Parker & Partners Wins 2010 Public Affairs Asia Gold Standard Award

For the second year in a row, Ogilvy PR’s public affairs specialist Parker & Partners won the Public Affairs Asia Gold Standard Award for Government Relations.

Parker & Partners won the award for their work with Bell Shakespeare, taking out the award over strong competition. Managing Director, Sarah Cruickshank accepted the award on behalf of the team on 20 January at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong.

Bell Shakespeare is Australia’s national theatre company founded on the ideals of uninhibited access to the great classics for as many Australians as possible. Their flagship education programme, Actors At Work involves young actors touring Australia and delivering live performances to schools. With the help of government funding, many of these performances are delivered on a discounted or free-of-charge basis to schools disadvantaged by small numbers of students, remoteness, and socio-economic disadvantage.

Changes to government funding arrangements put the continuation of the Actors at Work programme under threat beyond 2010. Parker & Partners devised and executed a strategy designed to ensure continued funding for Actors at Work, thereby allowing Bell to continue the ‘reach’ of the program into remote and disadvantaged schools. This strategy was successful, allowing Actors At Work to continue in 2011. As a result, hundreds of schools and thousands of students benefited from an Actors At Work performance, many of whom would not otherwise have had the opportunity.

This also provided the Company with certainty for a further 12 months, allowing them time to plan for the long-term future of the programme.

Transparency good for government relations

One of the early initiatives of Kevin Rudd’s Government was to set up a Register of Lobbyists, an idea that was quickly copied by every state government.  The registers list the clients of government relations firms, providing a level of transparency about who is working for whom.

The registers came about following a number of controversial episodes in which lobbyists (usually ex-politicians) were given privileged access to government decision makers, were seen to have undue or improper influence on government decision making, or were awarded whopping great success fees when the government made a decision in favour of their client.

Currently the registers cover third party lobbyists (consultancies like Parker & Partners who are hired by organisations to help navigate the halls of government) but not ‘in-house’ lobbyists (individuals on the payroll with the specific task of government relations) or professional services organisations (law and accountancy firms who lobby on behalf of their clients), but this is likely to change.

Anomalies aside, moves to make the business of lobbying government more transparent should be welcomed by professional government relations organisations. The era of government relations firms providing access based on contacts (the ‘maaaate’ school of government relations) is rapidly coming to an end.

Indeed, many politicians say that organisations don’t need to hire a lobbyist to get a meeting, and most legitimate organisations with a real issue can get ministerial time. Where the modern government relations consultancy adds value is building a coherent and thought-through public affairs strategy for government engagement.

This can involve winning third party support, running a targeted media campaign, undertaking community initiatives, or flying a kite (flagging an issue to test public reaction). There’s nothing sinister about using these tactics to influence politicians – that’s why it’s called politics.

And doing it in the knowledge that the community knows who you’re working for only ensures the continuing legitimacy of government relations.

Parker & Partners Win at 2009 Gold Standard Awards

Ogilvy PR would like to congratulate Parker & Partners for winning the Gold Standard in Government Relations at the 2009 Gold Standard Awards.  Managing Director, Sarah Cruickshank attended the ceremony on February 4 at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Hong Kong, to accept the award on behalf of the team.  Parker & Partners won the award for their outstanding government relations campaign working with Veolia Environmental Services and Australian Landfill Owners Association.

Read more about the campaign here.

Veolia Environmental Services and Australian Landfill Owners Association government relations campaign

Challenge

Organic waste in landfills takes approximately 30 years to decompose, emitting methane (a greenhouse gas significantly more potent than carbon dioxide) throughout that period. By putting a price on carbon emissions the Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme would have made current landfill customers – including ratepayers and local councils – liable for emissions produced from waste deposited as far back as 1980 (known as “legacy waste”) at a cost of millions of dollars a year.

Veolia is one of the largest landfill operators in Australia. The Government had a political mandate to act on climate change and the Minister was firm in her resistance to any changes to the CPRS that would protect business interests. Veolia Environmental Services engaged Parker & Partners to lobby the federal government for the removal of legacy waste from the CPRS legislation as well as to raise the profile of Veolia’s brand within government circles.

Insight

Parker & Partners drew on our extensive relationships with Australia’s politicians, bureaucrats and media and found most had not heard of Veolia, and had no understanding of the concept of ‘legacy waste’ or the implications of the CPRS on the waste sector.

Creative Idea

We revived the defunct industry think-tank the Barton Group to provide intellectual force and further credibility to the arguments, and we created a new waste industry group, the Australian Landfill Owners Association to lobby government on the issue and to influence media coverage.

Campaign

• Multiple, targeted government relations engagements and meetings programs;
• Detailed policy and legislative development;
• Extensive journalist briefings and the crafting, dissemination and pitching of media releases and stories;
• Stakeholder relations and coalition-building within the waste industry; and
• Industry leadership and policy consolidation through the establishment of pre-eminent waste industry peak body, the Australian Landfill Owners Association.

Outcome

In April 2009 the Federal Government announced that emissions from ‘legacy waste’ would be excluded from coverage, making landfill the only sector covered by the CPRS to successfully convince the Government to substantially modify its legislation.

To date, the waste sector is the only CPRS covered sector to successfully convince the Australian Government to substantively modify the proposed CPRS legislation. Other powerful industry lobby groups – coal, minerals, and stationary energy to name but a few – have still had no success in modifying the CPRS legislation.

In terms of broader public affairs outcomes for Veolia, by May 2009 ALOA represented 70 percent of the waste management industry in Australia and was recognised by the Australian Government as the voice of the industry. In addition Veolia’s Director of Sustainability was elected as Secretary and official spokesman for the Association.