This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The revolving door between Australian government and the gambling, alcohol and food industries is threatening public health and undermining evidence-based policy, a new report has warned.

A study published on Wednesday analysed the backgrounds of 560 lobbyists listed on the federal lobbyist register, including 197 who declared they had previously worked within government.

Researchers were able to identify the background of 122 former government representatives, finding 18% were previously MPs or senators, and 47% were senior advisors or chiefs of staff. Almost 20% were previously media or communications advisers.

About 45% had spent more than a decade in government.

More than half of lobbyists have worked within Australian government, study finds Read more

The study, published in Public Health and Research Practice, used a series of 15 interviews to further examine the movement between government and lobbying for the gambling, alcohol and food industries. It considered examples of NSW politicians moving to the Australian Hotels Association and federal politicians going on to work for Crown.

It found revolving door appointments had “the potential to influence political decisions” and create an imbalance in the policy influence between industry and public health advocates. That imbalance posed “a substantial risk to the development of effective public health policies”, the study found.

The various interviewees – largely politicians, staffers and lobbyists – said the revolving door phenomenon created “industry-friendly networks” which could warp access to politicians.

“So someone retires from politics and then they have a ready-made set of relationships, nurtured over many years of being colleagues with other members of parliament, that they can then go and leverage on behalf of a commercial partner,” one politician told researchers.

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In most jurisdictions, cooling off periods exist to delay the movement between politics and corporate lobbying in related areas.

But they are weakly enforced and carry no real punishments. Federally, cooling off period restrictions exist in the ministerial standards, which carry no punishment for those who have already left office and are enforced largely at the whim of the government of the day. The lobbying code of conduct also nominally requires a cooling-off period, but is barely enforced and has carries little punishment.

In comparative nations such as Canada, cooling off periods are enforced by independent commissioners and breaches can result in fines, damages, termination or reduction in a government pension. In the United States, breaching the cooling-off period can result in imprisonment.

Lead author on the study, Deakin University professor Peter Miller, said Australia’s cooling off periods must be beefed up with proper enforcement and punishment. He said that would be most simply dealt with through a federal integrity commission.

“First of all you need actual, enforceable laws, with meaningful penalties,” Miller told Guardian Australia. “There’s no point in having a law if you don’t have a meaningful penalty. Then you’ve got to talk about who’s monitoring it, whose job it is. And making sure the law is actually enforceable, so people actually get the fines.”

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Miller said the current transparency on lobbying was poor. The main transparency tool – the federal lobbyist register – only covers third-party lobbyists, not in-house lobbyists working directly for corporations. It also fails to show which third-party lobbyists are meeting with which politicians, and about what.

“They are not fit for purpose,” Miller said. “It’s a complete lack of transparency.”

Last year, Guardian Australia investigated the background of 483 individuals listed on July’s federal lobbyist register had a previous history within government or political party hierarchies. It found 255 lobbyists, or 52.8%, had a previous history within government or political party hierarchies.

It also revealed one in four lobbyists have worked as staffers – policy advisers, chiefs of staff, or electorate or media officers – to Australian politicians.