New Zealand’s politicians like to point to the existence of published ministerial diaries as evidence that our system is open and transparent. Ministers now routinely say that anyone can see who they’re meeting with, so there’s nothing much to worry about in terms of backroom influence. On paper, the diaries are supposed to be a window into the Beehive – a way for the public to track who gets face time with ministers and who doesn’t.
In reality, that window has been fogged up for years. The diaries are dumped out every few months as messy PDFs, full of disclaimers and omissions, with no indication of who asked for meetings and was turned away. Until very recently, almost nobody had managed to turn this jumble into proper data capable of answering the basic democratic question: who actually gets into the room with ministers, especially on big-ticket issues like transport and climate policy?
For the first time, a group of public‑health and transport researchers have done exactly that for the transport portfolio. Their work, and what it implies about how power works in Wellington, deserves a lot more public attention than it’s had so far.
What the diary data shows
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. Put another way, commercial interests had roughly three times as many opportunities to get their views in front of ministers as everyone else combined.
Drill down a bit and the picture gets more striking. The single most common focus was air travel (airlines and airports), which accounted for about 16% of meetings. Maritime interests came next (11%), then rail (9%), automobiles (8%), and consultancy outfits such as law firms, PR and lobbying firms, and economic consultancies (around 6%).
Meanwhile, some of the groups you might expect to loom large in a transport minister’s diary barely show up at all..
Health organisations, for example, accounted for just six encounters across the entire five‑year period – about 0.7% of all meetings with interest groups. Yet as Shaw and colleagues point out, conservative estimates suggest New Zealand’s transport system causes at least as much health loss as tobacco or obesity each year.
Iwi and hapū – the Crown’s Treaty partners, and communities who face severe transport inequities and a long history of land confiscation for roads and rail – made up only about 1% of encounters. The researchers describe this level of engagement as “notable by their absence”, given clear areas where Crown–Māori dialogue on transport should be central rather than peripheral.
There were also big differences between ministers. While all of them met more often with commercial than non‑commercial groups, the ratio varied from about 1.6:1 at the “least skewed” end, right up to 10:1. That suggests that who appears in the diary isn’t simply a neutral reflection of demand, but instead, there is real ministerial discretion in who gets in the door and who stays out.
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.
In other words, the official window into the Beehive shows a pattern: regular, repeated access for a relatively small group of commercial players; very occasional access for health, climate and community voices.
What diaries don’t show – and why that’s even more worrying
Shaw and her co‑authors are careful not to oversell what this kind of diary analysis can do. It shows opportunities to influence, not which arguments were made or whether ministers changed their minds. The diaries don’t list who asked for meetings and was turned down, so you can’t see all the doors that never opened.
They also don’t capture the more informal forms of access that seasoned lobbyists rely on: conversations at conferences, corridor chats, phone calls, and social events. As James Shaw once observed, “Sometimes I end up conducting ministerial business when I’m going to get a sandwich.” The official line is that the diaries cover scheduled meetings on ministerial business, not every human interaction.
On top of that, there are issues of accuracy and completeness. The Beehive website carries a 13‑line disclaimer warning that the diaries may include meetings that never happened, may omit unscheduled encounters, and may not list everyone who was present. Investigative work by journalists and bloggers has turned up cases where the same meeting appears in one minister’s diary but not in another’s, or where politically sensitive attendees – such as family members with public roles – have been omitted. Recent stories about Shane Jones failing to disclose a dinner with mining executives, which he later described as a “cock‑up rather than a conspiracy”, are simply the latest reminder that the system is porous.
All of this might sound like a reason to dismiss the diaries altogether. But the opposite is true. If even this partial, error‑prone record shows such a strong tilt towards commercial interests and such minimal engagement with health, community and climate‑focused groups, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the real, off‑the‑books balance of access is even more skewed.
It also underlines just how important it is to have these records in a form that ordinary people – not just the well‑resourced – can actually use.
Opening the black box: turning PDFs into data
When ministers agreed in 2018 to start publishing diary summaries, the move was sold as a “victory for transparency”. In practice, however, the information has been released in almost comically unusable format: scattered PDFs with inconsistent formatting, cryptic descriptions, and no central way to search or analyse across portfolios and over time.
The Shaw study had to begin by scraping, cleaning and coding five years’ worth of these files just to get started. This is exactly why the Democracy Project has spent years digitalising and standardising all ministerial diary data into a searchable database: the “Web of Influence”. This will soon be publicly available for researchers, journalists, and anyone who wants to look.
Once you do that grunt work, patterns suddenly become visible: which industries dominate particular portfolios; which lobby firms pop up everywhere; which ministers are particularly open to non‑commercial groups, and which rarely meet them at all. The Shaw research is really a proof‑of‑concept for this kind of analysis. It shows that even a single‑portfolio slice of the data, treated seriously, can tell an important story about whose voices are heard in Wellington and whose are pushed to the margins.
In that sense, the diaries are both a transparency tool and an argument for better ones. They hint at what a proper lobbying register and a modern, machine‑readable record of political access might reveal if we chose to build them.
The Road lobby in the room
Knowing who’s in the room is one thing; knowing what they say when they get there is another. 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. Responsibility is pushed onto individuals (“Kiwi drivers’ choices”, “consumer demand”) rather than onto the design of the system or the regulations that shape it. Proposals to reallocate road space or funding towards public transport, cycling and walking are framed as “ideological” or “anti‑car”, while massive highway projects are defended as the only “pragmatic” way to keep the economy moving.
Arguments about timing are used to water down or delay change. When the Clean Car Standard was being developed, for example, the Motor Industry Association publicly talked about supporting emissions reduction in principle, but lobbied hard behind the scenes for weaker targets and longer phase‑in periods on the grounds that the market “wasn’t ready” and that New Zealand couldn’t possibly move faster than Australia. Similarly, when speed limits were lowered on dangerous roads under the Road to Zero strategy, the AA and others campaigned to roll them back, warning of “productivity losses” and “driver frustration” rather than focusing on the well‑documented safety gains.
Transporting New Zealand has followed a similar script on freight. Its leaders have consistently argued that trucks carry “93 per cent of freight” and that any serious shift to rail is unrealistic, while lobbying for heavier and longer trucks under the banner of “efficiency”. When officials raised concerns about road damage and emissions from bigger trucks, the organisation produced its own figures claiming that supersized vehicles would actually cut emissions per tonne‑kilometre, which is a classic example of using selective metrics to soften the case for regulation.
Not every argument these groups make is wrong – they are representing genuine interests, and sometimes raise practical issues that need to be dealt with. The point is that when you line up their framing alongside the diary data, you get a sobering picture: the organisations that most vigorously resist meaningful change in our transport system are also the ones with the most regular access to the ministers in charge.
Who’s knocking on the Beehive door?
The files on specific transport players help put some flesh on these bones.
Take the Motor Industry Association (MIA), which represents almost all new vehicle importers and distributors in the country. Its leadership has been a textbook case of the revolving door: its former chief executive, David Crawford, came from a senior role at the Ministry of Transport, and his successor, Aimee Wiley, arrived straight from running the Low Emission Vehicles programme at Waka Kotahi (the very policies MIA had been lobbying on). Publicly, the association talks about supporting “sensible” climate action and encouraging cleaner vehicles; privately and in submissions, it has fought hard to dilute fuel‑efficiency standards, opposed any talk of banning new petrol and diesel cars by a set date, and complained bitterly about the Clean Car Discount and Standard.
Then there is Transporting New Zealand (previously the Road Transport Forum), the peak trucking lobby. Over the years, it has been led by a succession of former politicians – National Cabinet minister Tony Friedlander, former Act deputy leader Ken Shirley, and Porirua’s ex‑mayor Nick Leggett – who brought with them a dense web of contacts in Parliament and the bureaucracy. The organisation has helped secure heavier truck limits, influenced the shape and timing of road user charge increases, and pushed back against efforts to shift freight onto rail. In the late 2000s it and its members made substantial political donations, particularly to National, before quietly stepping back from direct giving when the optics became too risky.
Air interests show up prominently, too. Air New Zealand, majority‑owned by the Crown, has long occupied a privileged space in Wellington as both a commercial airline and a quasi‑national institution; the diaries and earlier analyses of the first releases show its executives appearing frequently across multiple ministers’ schedules. Auckland Airport and Wellington Airport – both partly council‑owned – likewise maintain close relationships with transport and tourism ministers, particularly around crises such as Covid‑19 and debates over airport expansion and state support.
Around them orbit a wider ecosystem: big logistics firms like Mainfreight, which rely on road and port infrastructure; fuel companies such as Z Energy, deeply invested in the pace and direction of decarbonisation; and umbrella groups like Infrastructure New Zealand, which bring together construction firms, financiers and consultants to push for more and bigger projects.
None of this is secret. These organisations put out press releases, appear in select committees, sponsor conferences and sit on advisory panels. But when the diary data is finally pulled together and analysed, you see how often the same names recur, and how much more frequently they appear compared with, say, disability advocates wanting safer streets, or climate groups arguing for fewer flights and more trains.
New Zealand’s lobbying transparency problem
The uncomfortable truth is that New Zealand’s much‑vaunted transparency regime is thin gruel by international standards. Ministerial diaries and MPs’ pecuniary‑interest registers are almost the only formal tools we have for tracking influence.
We have no lobbying register, no enforceable code of conduct for lobbyists, and no meaningful cooling‑off period to stop ministers and senior officials walking straight into paid advocacy roles. Attempts by the previous government to introduce a voluntary lobbying code were quietly gutted after intensive lobbying from the industry itself, which insisted on such a broad definition of “lobbyist” that it became meaningless. Under the current government, that process appears to have been shelved entirely.
At the same time, some of the modest steps that had been taken are being reversed. Parliamentary swipe cards for lobbyists, which were briefly removed, have been reinstated by the new Speaker without publishing a full list of card‑holders. Ministers continue to hire advisers straight out of lobbying firms, and former ministers continue to pop up on the boards of the very industries they used to regulate.
Against that backdrop, the transport diaries are best understood as a sliver of light in a mostly dark room. They do not, on their own, solve the problem of hidden influence, but they do give researchers just enough visibility to show that the system is structurally tilted.
Why this matters, and what should change
Transport is not a niche issue. It sits at the intersection of climate, health, equity, and economic life. Decisions about highways versus rail, speed limits versus “flow”, aeroplanes versus night trains, and SUVs versus safer, smaller vehicles will shape how and whether we meet our emissions targets, how many people are killed or injured on the roads, who can get to jobs and services, and who bears the costs of pollution.
The Shaw study shows that during a period when New Zealand was, on paper, trying to shift towards a healthier, low‑carbon transport system, the ministers in charge were still hearing overwhelmingly from those with a commercial stake in the status quo. The Miller “road lobby” research shows that when those commercial actors speak, they often deploy familiar delay and deflection tactics that have been honed in other harmful industries.
Put together, and set alongside the work to open up the ministerial diary data more broadly, this should force a re‑think of how comfortable we are with our current “light‑touch” approach to lobbying. At the very least, it points towards some straightforward reforms: proper, searchable publication of diaries; a statutory lobbying register that shows who is being paid to represent whom; and basic rules to slow the revolving door between public office and corporate advocacy.
If politics really is “so much about relationships”, as one politician told researchers, then who gets those relationships, and who doesn’t, is a basic question of democratic fairness. The transport diaries don’t give a full answer, but thanks to this research they give us a much clearer sense of where to start looking.
Dr Bryce Edwards
Director of the Democracy Project
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