The journey of an idea into law is long and tortuous.
Few people have nurtured an idea and taken it through the ebbs and flows of the legislative journey.
It is an arduous journey that even experienced journeymen don’t take lightly. It takes many years of hard work. Success is not guaranteed.
The biggest challenge is that the many steps a law goes through – from ideation to adoption – are unknown to the public and most lobbyists. The actual map is not documented in one place. There is no reliable GPS. And few people have taken the time to draw the map of this long journey down on paper.
The key steps in the legislative journey are the moments in time when the ‘real’ decisions are taken. Few of them are public. These are the moments like the entry of an initiative into eDecide, the launch of an inter-service consultation, or the agreement of a Political Group to a voting line. They are not public or advertised.
Out of around 69 steps involved in the ordinary legislative procedure, the really important moments are private. Many lobbyists don’t even know the steps eexist, let alone how to find out about them.
To discover the genuinely important information, the information that can help you change the outcome depends on a well-developed network of people across all institutions and mainstream political families. If you have this, you can help your clients secure the outcomes they want.
If you don’t, you will be reporting long after the real decisions have been made. You’ll be too late to influence outcomes.
The best service for many is to provide a real-world map of the legislative journey they are embarking on. Warnings for pitfalls and traps should be given. That map is valuable in itself.
Each process, whether they are delegated acts, RPS measures, or other legislative procedures, has its own specialised maps.
If you use the real map, you’ll see much of what is unforeseen. If you are serious, you’ll use someone to guide you through what is unforeseen. If you only use the public map, you’ll likely get lost.