Policy development happens through a complex interplay of politicians' directives, civil servants' work, and civil society input.
Bryce Edwards is director at The Integrity Institute, which has been pretty critical about anyone's involvement in policy processes other than the bureaucracy and anyone considered to not have a financial stake in an outcome.
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.
With that particular critique in mind, let's have a look at a different campaign.
One that Guyon Espiner has been running, on the public dime, at Radio New Zealand, and at RNZ-Newsroom co-production The Detail.
In his telling, shadowy alcohol industry influence stymied admirable public health efforts to adopt new and stricter Canadian low-risk drinking guidelines.
He's had a lot of airplay on this. If you're reading this in New Zealand, you've been forced to pay for it.
So what is that shadowy influence?
David Farrar has the correspondence.
The Brewers Association wrote to Ministry of Health asking for details on a review of the low-risk drinking guidelines. And there was also correspondence on the use of the alcohol levy - a small levy imposed on every bit of alcohol sold, used to fund various harm-reduction efforts. Producer levy schemes tend to have producer involvement.
The Brewers also pointed out what looked like an error on the Health NZ website (recall that Health NZ is the operational arm, Ministry is policy). They thought that some proposed Canadian guidelines had actually been implemented.
Health Canada had commissioned a third party to produce revised alcohol guidelines. That was a couple of years ago. Those proposed guidelines have not been adopted or ratified by Health Canada. And two different Ministers of Mental Health and Addictions, in late 2024 and early 2025, have confirmed that the 2011 guidelines remain the ones in place.
Health NZ thought that Canada had tightened its guidelines and was taking this as basis for tightening ours.
The Brewers pointed out an error. The Ministry of Health saw that error corrected. And Guyon Espiner deemed the whole thing an example of influence that needs to be stopped. Of course, on his podcast interview with The Detail, he hedges a bit - saying he's only raising questions and noting how interesting it is that a framework convention bars industry discussion with government in the case of tobacco but not for alcohol. Not that he's campaigning to get the framework convention extended to alcohol.
Let's go back to Deb's piece.
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;
The Brewers found an error. Min Health made the same mistake Espiner did, potentially based in motivated reasoning - wishing that the Canadians had given NZ an excuse to tighten guidelines here.
That error was corrected, because we don't stick bureaucrats in towers and ask them to hand down advice from on-high. There is interaction. It is helpful. It makes things suck less.
Some campaigners, like Edwards, and like Espiner, seem not to like it when that interaction results in policies that they like less. They seem to view it as inherently corrupt. At least Edwards isn't doing it on public funding.
David Farrar's post with the correspondence went up on the 25th.
The day before that, I submitted a column to Newsroom on the topic, because I'd first caught this on their site - they co-produce The Detail. I sent it through on Wednesday of last week for my usual slot on Tuesday - earlier than usual, because it was critiquing some of their work and I wanted to give them time with it.
After asking that I add a lot more detail on the evidence around moderate drinking, they decided not to run it. There was an in-house view that Espiner had sufficiently couched what he'd said on The Detail. Perhaps there was a background worry that publishing a critique would make a likely press council / BSA complaint about The Detail piece more viable; I wouldn't know.
I brought the piece back to 800 words; it was in Monday's Post as a full-page print piece (and presumably Press etc). An ungated version is here. I confirmed bits of the correspondence with the Brewers Association in the interval.
The full piece I'd sent to Newsroom is below; it's a lot longer than the version at the Post, in part because they asked me to add a fair bit of content.
I only saw Deb's piece after all this. But it's been rolling around in my head since then. The policy process really isn't what some of these campaigners seem to wish it were.
Anyway - the piece that Newsroom declined. I declined to write a substitute piece for them for this week.
