NEWCASTLE academic Kypros Kypri – whose research helped convince the NSW government to retain the “Newcastle solution” for late-night licensed venue trading – says government registers of industry lobbyists are not serving the purposes they were designed for.
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Professor Kypri, from the University of Newcastle’s School of Medicine and Public Health, is a keynote speaker at an international alcohol policy conference in Melbourne from Wednesday to Friday.
Organisers of this year’s Global Alcohol Policy Conference cite World Health Organisation estimates that alcohol consumption caused 3.3 million deaths in 2012, or nearly six percent of all deaths worldwide.
“With a multitude of short-term and long-term health risks associated with alcohol consumption (including alcohol poisoning, increased cancer risk, motor vehicle crashes, alcohol dependence and alcoholism, homicides, suicides, stillbirths, heart disease and stroke), communities are often desperate for effective measures to stem the tide,” conference organisers say.
Professor Kypri says lobbying of politicians is one way that the alcohol, tobacco and gambling industries influence policy behind the scenes.
“Corporations seek to influence government policy to maximise profit with no more regard for public health than regulators require of them,” Professor Kypri said.
In a recent paper published in the academic journal Drug and Alcohol Review, Professor Kypri – together with academics from Deakin and Curtin universities – wrote of ”widespread concern about the nature, extent and impacts of lobbying by industries selling unhealthy commodities”.
They said all Australian governments with the exception of the Northern Territory had set up registers of lobbyists, supposedly to allow the public to see which individuals and organisations were gaining the ear of those in power.
After examining each of the public registers, and seeking information from the relevant state and federal registrars, the authors found they “do not contain timely, up-to-date and complete information concerning interactions between lobbyists and politicians, political staffers and senior bureaucrats”.
“None provides sufficient information on their websites to allow investigation of historical lobbying activity, and few were responsive to requests for such information,” they wrote.
“Accordingly, we conclude that Australia’s lobbyist registers fall well short of meeting their stated objectives.”
The authors said their findings were consistent with those of the Queensland Integrity Commissioner, who described existing registers as “too narrowly focused on relatively few lobbyists” while ignoring “the lobbying of non-government legislators”, with “no real mechanism for supervision or policing”.
The authors argue that Australia has a much less transparent system than comparable countries, especially the United States and Canada.
“Canada imposes a 5-year (i.e. one year longer than a cycle of government) disqualification on lobbying by people who have held public office,” the authors said.
They note that Australia restricts some parliamentary staffers from serving as lobbyists for 12 months after leaving government employment, but that this restriction “does not apply to the bulk of senators and non-cabinet members of parliament”.
The authors made seven recommendations, including a four-year cooling-off period before former public officials (including politicians and political advisers) can seek employment as lobbyists or in commercial positions involving engagement with government”.
In a related development, a Senate select committee was established in August to inquire into the political influence of donations.
The deadline for public submissions is Monday, October 9. The committee is due to report on Sunday, December 17.
