Dita De Boni: Let's hear it for the lobbyists

Illustration / Anna Crichton

It's time to forget those crazy lefties and get back to business as usual.

You know, I'm thoroughly sick of that beltway issue known as Dirty Politics. Loony lefties and their crazy distractions - all "corrupt Government" this and "Prime Minister donkey deep in it" that - it's all so boring.

Like many other Kiwis I would much rather hear about the $10 a week I might get in 2017, because that's what confirms we're on the right track and have the team that's working. And our favourite team, National, also has a team that's working - the PR team that instructs Prime Minister John Key how to brush off lefty smears and lies. If that's not a good use of all the corporate sponsorship the party enjoys, I'd like to know what is.

It's nice to see people rallying around the Prime Minister at a time like this, when the left would do absolutely anything to bring him down, because they are haters and wreckers. Some in the media, at least, understand their role as chief prime ministerial defenders against communism of any kind - not like those other churnalists and repeaters.

This week on Twitter came another voice that's too often consigned to the sidelines - the corporate lobbyist. Charles Finny, who works for those upstanding chaps at Saunders Unsworth, declared he would make it his personal mission to campaign for a new sedition law and new internet privacy/anti-hacking laws - "with real teeth" - after the current election.

I can tell you right now, once I realised he wasn't referring to the Prime Minister's one-time confidante, Jason Ede, making off with information from the Labour Party membership list, I agreed wholeheartedly. The brass neck of someone willing to publish, for money, information provided under cover of darkness made me fume.

A quick scroll through the Saunders Unsworth website reveals that, quite rightly, the firm has long despised that hippy do-gooder Nicky Hager. On one page, where they display their amazing knowledge of the intimate quirks of National Party politicians (they describe Steven Joyce as calm and unflappable, quiet and friendly), they note that Joyce was unfairly maligned as a 'Hollow Man' in Hager's "pathetic beat-up publication" before the 2005 election.

Now, it is Saunders Unsworth's clients who are being unfairly maligned, by people of Hager's ilk, so action is needed. The right of, say, client Coca-Cola Amatil to email key players about plans to sell yet more soft drink to the poor of South Auckland, or for the world's largest pharmaceutical companies to nibble away at Pharmac - who is defending that right? Why can't Saunders Unsworth continue privately advising the likes of Solid Energy on how to parry journalists' questions, or counter scientists who speak the truth about the country's polluted waterways, without the risk of their advice falling into the wrong, publicity-hungry hands?

Luckily, Saunders Unsworth still has swipe-card access to its friends in the National Party Cabinet, and is there to represent the disadvantaged corporates who struggle to get a hearing when policy is being formulated.

So let's hear it for the lobbyists, for fighting a fight that all right-thinking people can get behind.