Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today about lobbying technique. As your invitation put it - "how to gain the support of the decision-makers".

Ten years ago, in Rob Muldoon's heyday, a good living could be made organising conferences on how to lobby government. Every interest group in the country was desperate to climb on to the gravy train of government support.

People used to believe the economy ran on lobbying the way a car runs on petrol. They thought that, if the lobbying ever stopped, the wheels of industry would come to a grinding halt from Cape Reinga to the Bluff.

It is a simple matter to cull the files of the late '70s and early '80s.

Let me give you first, in summary, the standard lecture delivered in that period to all those panting interest groups.

• Map all relevant decision-making paths and networks in their entirety. Successful lobbying does not limit its focus to people at the top.

• Set up systems to monitor significant developments at every level.

• In particular, identify and butter up middle grade advisors at working level in departments. They are the point, not Ministers or Departmental CEOs, where most ideas and initiatives start or get killed off. Anything that does originate higher up will, sooner or later, be referred to them for professional analysis and comment. If you lose at this level, you are unlikely to win higher up, but you start at an advantage, most lobbyists neglect them. They will be flattered by your attention.

• No matter how short-sighted, selfish, or anti-social your demand, always dress it up in the selfless rhetoric of national good and public interest. It you are marketing Thalidomide, for example, you need to be able to demonstrate the high cost in human life and suffering when people needing treatment are deprived of new drugs for an excessive period of time by the testing requirements.

• Remember that the national interest is a fashion industry. The keynote may be jobs one year, and balance of payments the next. You will look unprofessional if you fail to keep abreast of the latest presentational fad.

• Know the role of all relevant interdepartmental committees. Find members willing to keep you up to date with their activity.

• Monitor Ministers' offices; be on friendly terms with their staff. Position yourself as a valued informant to all of these people, an expert they can turn to for advice, independent, informed and impartial, on all issues crucial to your own gain.

• Identify allies, neutrals and opponents among backbench MPs. Mobilise, inform or kneecap them, as appropriate.

• Appoint trustworthy people to liaise with each and every MP in his or her own electorate. Show that you are capable of helping or hurting where it matters most. Help them to understand what you need to mobilise increased support.

• Establish groups who will act to your instruction at electorate level. They can write letters to newspapers, ask questions on talkback radio, phone MPs at home in the weekend. Half a dozen apparently unrelated calls on a Sunday about a single topic will galvanise the most amazing speeches by marginal backbenchers in Caucus the following Thursday.

• Follow the example of General Motors; develop a Speakers' Bureau. These are lists of people in every centre nation-wide who have frequent opportunities to make speeches to service clubs, church groups, and other events reported by the local news media. They speak to your instructions, but they have no visible connection whatsoever with you. The General Motors book of basic instruction in the US on which issues to push and what to say about them is 4 inches thick. What outsiders see is a groundswell of more or less universal spontaneous support at local level.

• Know your Caucus committees. Keep them judiciously briefed; ready for activation as necessary against crackpot ideas that arise at Cabinet or departmental level.

• Know how to use both the Government and Opposition research units. A few overworked people in them, not usually very well informed, generate the speech material for virtually every lazy MP in Parliament. Your help will improve the accuracy and relevance of their material.

• Maintain helpful contact with appropriate advisors in the PM's Department. Those people are often seconded from outside industry on a sector basis. Their natural sympathy may be with you, not the Government. Use them as a pipeline straight to and from the Prime Minister.

• Keep track of questions, petitions, commissions, inquiries, legislation.

• Make submissions. Use the select committee structures. Get to know the committee clerk. Write on one side of the paper. Leave wide margins. Position your organisation as a uniquely valuable provider of accurate information designed to bias the outcome in favour of your own vested interest. There is no need to go on. You get the idea.

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