Sometimes I suspect many business people regard it as quite ethical to lie and mislead the public, provided they're lying in the shareholders' interests. And when you're laying it on thick to pressure some government into giving you a special deal or an exemption from some measure, you're always doing it for the shareholders. What's in the nation's interests - and whether your special deal would damage the nation's interests - is not your concern.

Often, any special concession you screw out of the pollies will come at the expense of those businesses and industries that don't get a similar concession, but there seems to be an honour among thieves that requires those who'd lose from the success of another industry's lobbying to keep their traps shut.

For a rival industry to point out how exaggerated or self-serving the lobbying industry's claims are is just not done. Governments - and the citizens, taxpayers and consumers whose interests they represent - are regarded as fair game. If the totality of business's success in ducking its responsibilities leads to the country being badly governed, that's just bad luck for the country.

Businesses on the make invariably seek to pressure governments by putting the frighteners on the public. And this means they often claim the government measure they're objecting to would lead to huge job losses. This has the additional advantage of frightening their own employees, and so getting the union to join them in the fight.

In the old days, businesses would pluck some big-sounding figure out of the air, but these days the fashion is to pay one of Canberra's many firms of economists-for-hire to do some ''independent'' modelling.