How to build a government relations strategy

A government relations strategy sets out what your organisation wants from government, who can deliver it and how you will engage them. Legislative and regulatory change can create value for an organisation or destroy it, and a clear strategy helps you manage the risk and act on the opportunity. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, but the strategies that work share the same elements.

This guide is for government relations, public affairs and policy teams in Australia, whether you are writing a first strategy or rebuilding one that has drifted. It takes each element in turn, including the political calendar to plan around, and ends with a one-page template and a worked example.

The short version

• Start with the decision you need: what, from whom and by when.
• Work out how that decision gets made, from the department to Cabinet and Parliament, and who influences it at each step.
• Map every stakeholder by influence and position, and decide whose position you need to move.
• Give each one a reason to act that fits their priorities, with evidence and a local angle.
• Plan engagement around the political calendar: the budget, sitting weeks, estimates and elections.
• Track the issue and your engagement, so you know when it moves and what the team has done.
• Measure outcomes as well as activity, and review the plan on a fixed rhythm.
• Fit it on one page, so leadership can read it and the team can run it.

Start with clear objectives

Agree clear objectives for the engagement before you plan anything else. A good objective names the decision you need, who makes it and when.

Be realistic about what can be achieved, given the political reality and the government’s appetite for change. After a period of significant reform in an area, for example, a government will be less willing to reopen it. At a time like that, building and keeping relationships may serve you better than pushing for further change.

• Separate the goal from the ask. The goal is the outcome your organisation needs. The ask is the specific thing you put to government, in one sentence.
• Set a fallback. Decide in advance what you would accept if you can’t get everything: a pilot, a review, a delay or a smaller amount.
• Prioritise. Two or three objectives a year is plenty for most teams. Write down what you won’t pursue, too.
• Get sign-off. Your chief executive and board should agree the objectives, because they will be asked to spend time and reputation on them.

Work out who decides

Many strategies go straight to a list of politicians. Trace how the decision you need gets made first, because that tells you who matters and when.

A few features of the federal system shape almost every strategy:

• Departments advise ministers. Officials draft the options a minister chooses between, so bring the department with you before you go to the minister’s office, and avoid going around it.
• Budget asks go through Cabinet. The department drafts a new policy proposal for its minister and agrees the costing with the Department of Finance, mostly between December and February. Cabinet’s Expenditure Review Committee decides between February and April, so your ask needs to be with the department and the minister’s office by the end of the calendar year; one that first arrives in the new year rarely makes that budget.
• The Senate decides contested bills. The government doesn’t hold a majority in the Senate, so a bill the opposition opposes needs crossbench votes. Many bills are also referred to a Senate committee, which takes submissions and may hold hearings: often your clearest chance to put evidence on the public record.
• Regulations can be disallowed. A member of either house can give notice of a motion to disallow most legislative instruments within 15 sitting days of their being tabled, so a regulation you oppose isn’t settled the day it’s made.
• The federation matters. Health, education, energy, transport and many other areas are shared with the states and territories, so the same issue often needs a federal and a state strategy.

Identify key stakeholders

With the decision path in front of you, list everyone who makes or influences the decision. This could include:

• Ministers and assistant ministers, and the advisers who handle your issue
• Department officials in the program or policy area
• Shadow ministers
• Committee chairs and members
• Members of the crossbench in both houses
• Backbenchers who speak on the issue, or whose electorates it affects
• State and territory ministers, where they share the decision
• Industry associations, unions, councils and community groups, as allies or opponents

Focus on the people with the most influence now, but keep good relationships with shadow ministers too, so your strategy holds up in the long run.

Advisers matter as much as ministers. A minister sees many organisations each week, and the adviser who handles your issue decides what reaches them. If you can’t get time with the minister, a meeting with the right adviser is often worth more. Our roadmap for government relations covers building these relationships between asks.

Identify their positions

Next, find out where each stakeholder stands on your issue. Broadly, sort each one into:

• No position: those who have no clearly articulated position on the issue
• Detractor: those who clearly do not support your position on the issue
• Neutral: those who are neither supportive nor unsupportive of your position
• Supporter: those who support your position on the issue

Then note each stakeholder’s influence over the decision, high, medium or low, and decide whose position you need to move and where to. A high-influence stakeholder with no position is usually where your time goes furthest. A low-influence detractor rarely is.

Base each position on evidence: what they have said in debate, in questions and at committee hearings (all in Hansard), their first speech, committee and dissenting reports, media releases, social media posts, party platforms and election commitments, and what they have said to you. Note the source and date beside each position, so the team can see how current it is. Our guide to political intelligence covers the sources and a weekly routine for keeping positions current.

Map your opponents too: who will argue against your ask, to whom, and with what evidence. Prepare your answer to their strongest argument before you need it.

Develop key messages

Align your messages with each stakeholder’s objectives. Explain why your issue matters to them, and why it should take precedence over other issues. Quantify your organisation’s impact, and show how it relates to their current priorities and, where possible, their constituency.

A message that works usually has four parts:

• The ask: one sentence, specific enough to say yes to.
• Why it matters: three reasons at most, each with its evidence. Keep the ask and the reasons separate, so neither gets lost.
• Why it matters to them: how it advances something the government, the minister or the member has said they want, in their words from Hansard or their media releases.
• What it costs: if the ask costs money, say how much, over how many years, and what it saves.

Local evidence carries weight with every MP: the jobs, sites, members, clients or patients in their electorate. The AEC’s Find my electorate looks up one suburb or postcode at a time; GovConnex Maps takes a spreadsheet of addresses or postcodes and shows the federal and state electorate of each.

Write it down once, as a one-page brief to leave behind after every meeting. Our guide to writing a briefing note shows how. Prepare for the questions you would rather not get, too: what it costs, who opposes it and why now.

Plan engagement

Plan how you will engage each stakeholder, through a mix of letters, events and meetings.

• Letters and emails open the door and put your ask on the record. See our checklist for writing to MPs.
• Meetings move positions. Bring one ask and leave a one-page brief. See our tips for meeting MPs.
• Submissions to parliamentary inquiries, departmental consultations and the pre-budget process put your evidence on the public record, and a strong submission can lead to an invitation to give evidence.
• Site visits in non-sitting weeks, when MPs are in their electorates, show the issue rather than describe it.
• Events and roundtables, including those run by industry associations and parliamentary friendship groups, keep you in touch between asks.
• Coalitions show breadth of support. One letter signed by five organisations carries more weight than five separate letters.
• Public campaigns and media raise the political cost or benefit of a decision. Use them deliberately: going public can close doors that private engagement would have opened.

Sequence the plan. Work with officials before the minister’s office, and the minister’s office before the minister. Build support among backbenchers before you escalate, and talk to the opposition and crossbench before a bill reaches the Senate. Go to the Prime Minister’s or a Premier’s office only when every other avenue is exhausted.

Decide who does what: who owns each relationship, which meetings need your chief executive, and which the policy team can hold. The chief executive’s time is usually the scarcest resource in the plan.

Plan around the political calendar

Timing matters as much as the message. A strong ask that arrives after the decision is made achieves nothing. These are the fixed points of the federal year:

• Sitting weeks are when ministers, MPs and senators are in Canberra together. In non-sitting weeks, MPs are mostly in their electorates. Parliament publishes each year’s sitting calendar in advance. Avoid asking for time during question time, estimates hearings or a political crisis.
• Caretaker periods start when the House of Representatives is dissolved for an election. The government then avoids major policy decisions that would commit an incoming government, and significant appointments. Get the decisions you need before then, or seek commitments from parties and candidates during the campaign.
• The states and territories run their own budgets, estimates and caretaker conventions, and most have fixed election dates.

Track your issues and your engagement

Track mentions of your issues in parliamentary speeches, media releases and politicians’ social media, so you know when an issue moves and what key stakeholders are saying. A political monitoring service can do this for you. Our guide to choosing a monitoring service covers what to look for.

Follow the formal steps too. Keep a tracker of each bill, inquiry and consultation you follow, with your position (support, support with amendments, oppose or monitoring), an owner and the next deadline, so nothing slips between people.

Keep a record of every engagement: who you met, what was said, what you promised and what they asked for. A shared record means anyone on the team can pick up a relationship, and it is what your reporting is built from. Our guide to government relations CRMs covers what that record should hold.

Measure what the work achieves

Measure at three levels, and report them side by side:

Keep the team’s contribution and the political outcome distinct. Governments decide for many reasons, and a record of meetings followed by a policy change doesn’t prove that one caused the other. Report what the team did, what moved and what government decided, and say plainly what you think made the difference.

Set the measures when you write the strategy, not when you write the report.

Review and refine

Review your strategy regularly, and refine it as the issue evolves. A rhythm that suits many teams:

• Weekly in sitting weeks: what moved, what’s due and who needs a call.
• Monthly: update the stakeholder map and positions.
• Quarterly: check progress against the objectives, and report to leadership.
• After a big moment: a budget, a reshuffle, an election or a new minister calls for a fresh look at the whole plan.

Stay inside the rules

• Consultant lobbyists must be registered. Third-party lobbyists, who lobby the Australian Government for clients, must be on the Register of Lobbyists and follow the Lobbying Code of Conduct, and ministers and officials must not knowingly deal with one who isn’t registered. Check a consultant’s registration before you hire them.
• In-house teams aren’t on the federal register. The Code doesn’t apply to an organisation, or its employees, lobbying on its own behalf. States and territories set their own rules, so check each one you deal with.
• Be accurate. An office that is given wrong information once will check everything you say afterwards. If you get something wrong, correct it quickly.

Our roadmap for government relations covers the other rules, including cooling-off periods for former officials and political donations.

A one-page template

Copy this outline and fill it in for each objective:

• Objective: the decision you need, from whom, by when.
• The ask: one sentence, specific enough to say yes to.
• Fallback: what you would accept instead.
• Decision path: how the decision gets made, and the dates that matter.
• Stakeholders: who decides and who influences, with their influence, position now and the position you need.
• Messages: your three reasons, the evidence for each, and the local angle.
• Engagement plan: who you will engage, how and when, and who owns each relationship.
• Allies and opponents: who will support you, who will argue against you and what they will say.
• Risks: what could knock the plan off course, and what you would do.
• Resources: the team, the chief executive’s time and the budget.
• Measures: activity, influence and outcome, set now.
• Review dates: when you will check progress and update the plan.

Worked example: a budget ask

Here is the template filled in for a fictional peak body, the Inland Health Alliance, which represents 45 rural health services. Its Rural Placements Program, also fictional, funds 600 graduate nurse placements a year and ends on 30 June 2027.

Objective. The program extended for four years from 1 July 2027, announced in the 2027–28 Budget in May 2027.

The ask. “Extend the Rural Placements Program for four years, at its current $38 million a year.”

Fallback. A one-year extension while the department evaluates the program.

Decision path. The department’s workforce area would draft a new policy proposal for the minister and agree its costing with Finance between December and February. The Expenditure Review Committee decides between February and April. Pre-budget submissions usually close at the end of January. So the department and the minister’s office need the Alliance’s case by December.

Messages.

• 600 graduates a year, and 7 in 10 still working in rural health two years later, from the Alliance’s own survey of members.
• A placement costs less than the agency staff a service would otherwise hire.
• The program supports the rural workforce priorities the minister has set out in Parliament.
• Locally: member services in 12 federal electorates, with the placements in each.

Stakeholders.

Engagement plan.

• October to November 2026: meet the minister’s adviser and brief the department. Watch supplementary estimates for what officials say about the program. Invite the 12 local MPs to visit a member service in a non-sitting week.
• December 2026 to January 2027: lodge a costed pre-budget submission. Ask the nursing and midwifery professional bodies to support it in writing.
• February 2027: the chief executive meets the minister with the latest retention figures. Ask the local MPs who visited to tell the minister what they saw. Before additional estimates, brief the two senators on the program’s results, so they can ask officials about it.
• March to April 2027: send the minister’s office new placement figures. No public campaign while the committee is deciding.
• May 2027: statements ready for budget night for each outcome: the extension, the fallback, or neither, with the plan for next year.

Allies and opponents. Allies are the nursing and midwifery bodies, rural councils and two state health departments. No one opposes the program outright; the competition is every other claim on the budget.

Risks. Savings pressure in the budget: show the agency costs the program avoids. A reshuffle: the department’s support carries over to a new minister, so build it early. A late evaluation: share the Alliance’s own data now.

Resources. The policy director owns the plan. The chief executive gives four meetings. The budget covers two Canberra trips and the member survey.

Measures. Activity: the submission lodged by the end of January, and every stakeholder on the map engaged by the end of February. Influence: the adviser and the department supportive by December, and the minister’s office asking for the costing by February. Outcome: the program extended in the 2027–28 Budget, or the fallback secured.

Review dates. Monthly at the executive meeting, and a full review after budget night.

Common questions

What should a government relations strategy include? The objective and the specific ask, how the decision gets made, who decides and influences it and where they stand, your messages and evidence, an engagement plan timed to the political calendar, the risks, who owns the work and how you will measure progress.

Is there a template for a government relations strategy? Yes. The one-page template above has a line for each part, from the objective and the ask to the measures and review dates. Copy it for each objective; the worked example shows one filled in for a budget ask.

How do you measure government relations? Measure activity (meetings held, submissions lodged), influence (positions moved, invitations to give evidence) and outcomes (what government decided), and report them side by side. Set the measures when you write the strategy, not at the end of the quarter.

How often should a government relations strategy be reviewed? Many teams check what moved each sitting week, update the stakeholder map monthly and report progress against the objectives each quarter. A budget, a reshuffle, an election or a new minister calls for a fresh look at the whole plan.

Do in-house government relations teams need to register as lobbyists? Not federally. The Australian Government’s Lobbying Code of Conduct doesn’t apply to organisations, or their employees, lobbying on their own behalf, so only third-party lobbyists, who act for clients, must register. States and territories set their own rules, so check each one you deal with.