Loose Threads is my space for quiet observation: where I return to threads in the public conversation that have been left unfinished, dropped, or miswoven. These pieces aren’t part of a regular series. They appear when something in the wider fabric of policy or public life feels out of step and could benefit from being picked up again. Sometimes that means offering context. Sometimes it means naming what has been set aside. Always, it’s about contributing to a stronger weave.
Sometimes, those who claim to defend democracy are the ones who misunderstand it most. The Integrity Institute’s recent campaign, ostensibly about exposing undue influence over policy, has revealed something more troubling: a fundamental confusion about how policy advice, participation, and legitimacy actually work in democratic systems.
The policy advisory literature has long since moved past the myth of the neutral bureaucracy. As Craft and Howlett (2012) argue, modern advisory systems are pluralised and layered. Policy advice no longer flows solely from within the state. It emerges through dynamic interaction between political actors, ministerial advisers, public servants, and external stakeholders: including iwi, hapū, academics, commentators, lobbyists, consultants, contractors, industry and community interest groups, and civil society. This is not a breakdown in integrity. It is a shift in how democratic knowledge is produced and contested; a shift that has been underway since 1996, when we began correcting for the distortions of the 1980s’ new public management reforms.
Rather than engage with this shift, the Integrity Institute appears to reject its premise. In targeting Federated Farmers, the Institute frames visible, declared advocacy as inherently suspect. Yet publishing policy platforms, meeting with ministers, or advocating for sector interests is entirely within the bounds of democratic practice. As Craft and Halligan (2020) remind us, robust advisory systems must accommodate both internal and external sources of advice. To treat advocacy as corruption is to misread the core architecture of modern policy-making.
This conflation is not just technically inaccurate. It is democratically dangerous. Legitimacy in policy does not come from insulation. As I have been exploring in the Waitangi Tribunal Thursdays series, and arguing in The Practical State, it comes from contestability, transparency, and deliberative engagement.
Whether it’s iwi asserting rangatiratanga, unions calling for fairer conditions, or academics and researchers offering empirical insight, the presence of diverse voices is a safeguard, and not a threat. As the policy advisory literature insists, multiple advisory channels are vital for balanced decision-making in complex societies.
The real question, then, is not whether influence exists. It always does. The question is: what kind of influence, under what conditions, and with what visibility? The distinction between transparent, procedural engagement and opaque, privileged access is not semantic. It is constitutional. Effective oversight requires more than tracing contacts. It demands a grounded understanding of procedural fairness, institutional independence, and the layered nature of advisory input.
And this is where the Institute’s own approach falters. Its campaign is donor-funded, targeted, and filtered through editorial partnerships. That, too, is a form of influence, though one cloaked in investigative framing rather than declared advocacy. If Federated Farmers can be criticised for lobbying in daylight, what are we to make of campaigns that operate in the shadows of funded journalism, with little transparency around strategic intent?
As Rasmussen and Willems (2022) observe, politicisation of advisory systems is not new. But when critique becomes selective, ideological, or deceptive, it corrodes the very norms it claims to defend. The work of maintaining integrity in policy advice is not about purging influence. It is about designing advisory systems that are open, plural, and structured to manage contestation well.
In the end, the Integrity Institute’s mis-step is not methodological. It is conceptual. It holds policy up to a technocratic ideal that has never existed. It confuses public participation with undue interference. And it mistakes democratic messiness for institutional decay.
But as Craft and Halligan (2020) make clear: complexity, pluralism, and engagement are not failures. They are features. They are the future of advisory systems.
Democracy, in other words, is not polite and tidy. It is contested. It is in constant debate with itself, and that is exactly the point.
References
Craft, J., & Halligan, J. (2020). Advising governments in the Westminster tradition: Policy advisory systems in Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand. Cambridge University Press.
Craft, J., & Howlett, M. (2012). Policy formulation, governance shifts and policy influence: Location and content in policy advisory systems. Journal of Public Policy, 32(2), 79–98.
Rasmussen, A., & Willems, E. (2022). Interest groups, public opinion, and political representation. In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Interest Groups, Lobbying and Public Affairs (pp. 728–738). Springer.
Footnote: This is not an argument in defence of Federated Farmers, nor of lobbyists more broadly. It is an argument for accurate and contemporary understandings of how policy advice is actually constructed in Aotearoa. Modern policy advisory systems are plural, layered, and relational. To conflate legitimate sector engagement with undue influence is to misrepresent how our democracy and public policy function, and to risk eroding the transparency and contestability that make them work. There’s a big difference between safeguarding integrity and shouting that the sky is falling. When every instance of advocacy is framed as corruption, and when “integrity” emerges as a tool for settling scores, as we have seen in other jurisdictions, we’re not protecting democracy, we are narrowing it. The real danger is not that the sky is falling. It’s that we’ve stopped seeing the threads that hold our democracy together, and started mistaking every interaction as collapse. But public policy is not stitched in panic. It is woven: in dialogue, in disagreement, and in the open. Our challenge is to open the weaving up to more people.