Profession politics: rule by lobby group?

A minor political furore has erupted here in Britain over the relationship between Prime Minister David Cameron and his Australian election strategist Lynton Crosby.

Mr Crosby built his reputation as an election guru on the back of three successive victories for the Howard government. These were followed by a win for London's flamboyant mayor Boris Johnson.

Now, though, Crosby's association with the British Conservatives is being seen as a potential own goal on their part.

The coalition government, of which they are the leading party, recently backed down on proposed legislation that would have required plain packaging for tobacco products.

At the same time, it emerged that Mr Crosby's lobbying company advises Philip Morris Ltd, the world's largest tobacco company, on how to argue against such moves.

The Australian government was the first in the world to introduce plain packaging for tobacco products. However, it maintains that it is too early to tell exactly how many lives will be saved as a result. This, it says, may take another three or more years.

British ministers have unexpectedly starting using this as a pretext for waiting. The media and press, however, suspect hidden agendas. They are raising again the vexed question of whether politicos are too close to lobbyists.

In Britain and, I think, Australia this is the age of professional politics. MPs are often groomed for office almost from the time they leave university - if not before. As fresh young graduates, many take up jobs as researchers with political parties or policy groups, or as dogs-bodies working for older MPs.

Few of today's top-level MPs have any appreciable professional experience outside the world of politics. In the UK, some senior politicians have hardly ventured beyond the bubble of Westminster itself, except perhaps to run for election.

Arguably, this gives rise to political careers that are just that - carefully mapped-out strategies for a life-long pursuit of power or, at the very least, a comfortable life of relative privilege, with some good works thrown in.

This may sound entirely too cynical and it may be just that - if we're considering the largely anonymous journeymen MPs who simply get on with the job at hand, doing their best for their electorates.

For the real power players, though, such a description is often apt.

In their sometimes cloistered world, operating under the harshest media spotlight of any generation, professional politicos are all too susceptible to the charms and ready-made policy packages of professional lobbyists.

Many of the more prominent lobby groups are made up of people whose careers have followed similar trajectories to those of MPs. At times, those career paths have crossed and closer relationships have formed.

By making themselves relatively accessible to lobby organisations, busy MPs - and ministers in particular - are able to rationalise away their lack of contact with men and women in the street.

Almost imperceptibly, then, a government that is open to lobbyists can become a government that is, in effect, ruled by lobbyists. Politicos sometimes mistake debates among lobbyists as wider community discussions - a convenient and time-saving shortcut when it comes to shaping policy.

When that happens, government becomes about closed elites taking advice from unrepresentative interest groups, the views of which are at best single-minded and at worst short-sighted.

Lobbyists' carefully constructed opinion polls and other devices are given too much credence. Like priests of old, they are sometimes assumed to be almost beyond question in areas of speciality, where they claim to have unique insight.

Lobby groups are an inevitable consequence of liberal democracy. If the many are to be ruled by the very few, those few must be confronted with the divergent views of their constituencies.

Lobby organisations may be necessary to politics but politicians should not get too cosy with them. Politicos must maintain a healthy if respectful distance, if objectivity is be both achieved and seen to be achieved.

For their part, MPs - and those paid to advise them - must ensure that they move beyond the professional political bubble, to hear the views of local, community-based groups.

They must avoid seeming shortcuts and expedient short-term answers, pondering long and hard how their present choices will impact on the future.

They must also learn to behave in more statesmen-like ways; thinking not just of the next election but of the next generation. They should be wary of those lobbyists who operate closest to the centres of power.