Problematic procurement processes and difficult contracting terms are unlikely to make even the most passionate policymaker’s heart skip a beat. But Consult Australia’s WA Manager Emma Thunder is making impressive progress for members with a simple but powerful strategy. 

Emma began her professional life studying human geography, spending years in planning, and then many more as a policy advisor for Western Australian planning ministers. Stints with the Property Council and Planning Institute of Australia followed, before she joined Consult Australia in 2022.

“I have always been interested in how humans interact with the world. Planning is a technical space, but it is reliant on soft skills. When I fell into policy, I realised people often focus on logic and reason but forget about the human relationships.”

The power of persuasion, according to Aristotle, rests on three pillars: ethos, or authority, credibility and character; logos, or logic; and pathos, or an argument’s emotional appeal. Good advocates need all three, but policy work often leans too heavily on logos and ethos, Emma notes.

“We need to present a logical and reasoned argument, and we need personal and professional credibility. But government policymakers are human. If we forget that we are trying to appeal to humans, then our advocacy will fail.”

Consult Australia is dedicated to the success of consulting businesses in design, advisory and engineering. “Our members deliver solutions to the nation’s most complex challenges – but the issues that we champion aren’t always headline grabbing. The way we get governments to care is to bring the human connection to every story.”

Take Consult Australia’s recent work to reduce professional indemnity insurance thresholds for the state government’s new engineering panel. 

“The tender set the professional indemnity levels far too high, but this was pulled back after we advocated on our members’ behalf. We shared the human stories of the cost on small business, which in some cases were prohibitively high,” Emma says.

“The people in government are intelligent – they just aren’t exposed to the same information as us. But two days after I explained that many small businesses would not be able to participate in the panel, and how that would impact the sustainability of our local industry, the draft was changed.”

The most gifted advocates instinctively know how to ‘read the room’ – and that starts with an innate sense of curiosity and desire to create human connections. 

“I’m most interested in learning how someone ticks – whether that’s a minister or a Consult Australia member. Detail, facts and process are important. But ultimately, I want to know what’s going on for the person.”

There's plenty of work ahead. The most pressing challenge for Consult Australia members in Western Australia is the same as that around the country: criticality of pipeline certainty and visibility. This message is front-and-centre of Consult Australia's most recent submission to the Infrastructure Investment Program review panel. 

Consult Australia represented members’ interests during the drafting of the WA building engineers’ registration scheme and “we are now collaborating with several WA Government agency taskforces and working groups to champion collaborative contracting models and the role of designers in getting the design right up front,” Emma notes.

“What I like about Consult Australia is that our advocacy can be direct but also discreet. It can be strong, but also sensitive. We don’t go out telling the media that ‘Consult Australia’ won. But our members know it was us.”

Advocacy is a long game, Emma adds. 

“We deliberately take it slowly. We know we can’t always get wins straight away. But we are now sitting at the table with people we weren’t a year ago. 

“We want everyone to remember meeting with Consult Australia – and it won’t be because we’ve told them about procurement. It will be because we’ve struck an emotional connection.”