Environment groups were given far less access and broadcaster Alan Jones got eight ‘catch-up’ meetings

Mining and resources companies were given an extraordinary level of access to the highest rungs of the New South Wales government in the past four years, securing roughly 188 meetings with ministers in 235 weeks.

An analysis of four and a half years of the state’s ministerial diaries shows the NSW Minerals Council has obtained regular access to resources, planning and finance ministers, and the offices of premiers and deputy premiers.

The council was given 61 meetings with NSW ministers, more than anyone except the NSW Farmers Association, the City of Sydney council and Penrith city council.

Further meetings were granted to multinational resource and energy companies such as Shenhua, Whitehaven, Glencore, AGL, Rio Tinto, BHP, Origin Energy, Santos, Anglo American and Centennial Coal.

Analysis suggests the resources industry as a whole secured at least 188 meetings with NSW ministers in 235 weeks. Details on the methodology underpinning this analysis can be found below.

Environment groups were given much less access, the data shows. The group with the most ministerial access among these was the Lock the Gate Alliance, which campaigns against coal and gas developments.

It had just 19 meetings with NSW ministers.

Melbourne University lobbying expert George Rennie said it was common for wealthy and powerful groups to get a disproportionate level of access to governments.

“This can often occur at the expense of groups who represent important issues, such as environmental groups and researchers,” he said. “It is unfair and anti-democratic for decision-makers to give better access to those that donate more to their party, or those who have the greatest propensity to employ ministers and their staffers when they’ve left office; yet this problem is increasingly common.”

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The NSW Minerals Council said the resources sector operated in a fluid and highly regulated space, requiring constant engagement.

“Mining in NSW is a highly regulated industry subject to constant change and reform that requires ongoing engagement across multiple portfolios,” it said in a statement.

The group with the most access to ministers was the NSW Farmers Association, the main lobby group for the state’s farmers.

It secured about 90 meetings with ministers – principally the primary industries minister – in four and a half years. The meetings last year were largely concerned with the drought. In 2014, the association regularly met ministers to lobby on the laws restricting farmers from clearing native vegetation, which the association has since described as “statutory theft”.

The analysis also shows the broadcaster Alan Jones enjoys “catch-ups” with the most powerful politicians in the state. Jones has had eight meetings with NSW ministers, according to the diaries, including a 2016 meeting with the then premier Mike Baird and the then family and communities services minister Brad Hazzard, described simply as a “catch-up”.

In 2016 Jones met the primary industries minister, Niall Blair, to discuss “a rural matter”.

The Sydney Cricket and Sports Ground Trust, of which Jones is a board member, secured eight meetings, including three in 2015 to discuss “NSW Stadia reforms” or “Stadia matters”. The SCG Trust supports the Coalition’s plan to demolish and rebuild the Sydney Football Stadium, which has been a central issue in the NSW election campaign.

The Sydney Motorway Corporation, the company behind WestConnex, secured about 50 meetings with various ministers in two years to discuss the project.

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The publication of NSW ministerial diaries is a key plank of the state’s efforts to improve transparency and ensure integrity. No such measure exists at a federal level, despite repeated calls by transparency and anti-corruption campaigners.

This means the degree of access that private interests are being granted by federal ministers remains largely hidden. Rennie said it was critical to change that situation.

“Transparency is vitally important in any democracy, and access to ministerial diaries allows for the public to see how, and whether, their interests are being properly represented,” he said. “Ministers have to be held responsible for their decisions, and how they made them. Ministerial diaries shed more light on that process, and should be part of a federal transparency system.”

Notes

The data used was scraped from all the available ministers’ diary disclosure PDFs, and then cleaned to merge similar entity names where possible. For meeting counts, multiple meetings on the same day were combined to account for meetings attended by, and declared by, multiple ministers.

You can get a copy of the data here on Google drive or on GitHub (along with the scraper code).

Where multiple entities attended a meeting, we chose to split those into separate entries to allow us to count the number of meetings by individual entities. This means that where an entity name runs over two lines, the second line has been truncated and will be counted as a new entity. This should be taken into account when doing counts by entity name or minister or date.

Some cleaning of entity names has been done, but there are still many examples of name variation that clearly are referring to the same entity. This means the counts presented are estimates only, and the actual count may be higher.