A truly stupid analysis

Bryce Edwards writes:

The study by Caroline Shaw, Ryan Gage, Alice Miller, Katherine Cullerton, and Alex Macmillan looked at five years of ministerial diaries for transport and associate transport ministers, from October 2017 to November 2022. They pulled together 11,079 diary entries for five ministers and associates (Phil Twyford, Michael Wood, Julie Anne Genter, Shane Jones, and Kieran McAnulty) and then painstakingly identified every meeting related to the transport portfolio.

About a third of all their diary entries related to transport. Within those, the researchers found 880 meetings with outside interest groups, involving 974 separate organisations – everyone from airlines and airports to health NGOs and iwi authorities. Each of these groups was classified in two ways: by type (commercial, non‑commercial, or iwi/hapū) and by focus (what bit of the transport system they mainly cared about – air travel, freight, road safety, public transport, and so on).

The headline result is stark: close to three‑quarters of all these encounters were with commercial organisations (for‑profit firms and business associations) while only about a quarter involved non‑commercial groups such as unions, citizen groups, or research bodies.

This is just, with respect, meaningless drivel. It tells us nothing about how many groups there were, how many meetings were sought, etc etc. It also tries to portray meetings with commercial players as somehow bad.

Before we even get into the data, it should be no surprise that the commercial sector meets with decision makers. The commercial sector are the ones who have to comply with laws and regulations. The non for profit sector are people who want a particular outcome in a sector, but don’t generally have to comply with the laws and regulations imposed by Government.

Secondly the commercial sector is far far far larger than the non-commercial sector (which they fund through taxes). Between 80% and 90% of private sector employees in NZ work for a for profit organisation than a not-for-profit.

There will also be far far more commercial companies or sector groups, than non-commercial. If you look at meetings compared to number of organisations, the commercial sector probably get far fewer meetings than they should.

Overall, just 15 organisations accounted for about a third of all encounters. KiwiRail – a state‑owned enterprise, with the minister as its shareholding minister – had more meetings than any other single entity, followed closely by airports, big airlines and business associations.

For eff’s sake. Kiwirail is owned by the Government and costs taxpayers billions of dollars in losses. In what world would they not be having lots of meetings with the Minister?

The diaries don’t list who asked for meetings and was turned down, so you can’t see all the doors that never opened.

Which makes the entire thing meaningless.

But this is part of a pattern. There is a continual campaign to try and discourage Ministers from meeting commercial interests. They want their world views to be the only ones acceptable for Ministers to hear. They can’t win in the merits of their arguments, so instead they just try and pressure Governments to not listen to anyone else.

A companion study led by Alice Miller digs into this second question by looking at the public submissions and rhetoric of what the authors call the “road lobby” – organisations like the Automobile Association, Motor Industry Association, Motor Trade Association, Transporting New Zealand, and the BusinessNZ Energy Council.

Their conclusion is uncomfortable: on transport and climate, these groups often use tactics that look remarkably similar to the old tobacco playbook. 

This is a great example of what I was saying. First of all they include the Automobile Association as part of the commercial sector, when they are in fact a non-profit. This tells us much about the authors – they group people by whether they disagree with them, not by whether they are commercial or not.

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