Antony Fisher’s 1984 pitch is why business should want a lobbying register

When Antony Fisher wrote to Lion chairman Douglas Myers in October 1984, he was not really selling ideas. He was selling a delivery mechanism. The Atlas Network founder congratulated Myers on setting up a think tank and laid out the return on investment: “Policy makers have reacted favourably, laws have changed, and all at low cost, without political action.”

That line deserves a second reading from every business leader who funds advocacy today. Low-cost describes the price. It does not change what the product is. Funded policy influence is lobbying, and New Zealand still has no system for showing the public who is paying for it. For business, that gap is now a bigger risk than disclosure would ever be.

The pitch was about leverage

By 1984 Atlas had 26 affiliated institutes in 16 countries, including London’s Institute of Economic Affairs, which Fisher founded. Margaret Thatcher wrote to him in 1979: “You created the atmosphere which made our victory possible.” Fisher told Myers that Atlas could offer New Zealand only “advice and experience”, not money. Local backers would fund the work themselves.

His letters to American donors were franker. In 1984 he told Robert Brown, then president of Lloyds Bank of California, that corporate gifts of up to US$45,000 a year fed an operation with about US$5.5 million in income, and that with funding he could persuade “at least four” institutes to focus researchers on a single issue such as social security. In 1982 he reassured another backer that “any impression of special pleading is avoided.”

Independence was part of the product

That last phrase is the tell. The appearance of scholarly independence was not incidental, it was the feature being sold. Newsroom’s companion piece, previewing a new report by Ralph Wilson, Mohan Dutta and Jeremy Walker, frames the method as getting academics to say what business can’t say for itself, and revives Nicky Hager’s “spiderweb” critique of the Taxpayers’ Union.

Here is the honest counterpoint. Many of the ideas were right. The open, competitive economy New Zealand built after 1984 has served exporters and consumers well. An opinion piece in The Point argues the reform era was less a local intellectual awakening than the product of a multi-year international recruitment campaign. Even if true, good policy is good policy regardless of who first argued for it. But undisclosed money hands opponents the easiest rebuttal available: never mind the argument, look at the funder.

A network that scaled, a register that never arrived

Atlas now partners with more than 500 free-market think tanks worldwide, including 10 in Australia and New Zealand. The transparency architecture here barely moved over the same period.

In 2023, Transparency International New Zealand found the country lacked a comprehensive lobbying register or mandatory disclosure regime comparable to other OECD members. A 2018 Policy Quarterly study found Statistics NZ did not even classify lobbying as a distinct industry, folding it into management consulting. Of the lobbying actors that study could identify, corporates made up 26%, business associations and unions 20%, and consultants 18%. And a 2006 paper documented sustained organised business opposition to any rollback of the 1984-93 reforms through the 1990s and early 2000s. None of this is new. It is simply invisible by design.

The critics are doing the accounting instead

That invisibility is being filled by people with no interest in giving business the benefit of the doubt. Max Rashbrooke and Lisa Marriott’s September report, “Swimming in a sea of it”, frames vested-interest lobbying as systemic infrastructure rather than a run of isolated incidents. Cambridge News observed in August that lobbying has become “an industry in itself”, with professional firms selling access to whoever can pay.

BusinessDesk has previously described a paid-membership forum for large corporates built around lunches and policy discussion, and asked whether it amounted to bargain lobbying or good corporate citizenship. It may well be the latter. Without disclosure rules, nobody outside the room can tell, and that ambiguity always resolves against business in public debate.

Disclosure is the free-market answer

Markets run on information. Business rightly demands that government account for every dollar of spending and every new rule. It should accept the same standard for the money it puts into shaping those rules. A register of lobbying activity and think tank funding costs very little to comply with. The alternative is every sound argument for lower taxes, lighter regulation or freer trade being waved away as bought and paid for.

The Wilson, Dutta and Walker report is landing, Newsroom’s series has more instalments to run, and advocacy funding is now firmly part of the political conversation. Business groups have a choice. They can wait for a register to be designed by their sharpest critics, or they can publish their funders voluntarily and back a regime built on OECD principles. Fisher was right that influence can be cheap. Keeping it hidden is what is getting expensive.

Sources

• Newsroom: Atlas founder woos a beer baron, lays out low-cost lobbying (2026-11-14)
• Newsroom: Getting academics to say what business can’t say for itself (2026-11-13)
• The Point: Why the fifty-year history of Atlas Network’s ‘thinktank method’ in Aotearoa is the defining question of the 2026 New Zealand election (2026-11-09)
• The Standard: How the Atlas Network is shaping your life, even if you’ve never heard of it (2026)
• Transparency International NZ: An assessment of lobbying in New Zealand against the OECD principles for transparency and integrity in lobbying (2023-04-04)
• Policy Quarterly: Grease or Sand of Democracy? The market for lobbying in New Zealand (2018-05)
• Cambridge News: The trouble with lobbying (2026-08)
• BusinessDesk: The $17,000 club: bargain lobbying fee or good corporate citizenship?