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April 4, 2004
One of the things that I notice about federal Parliament was how its long corridors are filled with groups of organized lobbyists going about their business. Groups of them are everywhere. And they start early---around 8.30 am. After doing some of the rounds of those they were trying to persuade they would hang about Aussies---the coffee shop in Parliament House--- with mobiles glued to their ears. They are taking a break whilst they waited for the next set of appointments. They were (mostly) men with a purpose who had a glint in their eye and a determined gait.
Most of the lobbyists were trucking off to the minsterial offices. Some (the big energy companies) camped in the foyer of Ministers offices. The ministeral entrance to Parliament swarmed with their comings and goings. Many, from the big end of town, had far more more direct access to the Ministers than did the individual Senators. Is this not a probelm?
So what was their business? What were the lobbyists up to? What were they trying to achieve? What was the significance of all this activity of persuasion and cajoling? (The energy companies cajole rather than persuade.)
For many lobbying is seen to be benign as it is a part of the workings of democracy. It is the process of pluralism and persuasion at work, not the existence of violent factions with a sword in their hand. On this account lobbying is more a briefing rather than political warfare. It is the way political reason worked.
I saw it differently. In the field of health the briefing was the appearance. The reality was armed antagonism. The lobbyist groups (eg., the AMA) were a band of warriors who had declared the right to evaluate self-protection in its own way and to act accordingly. Each had claimed the right to judge the political as a conflict between friend and foe.
This is interpreting the actions and statements of the lobbyists through the eyes of Carl Schmitt. I saw them representing commercial power and so they were a counter force to the liberal state. Though many of the business lobbyists did not possess political power, many of them were were in a position to prevent the state from exercising that power. Thus the energy companies prevented the efforts to give a greater role to renewable energy.
If Parliament is what is left of the original lethal clash between king and commons, and is the continuation of this civil war, then it is a form of warfare that has renounced killing and is carried on by other means. The lobbyists represented the intensification of the internal antagonism in civil society.
For Schmitt the pluralism of democracy means a hollowing out of the power of the state, the fragmenting of political unity, and ongoing destablizing division. Unity can only be maintained when two or more parties recognize common premises of the Constitution. The ethic of the state becomes the ethic of the Constitution, and it is the Constitution that forms the ground of real political unity.
Will this be called into question with the forthcoming industrial relations legislation We saw something of this warfare in the 1990s when Peter Reith was Minister of Employment and Industrial Relations. Remember all that conflict on the wharfs?
Schmitt's Hobbesian account makes sense.
The danger is that in a liberal democracy the Constitution becomes to be seen as the little more than the rules of the game and its ethic degenerates into the convention of fair play. The threat of conflict getting out of hand is part of the politically possible present. It is the threat the political order must continually ward off.
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