You’re not supposed to say the quiet part out loud. It makes it harder for everyone to pretend that the policy-making is not sock-puppetry for the rich (1).
The latest example of this is a Canadian having to quit (2) because he boasted to an audience that ‘We’ve been given opportunities to write entire briefing notes for ministers and premiers and prime ministers’ (H/t to Sam).
People with long and strange memories will recall that in February 2006 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Four Corners ran an episode on “The Greenhouse Mafia.”
Here’s a bit of the transcript
JANINE COHEN: But industry players were adamant. They told Guy Pearse how they’d helped write Cabinet submissions and ministerial briefings, and costings relating to greenhouse policy while informally being invited into the Department of Treasury and the Department of Industry. One lobbyist who was interviewed in 2002, claimed he had drafted Cabinet documents and ministerial briefs four or five times over the preceding 10 years. This meant his privileged access went back as far as the previous Labor Government.
DR GUY PEARSE, SPEECHWRITER, ENVIRONMENT MINISTER, 1997-2000: So you ended up with this unique situation, a circular situation, where the advice that the government was receiving from its bureaucrats was almost identical to the advice they were receiving from industry associations, because effectively the same people were writing it.
JANINE COHEN: Writing Cabinet documents?
DR GUY PEARSE, SPEECHWRITER, ENVIRONMENT MINISTER, 1997-2000: That’s clear in some of the comments that were made to me. A number of interviewees confirmed that this went on, and a few of them even went on record claiming particular instances of where they helped to write briefs, costings, Cabinet submissions.
It’s not just energy policy. Recently in the UK, the fossil-fuel funded junktank known as “Policy Exchange” basically drafted the legislation enabling even tougher charges to be thrown at environmental protestors. This was admitted in June 2023 by that crazed conspiracy theorist… Rishi Sunak.
But there are precious myths we are supposed to believe. Academics’ lives are easier if they can pretend that there are neutral “policy-makers” in “policy-networks” just waiting to hear their sage advice….
Meanwhile, the carbon dioxide continues to accumulate. Fun times.
Footnote
(1) This is not to say that policymaking doesn’t meet with resistance – and that that resistance can be successful. See both fracking and “hydrogen villages.” The fact that sometimes the plans fail doesn’t change the fact that the plans are written by vested interests and then handed on to civil servants/politicians for a bit of state-washing…
(2) Like the Terminator, he’ll be back
marchudson.net 
Even the name Greenhouse Mafia strikes me as very clever. I prefer to call them Carbon Mafia because they were operating – and are still operating – a protection racket for their economic rentier’s market in fossil fuels. By referring to themselves as Greenhouse Mafia, the person in the street who does not follow the details might readily think that it is a reference to those nasty environmentalists trying to drive the economy into the ground.
Good point!