Better work from The Guardian today:
Not a single lobbyist has been punished for breaching rules in the past five years – either federally, or in Victoria, Western Australia, Queensland or South Australia.
Experts warn that the lack of enforcement leaves the sector to largely police itself, and that even if authorities took action they have little power to hand out meaningful sanctions.
A Grattan Institute researcher, Danielle Wood, an expert on lobbying, said the lack of deterrence left “very little incentive” for lobbyists to comply with the code.
“Part of the problem is a lack of meaningful penalties to impose,” she said.
“I think we need to take the approach [that] if concerns about lobbying are important enough that governments have developed a code of conduct to deal with them, then the code should be independently administered and enforced.”
An auditor-general’s report earlier this year found the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which oversees lobbying, had not suspended or removed the registration of a single lobbyist since 2013, despite identifying at least 11 possible breaches.
Agencies in Western Australia, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland confirmed to Guardian Australia that they had also taken no enforcement action against lobbyists in the past five years.
The overseeing agencies are often constrained by weak, vague or narrowly focused lobbying laws. Most have next to no power to investigate or punish unethical lobbying.
As said yesterday, we need a two year blackout period for public servants joining private operations that stand to benefit from insider knowledge:
… there has to be some rules around this stuff or the breakdown of the political economy that we are seeing will accelerate. A statute of limitations that disqualifies public servants from working with private corporations that were associated with their former role is needed. A two year lockout period seems reasonable.
There is no downside to this. It will help restore the public’s faith in the integrity of their institutions. It will help prevent regulatory capture. It will prevent public investment in people being treated like a piss-pot resource for corporations. It will help prevent rent-seeking and corruption of policy.
Some may argue that such limitations will prevent good people from joining the public service and perhaps it will. But anyone who doesn’t join the public service owing to a two-year lockout after leaving is obviously in such a hurry to exploit his or her former position that they do not have the kind of public service ethos that good policy demands anyway.
