A promised widening of the ACT's lobbyist register could triple its size despite the proposal, part of wider changes to improve government integrity in Canberra lagging behind efforts in most other states.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The register was created by former ACT chief minister Katy Gallagher in 2014, and has been active since January last year, serving as a public record of all third-party lobbyists trying to get the ear of ACT public servants and politicians.
While it lists 28 companies or "natural persons" as lobbyists – serving 89 clients – an election promise to widen the register's scope to capture in-house government relations staff, industry associations and "project management" companies will be implemented, courtesy of the Labor-Greens deal to form government struck last weekend.
Australian National University professor John Warhurst said the widening of the scope of the register was a welcome development, but the ACT government was "playing catch-up" with the register and other integrity-in-government proposals, compared to other states.
"I think you've got to see these in the context of other developments around Australia – they don't seem to me to be revolutionary proposals, they've already been taken up in other jurisdictions and it seems the ACT is playing catch-up rather than being out in front on these sorts of issues," he said.
Professor Warhurst said he expected the size of the register to grow markedly with the expansion of who it applies to – comparing it to the federal register, which is understood to only capture a third of the lobbying industry, given a restriction to third-party lobbyists alone.
The planned ACT changes would also see as-yet-undefined "project management" companies and consultants forced to register – a response understood to be related to concerns around close relationships between developers and the government.
Professor Warhurst said that aspect of the changes seemed to be "a new area", but that it could potentially widen the scope of the register "beyond strict lobbying and into what might be considered normal commercial operations, despite the closeness those operations can cause".
While the size of the ACT-level lobbying industry was dwarfed by those in Canberra lobbying the federal government, Professor Warhurst said it was "all about scale".
"I think that given the scale of the ACT government, we should be just as concerned about having transparency around these things as we would federally," he said.
"It's really about the scale and the size of the institution we're talking about – there's a community of lobbyists on the register, and another community surrounding them that aren't, so I think there's good reason to welcome the wider scope of the register."
While the agreement to form government pledges to widen the register's scope, a timeframe on when the changes would be made had not been set.
