Regardless, the end result of the Government abandoning the promised lobbying reform agenda will be that there will be yet more public discontent about politics and democracy – which increasingly looks like it’s been captured by elites and vested interests. Ironically, the Ministry of Justice has previously said that such a lack of lobbying regulation “can erode trust in the democratic process and could ultimately affect social cohesion”.

Urgent need for a Lobbying Register

The Integrity Institute is making lobbying reform one of its central goals. We will push hard for this. We have established a work programme that will heavily scrutinise lobbyists in New Zealand while also advocating the implementation of the proper regulations. In lieu of the Ministry of Justice playing its role, we hope to lead a debate on some of the best reforms to implement.

We believe that the most critical lobbying reform is the establishment of a mandatory register for lobbying activities. This is commonplace in other OECD countries – New Zealand is an outlier for having nothing in this regard. Last year, the OECD ranked New Zealand as the fourth-worst country among its 38 members when regulating vested interests that try to influence policymaking. They warned that the absence of mechanisms like a lobbying register threatens to produce an “unlevel playing field” in which big businesses can dominate and monopolise New Zealand industries, reducing productivity.

Such a lobbying register seems unlikely to be brought in by any New Zealand government soon. Even if there is a change of government in 2026, it’s far from certain that a Labour-led Government would implement one, especially given they are also very closely connected to many in the lobbying industry – including former Labour ministers, staff, and activists.

We could be waiting a long time for this to eventuate. Therefore, The Integrity Institute is committed to producing our own “Unauthorised New Zealand Lobbying Register”, which we will publish soon and will continue to update. This register contains details of all the firms and individuals involved in lobbying in this country. It will be user-friendly and accessible.

We are currently doing the research to find out as much as we can on who is doing the lobbying, who they are lobbying for, and what decision-makers they are lobbying. The end result will include many important details that will open up the murky world of New Zealand lobbyists.

But we need your help. Putting together the “Unauthorised New Zealand Lobbying Register” requires a lot of investigation on our part. We have built up stores of information and databases about lobbying activity. But lobbying is intrinsically secretive. So, we also need more inside information. We are hoping that we can crowdsource some of the hidden details. This might occur in terms of traditional lobbying firms like Capital Government Relations or Saunders Unsworth, but it might also be in terms of the big law firms, industry bodies, or interest groups.

Therefore, if you know details of lobbying that has occurred in the past or present, please get in touch so that we can start shining some bright light on what’s going on behind the tightly closed door of lobbying.

Dr Bryce Edwards

Director of The Integrity Institute