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Most organisations meet Canberra for the first time on a bad day. A bill appears, or a regulator writes, or a minister says something unhelpful in Question Time, and the board starts asking who knows someone. The conversations that would have mattered happened months before that, in the departments and the offices where the problem was first defined. We have watched this from the press gallery, from a ministerial office and from the corporate side. The same five mistakes do most of the damage.

They arrive after the policy has been written

By the time an exposure draft is public, the policy has been through a department, a minister’s office and usually a cabinet committee. Everyone who touched it has defended it at least once. Asking for a change at that point means asking people to reopen an argument they consider closed. The moment that counts comes earlier, while the problem is still being defined: the consultation paper, the terms of reference for a review, the window for budget submissions. Those dates are published in advance. Organisations that work to them spend their effort where it can still move something.

They confuse access with influence

Meetings are not hard to get. Being remembered after one is the hard part. A minister’s office sees dozens of delegations a week, and the ones invited back brought something the office could use: a number the department did not have, a compromise that could survive the party room, an honest account of who else the decision would hit. A reputation for being right, and for being reasonable about what you are asking, is built one accurate briefing at a time. It cannot be assembled in a hurry.

An office will take the meeting. Whether it takes the next one depends on what you left behind.

They brief one side of the building

Governments rarely control the Senate. Bills get amended, delayed and sometimes rewritten by the opposition and the crossbench, and the committee process hands every one of those senators a public platform. A case that has only ever been made to the government will be tested in a hearing room by people who have never heard it. Briefing across the Parliament is how an amendment stops being a surprise.

They treat the media as a separate problem

What an organisation says in public sets the terms of what it can negotiate in private. Ministers read the same gallery copy their advisers read, and so do the crossbenchers working out how to vote. Position, polling and press get planned in the same room, by people who know how a story travels through Parliament House, or they end up working against each other.

They stop when the vote is won

A law is a starting point. What it does in practice gets settled afterwards, in the regulations, the guidance notes and the decisions of bodies like the Foreign Investment Review Board and the competition and tax authorities. The relationships that carried the argument through the Parliament are the ones needed through implementation, and by then the next issue is usually already forming.

None of this needs a large team. It needs a few people who know the building, who are trusted on both sides of it, and who were engaged well before the bad day arrived.

If this is already on your board’s agenda, it is worth a conversation before it becomes urgent.