Te Rā Whakamana: Policy Advisory Systems and Beyond The Lobbying Debate

05/08/2025

I pull the first six posts into one argument: Aotearoa is having the wrong fight about lobbying, and the real question is how we orchestrate a plural advisory ecosystem so that delivery knowledge is at the table.

Te Rā Whakamana examines what happens after policy is announced, tracing how delivery holds or fractures and where legitimacy is built or lost. This week I pull the threads of six posts into one argument: that Aotearoa’s current lobbying debate is the wrong fight. While attention is fixed on moral panic and corporate capture, the more important issue, which is how our policy advisory ecosystems work and why delivery keeps failing when advice is trapped inside outdated mental models, is being ignored.

Over the past six weeks I have been laying the groundwork for a single, cumulative argument. I began with Paul Cairney’s work to establish a founding hypothesis, that fragmentation is a structural feature of the modern state rather than an accident, and that this renders most promises of integration and an outcomes focus hollow.*

From there I used Brian Head’s research to show that policy expertise is no longer contained within state-run policy shops. It is distributed, contested, and contextual, and it flows from communities, Iwi, Hapū, whānui, industry representatives, sector interests, and academics, as well as from contractors, consultants, and think tanks.

The argument rests on evidence as well as theory. Drawing on Elizabeth Eppel’s work, I pointed to the Māori Communities COVID-19 Fund as an example of implementation that succeeded as adaptive, real-time, relational policy inquiry, as opposed to a technical exercise in mechanical execution. A Dutch shelter managed by its homeless residents then showed that, when policy authority is devolved, marginalised groups can run complex services with some success.

The hypothesis I am sharpening is that the mental models of public policymaking many people hold are outdated, for reasons I will not speculate on, and that those same people seem unwilling or unable to handle the pluralism revealed in these cases, let alone the demands of citizens.

The leaky homes crisis, which I examined through Derek Gill’s 2016 work, brought that mistake into sharp relief. Aotearoa did well at policy coherence on paper and failed catastrophically because delivery was treated as secondary. The lesson I draw is that the design of a policy matters no more than who it affects, how they respond, and who bears the consequences when the rules fail.

Taken together, these cases, from adaptive COVID-19 responses to catastrophic housing failures, show a consistent pattern. Policy outcomes depend on whether advisory processes acknowledge and take in the plural realities of implementation, as well as on design decisions, and mental models that treat policy advice as a sterile, contained process tend to produce elegant failures when they meet the messy and contested terrain of delivery.

This brings me to a debate currently consuming considerable partisan energy in Aotearoa, one that shows these outdated assumptions in action. The lobbying debate is framed as a debate about democratic integrity and corporate influence, and it is where we can watch, in real time, fantasy colliding with operational reality.

To be free and frank, I think Aotearoa is having the wrong argument about lobbying. The discourse is dominated by a self-appointed few who feed on moral panic over corporate capture and the supposed corruption of a pure democratic process, and their narrative misses the point because its conceptual premise is a fantasy.

Policy advisory systems are plural. Some rely on outdated mental models, certain policy tools have long passed their use-by date, and not everyone is at the table, but the notion of a sterile, isolated bureaucracy is a convenient fiction. Iwi, Hapū, and Māori have been making this argument since 1852, and since the reforms of the 1980s it has become an undeniable operational reality of our state.

Ministers and their agencies do not design policy in a vacuum. They sit within messy, conflict-ridden, and complex webs of influence that include political staff, consultants, contractors, local government, industry advocates, te ao Māori institutions, think tanks, universities, NGOs, and indeed lobbyists, and those webs are the system itself rather than a bug in it (Cross, 2007; Dobuzinskis et al., 2007; Fleischer, 2009; Howlett, 2019; Maley, 2000; Plowden, 1987; Stone et al., 1998).

Wishing away reality is a poor basis for public debate. The question before us is how we orchestrate this messy reality to serve delivery better, since plurality already exists and will continue to. Frankly, targeting Federated Farmers is the same tactic that was used to target Iwi and Hapū during the Three Waters reforms; it does not take us forward, it is short-term, and it conveniently ignores all the revolving doors.**

Orchestrating these advisory ecosystems well requires us to move past moral panic and engage seriously with what the scholarship tells us about how policy systems function and change, and to answer that we need to appreciate the intellectual journey of scholarship on policy systems.

Early work mapped power and gave portraits of influence (Barker & Peters, 1993; Goldhamer, 1978; Plowden, 1987). John Halligan (1995) advanced this by thinking in terms of systems, although the early models were still too simple and assumed a neat transfer of evidence to power, an assumption that rarely survives first contact with the ground.

The thinking sharpened when Halligan acknowledged the role of political alignment and, in doing so, restored democracy to the bureaucracy. Prasser (2006) captured the cultural shift from “speaking truth to power” to a more collaborative “sharing truth,” and Prince (2007) introduced the dimension of timing, distinguishing between “hot” crisis advice and “cold” anticipatory thinking.

Later work named the phenomena that have been changing governments everywhere, the relentless externalisation and politicisation of advice (Craft & Howlett, 2013; Eichbaum & Shaw, 2007, 2008, 2010).+ The result has been more voices, more outside expertise, and more partisanship, and also, critically, more fragmented pathways to implementation.

The most recent scholarship treats these arrangements as ecosystems (Craft & Wilder, 2017). The most important contribution of this approach is its recognition of delivery knowledge as a core advisory input rather than a downstream clean-up job. When frontline capability and local conditions are treated as core evidence, advice tends to improve; when they are ignored, the result is elegant policy that shatters on impact.

For Aotearoa, this means the current lobbying debate is a distraction. Our policy advisory ecosystem is already diverse, and the challenge is to govern it well and keep it learning and adapting, with those who hold the knowledge that enables delivery at the table. Externalisation without shared rules and delivery knowledge is noise, and politicisation without institutional stewardship and transparency erodes trust.

Our shared task is to include the right voices deliberately and at the right time, in particular those who hold the knowledge that implementation demands, as opposed to excluding voices (Craft & Howlett, 2013; Halligan, 1995). Programmes fail time and again because the advisory conversations that shaped them privileged certain voices and forms of knowledge and dismissed those essential for delivery, much more often than for lack of good intentions.

If you change the conversation (who gets to speak, whose knowledge counts, and when), you change what can be delivered. None of this is about banning lobbyists, or anyone else for that matter.

What we need is the discipline of orchestrating an advisory ecosystem that works for delivery as well as design, and certainly for more than performative politics.

That means treating advice and implementation as what they have always been, two halves of the same whole (Howlett, 2019), and it means putting aside the fantasy of the purchaser–provider split and reassembling the policy and delivery systems.

Next week I will introduce the Land and Water Forum, which I suggest comes closest to the kind of ecosystem I am describing, and use the peer-reviewed literature to ask why it failed or, more precisely, who was responsible for its failure. The week after, we will look closely at Craft and Halligan’s (2020) work on policy advisory systems in Australia, Britain, Canada, and Aotearoa, a richly researched book with a wealth of information about our own system.

*The exceptions are integration programmes such as Provider Development, Whānau Ora, and a limited number of commissioning projects in the social services sector.

**I have written before about revolving doors. Kua whakamātau au ki te toro atu ki te hunga e ārahi ana i te kōrero whakahe i te lōpi, kia whakaarohia tētahi anō āhua. Kāore he paku ngākau hiahia i puta mai.

+I cannot recommend Chris and Richard’s work enough. They join a long and distinguished line of local academics skilled in examining the conflict and tension between democracy and bureaucracy: Hood, Mulgan, Matheson, and others.

References

Barker, A., & Peters, B. G. (1993). The politics of expert advice: Creating, using and manipulating scientific knowledge for public policy. University of Pittsburgh Press.

Craft, J., & Halligan, J. (2020). Advising governments in the Westminster tradition: Policy advisory systems in Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. Cambridge University Press.

Craft, J., & Howlett, M. (2013). The dual dynamics of policy advisory systems: The impact of externalization and politicization on policy advice. Policy and Society, 32(3), 187–197.

Craft, J., & Wilder, M. (2017). Catching a second wave: Context and compatibility in advisory system dynamics. Policy Studies Journal, 45(1), 215–239.

Cross, W. (2007). Policy study and development in Canada’s political parties. In L. Dobuzinskis, M. Howlett, & D. Laycock (Eds.), Policy analysis in Canada: The state of the art (pp. 233–242). University of Toronto Press.

Dobuzinskis, L., Howlett, M., & Laycock, D. (Eds.). (2007). Policy analysis in Canada: The state of the art. University of Toronto Press.

Eichbaum, C., & Shaw, R. (2007). Ministerial advisers and the politics of policy-making: Bureaucratic permanence and popular control. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 66(4), 453–467.

Eichbaum, C., & Shaw, R. (2008). Revisiting politicization: Political advisers and public servants in Westminster systems. Governance, 21(3), 337–363.

Eichbaum, C., & Shaw, R. (Eds.). (2010). Partisan appointees and public servants: An international analysis of the role of the political adviser. Edward Elgar.

Fleischer, J. (2009). Power resources of parliamentary executives: Policy advice in the UK and Germany. West European Politics, 32(1), 196–214.

Goldhamer, H. (1978). The adviser. Elsevier.

Halligan, J. (1995). Policy advice and the public sector. In B. G. Peters & D. J. Savoie (Eds.), Governance in a changing environment (pp. 138–172). McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Howlett, M. (2019). Comparing policy advisory systems beyond the OECD: Models, dynamics and the second-generation research agenda. Policy Studies, 40(3–4), 241–259.

Maley, M. (2000). Conceptualising advisers’ policy work: The distinctive policy roles of ministerial advisers in the Keating government, 1991–96. Australian Journal of Political Science, 35(3), 449–470.

Plowden, W. (Ed.). (1987). Advising the rulers. Basil Blackwell.

Prasser, S. (2006). Royal commissions and public inquiries in Australia. LexisNexis.

Prince, M. J. (2007). Soft craft, hard choices, altered context: Reflections on 25 years of policy advice in Canada. In L. Dobuzinskis, M. Howlett, & D. Laycock (Eds.), Policy analysis in Canada: The state of the art (pp. 95–106). University of Toronto Press.

Stone, D., Denham, A., & Garnett, M. (Eds.). (1998). Think tanks across nations: A comparative approach. Manchester University Press.