Brisbane.
The final speaker at ANZCA 2009 today is Ian Ward, whose focus is on political lobbying - for which new regulations have been introduced by the Rudd government recently. Lobbying is integral to Australian politics, but remains understudied; it is an increasingly professionalised area of politics in Australia. And interestingly, on the new register of lobbyists in Australia, there is also a substantial number of public relations firms - lobbying is no longer driven by old boys' networks, but by professional communicators.
Traditionally, lobbying via the media has been seen as a risky and ineffective form of political influence (as message control is difficult here), but the presence of so many public relations firms on the list suggests that the traditional view of going to the media as a last resort may need to be rethought. There is now a strategy of supplementing direct lobbying with politicians by public, tactical media campaigns - suggesting that even established political insiders are increasingly also drawing on the strategy of traditional outsiders and activists.
Why is this so? One explanation is that policy communities are increasingly crowded: societies have grown more economically and technologically complex, governments have been driven to widen their regulatory reach, and more and more lobby groups have formed as a result; new social movements have led to a proliferation of interest groups, and these now fill the space between major parties and the community; this increase in both the number of groups and the complexity of policy issues in combination have encouraged a new process of governing where some of the policy formulation process has been outsourced to self-organising, interorganisational networks. Such networks are more fluid and unpredictable then previously thought; interest groups beget interest groups, and the policy space is becoming more and more crowded, populated by a messy change of actors who do not know one another well. Shifting the debate to another, mediated arena can be a way to cut through this Gordian knot.
Another explanation may be that issues which dominate public discourse have profound implications for further decision-making - the media are no longer peripheral to policy development, but are one of the venues where policy is decided, by providing a forum for elite exchange and debate. Interest groups also go public where they believe that they can generate enough public debate to gain the attention (or force the hand) of political decision-makers. Indeed, there may now be the tools and technologies for creating publics around specific issues through strategic communication.
