What is an example of political lobbying?

We see their spokespeople quoted in the papers and their ads on TV, but beyond that we know very little about how Australia’s lobby groups get what they want. This is the first article in our series on the strategies, political alignment and policy platforms of eight lobby groups that can influence this election.

Over the past 20 years, lobbying activities in Australia have expanded dramatically. Following the United States’ lead, where a radical shift in ideology in the 1970s led to a re-evaluation of the way corporations view their role in society, the notion of corporate “civic duty” has been replaced by a belief that governments and the public are fair game for special interests.

Now, lobbying in Australia is a multi-billion dollar industry which employs a sophisticated strategy to win public opinion and political favours for its clients or members.

Lobbying and the ‘revolving door’

Who is able to lobby, and the methods they can employ in doing so, is determined by a patchwork of laws designed to add some transparency to an otherwise murky process. There are, therefore, “official lobbyists” – individuals and firms for whom the frequency and import of their work requires them to register themselves.

Any interested party can engage the services of these professionals for a fee, but if a board member, union official, or other “concerned citizen” wants to meet with a political decision-maker, and perhaps even discuss a policy or infrastructure proposal over lunch, there’s little – other than a vigilant press, perhaps – to effectively prevent them from doing so.

So, political lobbying is not limited to those officially sanctioned as “registered lobbyists”. Its scope includes anyone who wants something and is willing to twist a government official’s arm to get it.

Lobbying consists of a range of strategies designed to co-opt or realign policy. Broadly, these strategies attempt to influence one of two key targets: government (including regulators) and the public.

In order to lobby politicians and regulators, lobbyists use campaign donations, letter writing campaigns, and try to build personal relationships. Lobbyists can also rely on morally dubious quid-pro-quo arrangements, such as jobs for friendly politicians at retirement.

This can lead to potential conflicts of interest. In the US, around 50% of ex-legislators become lobbyists. Although not to the same extent, this also occurs in Australia.

Alternatively, lobbying the public relies on advertisements, op-ed pieces, commissioned research, protests, and press releases to try and shift public opinion on a given issue.

Whether politicians or the public are targeted depends on their amenability. When dealing with Labor, for example, the Australian Council of Trade Unions will focus its efforts on meeting privately with Labor, and attacking the Liberal Party publicly. Demonstrations and ad campaigns are used to try and influence public opinion to that end, and played a key role in the 2007 election in attacking WorkChoices.

Similarly, business – which is more likely to have a combative relationship with Labor – will engage with the Liberal and (to a lesser extent) Nationals parties more positively, and engage in “public information” campaigns to exert political pressure on Labor, such as the mining tax campaign in 2010.

But these relationships make it harder for Labor to create policy at odds with union interests; and it’s similarly difficult for the Liberal Party to put “big business” off-side. Doing so for either party alienates key allies, and the question of whether a policy is actually “good” for the country can become a secondary consideration.

The many faces of lobbying

While lobbying in Australia represents a wide range of interest groups, it has a high cost associated. This can mean that, to the extent that lobbying is effective, it disproportionately benefits big businesses and a wealthy elite who can afford to “pay the piper”.

And if an issue isn’t adopted by unions – many important debates aren’t – then the associated public debate can be one-sided.

Businesses are generally well represented. Peak bodies, such as the Business Council of Australia and the Property Council, ensure that even small and mid-sized businesses have a say. Further, the largest think-tanks, such as the Institute of Public Affairs, ensure that the ideology of business – low taxes and few regulations – is well reflected in public discourse.

By stark contrast, “grassroots” organisations such as GetUp! or the Australian Conservation Foundation, even when broadly representative of the views of a large proportion of the population, tend to have far fewer resources at their disposal for public relations or campaign financing. To that end, their ability to effectively lobby is severely undermined.

The problem is one of diffusion. Compare, for example, a lobby group that represents very few very-high-income members (be they individuals or businesses) with one that represents many of average or low incomes. If a lobby group thinks a policy might threaten its members’ livelihood, it is far easier to draw large sums of money from wealthy few because, proportionately, the risk-reward ratio is much more in their favour.

When a policy is at odds with well-resourced interests, chipping in a few million towards a campaign is far easier to do, as many mining magnates did in 2010.

During that same time, despite claiming a million members, GetUp! was relatively under-resourced financially, and dramatically outspent by organisations such as the Minerals Council. As such, organisations like GetUp! are often forced to resort to social media, and hope that, predicated on humour, outrage or luck, their videos will go “viral”.

Election 2016

Elections unfailingly draw the attention and best efforts of lobby groups, which have a lot to gain or lose depending on which party takes power.

Labor has the unions on-side, which have been strangely quiet in the wake of the royal commission. But big business is disproportionately in the Coalition’s camp.

The Property Council, along with the state and federal Real Estate Institutes, clearly view the mooted changes to negative gearing laws as a threat. To that end, they’re pushing the message that removing negative gearing will devastate housing, one of Australia’s biggest industries.

(The imagery of this ad is a strange choice – is this an admission that Australia’s property market is indeed a house of cards?)

But the dark horse in this race is the banking industry. When Opposition Leader Bill Shorten signalled a royal commission into banks, the immediate response by the industry was to threaten a “mining tax-style campaign”.

Labor is still licking its wounds from the 2010 mining industry assault and is keen to avoid a repeat from a similarly well-resourced foe. But it knows the banking industry would be risking a lot in the battle for public sentiment, should it decide to wage a public relations war on Labor.

The proper role of lobbyists

Lobbying plays a critical role in Australia’s representative democracy. The sheer plurality of voices in a country of 23 million ensures that Australia needs a system to filter and convey the views of the many to the few who represent them. To that end, the role of the lobbyist is critical.

However, the dangers of lobbying are great. The potential for regulatory and government capture by special interests, as well as the ability of powerful concentrated interests to drown out other voices in public debate, presents significant challenges for Australian democracy.

Consequentially, Australia would benefit from changing to disclosure rules on campaign financing. We should also re-evaluate the permissibility of the “revolving door” of politicians and the lobbying industry. More pressingly, in the wake of recent scandals around political donations, Australia may need a national corruption watchdog along the lines of NSW’s Independent Commission Against Corruption.

Not all of these challenges can or should be tackled legislatively, but the potential of lobbying to undermine democratic ideals means reform is needed. The sooner the better.

Stay tuned for the rest of The Conversation’s Australian lobby groups series, which will profile individual interest groups.

What does a tax-avoiding, polluting, privatising corporation have to do to get its way with the British government? "We all know how it works," said David Cameron of lobbying. But do we? Lobbyists are the paid persuaders whose job it is to influence the decisions of government. Typically, they operate behind closed doors, through quiet negotiation with politicians. And the influence they enjoy is constructed very consciously, using a whole array of tactics.

Lobbyists operate in the shadows – deliberately. As one lobbyist notes: "The influence of lobbyists increases when it goes largely unnoticed by the public." But if the reasons why companies lobby are often obscured, it is always a tactical investment. Whether facing down a threat to profits from a corporate tax hike, or pushing for market opportunities – such as government privatisations – lobbying has become another way of making money.

Here are the 10 key steps that lobbying businesses will follow to bend government to their will.

Lobbyists succeed by owning the terms of debate, steering conversations away from those they can't win and on to those they can. If a public discussion on a company's environmental impact is unwelcome, lobbyists will push instead to have a debate with politicians and the media on the hypothetical economic benefits of their ambitions. Once this narrowly framed conversation becomes dominant, dissenting voices will appear marginal and irrelevant.

Everybody's doing it, including lobbyists for fracking and nuclear power, public sector reform and bank regulation. It doesn't matter if the new frame relies on fabrication. The referendum on an alternative voting system was not, as anticipated, so much a conversation about the merits of first past the post. No2AV was "very quick off the mark" to make it about cost to the public purse, explains Dylan Sharpe, of the No camp's TaxPayers' Alliance. They led with the claim that switching to AV would deny troops badly needed equipment and sick babies incubators. The Yes camp lost the vote two to one.

The trick is in knowing when to use the press and when to avoid it. The more noise there is, the less control lobbyists have. As a way of talking to government, though, the media is crucial. Messages are carefully crafted. Even if the corporate goal is pure, self-interested profit-making, it will be dressed up to appear synonymous with the wider, national interest. At the moment, that means economic growth and jobs.

Get the messaging wrong and you get fiascos such as High Speed 2 (HS2). In early 2011, lobbyist James Bethell of Westbourne Communications was parachuted in to rescue the £43bn project, which had initially been sold by ministers on the marginal benefits to a few commuters. Westbourne reframed the debate to make it about jobs and economic growth. The new messaging focused on a narrative that pitted wealthy people in the Chilterns worried about their hunting rights against the economic benefits to the north. The strategy was "posh people standing in the way of working-class people getting jobs," said Bethell. "Their lawns or our jobs," shouted the ad campaign.

Private healthcare also regrouped after the wrong messages went public. As Andrew Lansley embarked on his radical reforms of the NHS, private hospitals and outsourcing firms were talking to investors about the "clear opportunities" to profit from the changes. After comments by Mark Britnell, the head of health at accountancy giants KPMG giants and a former adviser of David Cameron, hit the headlines in May 2011 – Britnell told an investors' conference that "the NHS will be shown no mercy and the best time to take advantage of this will be in the next couple of years" – the industry got a grip. Lobby group The NHS Partners Network moved quickly to get everyone back on-message and singing from "common hymn sheets", as its chief lobbyist David Worskett explained. The reforms were about the survival of the NHS in straitened times. Just nobody mention the bumper profits.

It doesn't help if a corporation is the only one making the case to government. That looks like special pleading. What is needed is a critical mass of voices singing to its tune. This can be engineered.

The forte of lobbying firm Westbourne is in mobilising voices behind its clients. Thirty economists, for example, signed a letter to the FT in 2011 in support of HS2; 100 businesses endorsed another published in the Daily Telegraph.

Westbourne was also hired in 2011 to lobby against the top rate of tax, although who was behind its "50p tax campaign" remains a mystery. Ahead of the chancellor's annual Budget announcement in early 2012, letters appeared in the press demanding he scrap it. The FT's was signed by 20 economists. The Telegraph's by the bosses of 573 SMEs, described as the "bedrock" of British industry. A quick glance, though, revealed it included five managers from the Switzerland-based banking giant Credit Suisse. The paper's commentary noted the alarm this new call from "ordinary British business" would cause inside government.

Corporations are one of the least credible sources of information for the public. What they need, therefore, are authentic, seemingly independent people to carry their message for them.

One nuclear lobbyist admitted it spread messages "via third-party opinion because the public would be suspicious if we started ramming pro-nuclear messages down their throats". That's it in a nutshell.

The tobacco companies are pioneers of this technique. Their recent campaign against plain packaging has seen them fund newsagents to push the economic case against the policy and encourage trading standards officers to lobby their MPs. British American Tobacco also currently funds the Common Sense Alliance, which is fronted by two ex-policemen and campaigns against "irrational" regulation. Philip Morris is similarly paying an ex-Met police officer, Will O'Reilly, to front a media campaign linking plain packaging to tobacco smuggling. It is worth noting that a decade ago the tobacco giant coughed up $1.25bn to the European Commission to settle a long-running dispute over its own complicity in the illicit trade.

"The thinktank route is a very good one," said ex-minister Patricia Hewitt to undercover reporters seeking lobbying advice. Some thinktanks will provide companies with a lobbying package: a media-friendly report, a Westminster event, ear-time with politicians. "The exact same services that a lobbying agency would provide," says one lobbyist. "They're just more expensive."

In the mid-noughties, a lobbyist for Standard Life Healthcare, now part of PruHealth, worried about how they could get more people to buy private cover without being seen to undermine the NHS. The solution: "Get some of the thinktanks to say it, so it's not just us calling for reform, it's outside commentators ... it does need others to help us take the debate forward." The insurers did turn to thinktanks, including free-market advocates Reform. This has lobbied for more "insurance-based private funding" in the health service. Prudential, the insurance giant behind PruHealth, was Reform's most generous sponsor in 2012, investing £67,500 in the thinktank.

The BBC has also come under repeated recent criticism for inviting commentators from the leading neo-liberal thinktank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), to talk about its opposition to the plain packaging of cigarettes, without disclosing the Institute's tobacco funding. Although the IEA does not disclose who funds it, BAT concedes it has recently paid the IEA £30,000, with more to come this year. Leaked documents from Philip Morris also reveal the thinktank is one of its "media messengers" in its anti- plain-packaging campaign.

Companies faced with a development that has drawn the ire of a local community will often engage lobbyists to run a public consultation exercise. Again, not as benign as it sounds. "Businesses have to be able to predict risk and gain intelligence on potential problems," says ex-Tesco lobbyist Bernard Hughes. "The army used to call it reconnaissance; we call it consultation."

For some in the business, community consultation – anything from running focus groups, exhibitions, planning exercises and public meetings – is a means of flushing out opposition and providing a managed channel through which would-be opponents can voice concerns. Opportunities to influence the outcome, whether it is preventing an out-of-town supermarket or protecting local health services, are almost always nil.

Residents in Barne Barton in Plymouth were asked in 2011 what they thought about a 95-metre, PFI-financed incinerator being sited in their neighbourhood, just 62 metres from the nearest house. Although more than 5,000 people objected, the waste company's planning application was waved through. That's community consultation.

Lobbyists see their battles with opposition activists as "guerilla warfare". They want government to listen to their message, but ignore counter arguments coming from campaigners, such as environmentalists, who have long been the bane of commercial lobbyists. So, they need to deal with the "antis".

Lobbyists have developed a sliding scale of tactics to neutralise such a threat. Monitoring of opposition groups is common: one lobbyist from agency Edelman talks of the need for "360-degree monitoring" of the internet, complete with online "listening posts ... so they can pick up the first warning signals" of activist activity. "The person making a lot of noise is probably not the influential one, you've got to find the influential one," he says. Rebuttal campaigns are frequently employed: "exhausting, but crucial," says Westbourne.

Lobbyists have also long employed divide-and-rule tactics. One Shell strategy proposed to "differentiate interest groups into friends and foes", building relationships with the former, while making it "more difficult for hardcore campaigners to sustain their campaigns". Philip Morris's covert 10-year strategy, codenamed Project Sunrise, intended to "drive a wedge between various anti groups" and "position antis as extremists".

Then there are the more serious activities used primarily when big-money commercial interests are threatened, such as the infiltration of opposition groups, otherwise known as spying. Household names such as Shell, BAE Systems and Nestlé have all been exposed for spying on their critics. Wikileaks' Global Intelligence Files revealed that groups such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International and animal rights organisation Peta were all monitored by global intelligence company Stratfor, once described as a "shadow CIA".

Today's world is a digital democracy, say lobbyists. Gone are the old certainties of how decisions were made "by having lunch with an MP, or taking a journalist out," laments one. It presents a challenge, but not an insurmountable one.

One key way to control information online is to flood the web with positive information, which is not as benign as it sounds. Lobbying agencies create phoney blogs for clients and press releases that no journalist will read – all positive content that fools search engines into pushing the dummy content above the negative, driving the output of critics down Google rankings. Relying on the fact that few of us regularly click beyond the first page of search results, lobbyists make negative content "disappear".

Another means of restricting access to information is the doctoring of Wikipedia, "a ridiculous organisation," in veteran lobbyist Tim Bell's words. Accounts associated with his firm, Bell Pottinger, have been caught scrubbing Wikipedia profiles of arms manufacturers, financial firms, a Russian oligarch and the founder of libel specialists Carter-Ruck. "It's important for Wikipedia to recognise we are a valuable source for accurate information," says Bell, a master at killing stories. Other edits by lobbyists range from a computer in the offices of payday lender Wonga deleting references to "usury" from its entry, to a computer registered to the American multinational Dow Chemical repeatedly attempting to remove a large section from the company's profile detailing "controversies".

Without doubt, lobbyists need access to politicians. This doesn't always equate to influence, but deals can only be cooked up once in the kitchen. And access to politicians can be bought. It is not a cash deal, rather an investment is made in the relationship. Lobbyists build trust, offer help and accept favour.

The best way to shortcut the process of relationship-building is to hire politicians' friends, in the form of ex-employees or colleagues. Bill Morgan is a good example. In recent years, he's been backwards and forwards twice between Andrew Lansley's office and health-lobbying specialists MHP. Its clients had "obviously benefited" from Morgan's inside knowledge of Conservative health policy, MHP wrote. They could "look forward to continuing to be at the heart of the major policy debates".

Lobbyists are Westminster and Whitehall insiders, among them many former ministers. "You may remember me from my time as Minister of State for Transport," wrote Stephen Ladyman as he lobbied a potential government client in his new role as a paid adviser to a transport company. "I do indeed and am delighted to hear from you," replied the official. "We would be interested to hear your proposals."He had just opened the door.

There is the perception, at least, that decisions taken in government could be influenced by the reward of future employment. It's a concern that has been expressed for the best part of a century. Today, however, the number of people moving through the revolving door is off the scale.

The top rung of the Department of Health has in recent years experienced huge traffic towards the private sector. The department that sees more movement than any other, though, is still the Ministry of Defence. Since 1996, officials and military officers have taken up more than 3,500 jobs in arms and defence related companies. Two hundred and thirty-one jobs were secured in 2011/12 alone.

Government is the arms industry's biggest customer and the MoD's closeness to its suppliers is widely known. It is also gaining a reputation for its disastrously expensive contracts that deliver poor value for taxpayers and often poor performance for the military. More than one commentator has asked whether the two are connected.

A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain by Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell is published by The Bodley Head at £18.99.