Who meets the Ministers?

This is a guest post from an interview with Dr Caroline Shaw by Living Streets Aotearoa, on a recently released research paper titled Commercial Influences on Healthy Transport: Interest Group Engagement With Transport Ministers in Aotearoa/New Zealand 2017–2022.

You can check out the original article here.

And find Living Streets Aotearoa’s website here.

Dr Caroline Shaw is an Associate Professor, public health medicine specialist, and epidemiologist at the Otakou Whakaihu Waka, Poneke | University of Otago Wellington. She and her colleagues recently published the paper Commercial Influences on Healthy Transport: Interest Group Engagement With Transport Ministers in Aotearoa/New Zealand 2017–2022. Living Streets Aotearoa interviewed Caroline to learn more about this research.

The long-form interview, lightly edited for clarity, follows.

Can you talk a bit about the background of this study and how it fits into the big picture of the other research you and your team engage in?

So in the public health field that I work in, there’s been quite a bit of interest in what’s now called “commercial determinants of health” in the last few years. That means trying to explore which activities commercial organisations undertake which result in policy being in their favour, rather than being in the favour of improving public health. And the areas where researchers have looked at this are mainly things like smoking and food and gambling. No one’s really looked much at it in terms of transport.

We were interested in looking into this, because we understand that we need to make a healthy, low-carbon transport system. We know how to do it, but collectively, we can’t seem to do it. There’s been a few attempts to try and make our transport system more sustainable, and they haven’t really stuck that well, or they’ve been on a smaller scope than they need to be, or they’re rolled back. And that’s not unique to New Zealand, other countries do it as well, and had that same experience. So we were interested in trying to start thinking about commercial determinants of health in this space. And Alice’s work has looked at a different aspect of this issue, and she’s now looking further into other areas in her PhD.

But another one of the things that we can do to get a grasp on this was to look at who gets to meet with ministers. And we can do that because New Zealand has ministerial diaries that are publicly available, published every month on the parliament website. And we undertook quite a long time period analysis and, rather than looking at individual companies or people who met with ministers, we looked at the types of organizations that were meeting with them and the big picture patterns.

We know that meeting with ministers is really important, and there’s a bunch of research out there that shows that the gold standard for interest groups is getting face to face access with policy makers, especially the Minister of Transport. It’s the thing that they most aspire to do, and also ministers find it really valuable as well. So we were trying to have a look at who was getting in front of the ministers during that time period, from 2017 to 2022.

So how did you conduct this research?

We downloaded five years of diaries, and had to analyse and categorise them pretty much individually, because they’re on a PDF and were inconsistently coded. So there was a huge amount of manual work to figure out the types of meetings that happened, and then whittle down the five thousand or so meetings that were reported in them to about nine hundred that were with interest groups.

And then we went through and categorized all the interest groups. We did that two ways. We used what’s called an “actor type classification”, which is a European system that we adapted for New Zealand. That system allowed us to look at groups and determine whether they are commercial. And if they are commercial, whether they were a business, or a business association, which is an organisation that represents businesses. And if they weren’t commercial, we looked at what kind of citizen group or institution they were. The other thing we did once we did that categorisation, is that we went through and looked at all the websites of these organisations and categorised them by what type of transport they were interested in.

What were the main results from the study?

So big picture, ministers meet more with commercial interest groups than they do with non-commercial. And we looked at five different ministers. So there were two Ministers of Transport and three Associate Ministers of Transport during this time, and it was the same with all of them. They all met more with commercial groups more than non-commercial, although the ratio varied slightly, like some people met proportionately more with commercial groups than others.

We also found that they meet very infrequently with iwi and hapū, which we were a little bit surprised about. So the Treaty partnership aspect of it was definitely missing.

And then business meetings with business associations were surprisingly common. I think it was about 18% of all interest group meetings, which we were a bit surprised about.

We were also interested particularly in public health and in how many health groups met with the ministers. And it really surprised us that certain health groups never met with the ministers. For example, we thought that groups like the Heart Foundation or the Asthma Foundation or the Cancer Society might meet with them, because the transport system contributes significantly to all of these conditions, but they never had meetings. However, what we don’t know is whether they weren’t asking to meet with the minister in the first place, or were asking but were not getting access.

In terms of the lack of health groups that met with the ministers, do you think that ministers need to consider a wider range of interest groups that could be relevant to their portfolios, or vice versa? 

Yeah, it’s interesting. During the time period we looked at there was a lot of policy action going towards a more healthy, low-carbon transport system. So even though those health groups weren’t getting face time with the minister, there was a lot of action in that direction. So I think that it’s more complicated than saying, if you get face time with the minister, you’re going to get your policies in place. Obviously, it is really useful to have those conversations and to build up those relationships, but I’m not sure that necessarily translates into influence and exactly what any particular group might want.

I think it’s plausible also that the minister might meet with interest groups to try and sell their own policies to the interest groups, or try and get their support. So that could be a two directional kind of relationship, where the influence goes in both directions.

That is an interesting finding. Given that iwi and hapū groups were also not meeting with the ministers do you think that there still was consideration of Te Tiriti within transport decisions?

I don’t think that that information comes from the diary analysis, but I think there’s other information out there which suggests it’s not particularly a focus of the transport system. I think there were some moves, because I know that the Ministry of Transport came up with a Māori Transport Strategy, maybe in 2019 or something like that. So there was certainly an increase in thinking around this at that point, but I didn’t personally see that translated into outcomes, and now I think that it’s not thought to be a priority at all.

In the paper you wrote about how we need to transition to a healthy, low-carbon system that involves modes like walking, cycling and public transport, which don’t necessarily have the big commercial funding that other entities do. Do you think there needs to be a way to balance the commercial vs non-commercial meetings a bit more if that’s the system that we want to work towards?

Yes, I think that’s true, although I did kind of reflect that there’s a lot of money in public transport because of all of the big operators and so forth. Though in terms of KiwiRail, the Minister of Transport is the shareholding minister, so they’re a state owned enterprise, and of course they would meet. And I think this is a good place to make the point that there’s nothing inappropriate about meeting with a minister at all. It’s just that clearly there’s a structural kind of bias towards commercial organizations being able to access the minister, and that’s the same in other countries as well. So there’s a few of these diary analyses that have been done, and this is the same pattern as the one that was done in the UK.

What do you think Living Streets Aotearoa and other advocacy groups can do to get more regularly into ministerial diaries, or is the onus entirely on ministers and their staff?

Yeah, I don’t think that the analysis we did can tell us this. I think there’s extra bits of information you would need to get a better understanding about what motivates ministers to meet with these particular groups, and you would have to go and interview staff from the office and ministers themselves. I think other researchers suggest that ministers prioritize meeting people that represent a lot of constituencies, or are thought to be big employers or important for their policies. So there’s a particular set of reasons that ministers might meet with organizations, but I don’t think that this paper can give that answer.

What I would say is that advocacy groups need to ask to meet with the minister, as the first step, and keep on asking again if you don’t get a positive response at first.

What can Living Streets Aotearoa and other advocacy groups learn from these results, especially given we have an election this year and want to tease out what policies different parties might introduce?

Well, first I think that for a number of decades, there was a pretty consistent view from all the parties that transport was road building and it was quite a technical thing. And I think that’s changed. And there are now competing visions of what the transport system should and could look like, and that leads to lots of policy conflict and tensions in the system. But I don’t think we can go back to the old way where transport was just building more roads.

And there’s a whole bunch of other things that are really important here too, like the aging population, climate change, the need to move to a low-carbon transport system. And, of course, our infrastructure debt, which we hear lots about, and the cost of infrastructure that are pushing towards a different sort of transport system from what we’ve had in the past, one that is much more reliant on local streets and walking and sustainable transport and street space being used in ways that helps us better adapt to the changing climate. So I think we can expect to see competing visions of what a transport system can look like over time.

But in terms of what advocacy groups can do, since ministers are really motivated by meeting with groups that represent a big constituency, you can work together on a shared vision with other advocacy groups. And if you can all turn up to a meeting, that will make you much more powerful, representing these five or six different groups. So I would recommend forming alliances and presenting on behalf of many people.

What other research do you think we need to do to understand commercial influences on the transport system?

I think in future there’s other bits of research that are important to understand more about what’s going on. For example, you could do interviews with people about who understand more how the ministerial meeting process works. It would also be helpful to conduct something called a network analysis, which helps uncover who the most powerful people are, the decision makers in a particular policy network, who can be inside government and outside government, to get a much better handle on how policy decisions are being made, and who the key policy people are. So I think this research we’ve done has been really interesting, but it is a lead into a suite of other things that could be looked at.

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