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I think it’s unrealistic to expect voters to take a personal interest in all policy issues. There’s too many, they’re too complicated, and people aren’t interested.

I’ve just been reviewing proposed legislation the government has introduced recently. There’s a bill to replace the National Skills Commissioner with a statutory body called Jobs and Skills Australia. There’s a bill to allow Medicare fraud-prevention mechanisms to apply to non-medical practitioners. There’s a bill to remove one of two definitions of “export entry advice”.

No normal person is paying the faintest attention to these bills. They don’t have an opinion, and don’t want to have an opinion. And fair enough! I wouldn’t be paying attention either if it wasn’t my job.

The reality is that the majority of legislation is like this—unheralded, uncontroversial, technical, boring, and quite often jointly supported by both sides of politics. The issues you hear about in the media are the exceptions, the ones that animate large numbers of people. Taxes, inflation, jobs, healthcare—things that directly affect lots of people in clear and tangible ways. So the question is, are EA issues like the majority of issues, or are they the exception?

I don’t think they are exceptions, or that they should be seen that way. “Place regulatory restrictions on gain of function bio research” or “Allocate foreign aid according to objective measures of impact” fits right into that category of boring technical stuff. It’s not undemocratic, people can still get upset about it if they want to. But realistically they’re going to be happy to just shrug and say “Yeah, fair enough, I guess”, and leave it to the experts. And that’s not a bad thing.

Answer: There shouldn’t be a balance. The most important thing for EA is to be effective, and other values are assessed on that criterion. It doesn’t mean taking a stand for or against democratic politics.

I think direct advocacy is the most effective technique, but being an elected official is by far the most effective position.

Having a vote on legislation is nice, but it’s actually quite rare for your individual vote to be pivotal. If you get lucky you might end up being in a Joe Manchin position for one term, and leverage that to do some deals to advance your priorities, but most politicians never get into that position.

But the great thing about being an elected legislator is that you get access that most lobbyists can only dream of. People take your calls, you can get meetings, people will hear you out. A Senator has the ability to be a far more effective lobbyist than any actual lobbyist.

It’s that process of building connections and alliances, influencing others, negotiating, agitating for your issues of concern that separates really effective legislators from the empty suits.

And of course if you manage to get into an executive leadership position—a Minister or a Governor for example—you get the ability to just do things. There’s always constraints, but there’s a lot that can be done within them.

So if you want to have a positive impact in politics, and you see yourself as someone with the right personality, skillset, and connections to get elected—that is the most impactful thing you can do. But also, on a personal level, if you want to go down that path please do it with your eyes open. Politics is often an emotionally brutal experience. Be sure it’s what you want.

In terms of framing—this is really important. I often say that good politics is not getting everyone to think the same way, it’s getting everyone to vote the same way. You need to tailor your message to your audience.

For example, I think with animal welfare issues there’s a lot of people who are quite supportive of reasonable, non-prohibitive measures to improve animals’ wellbeing, but are badly turned off by any sort of vegan, abolish-animal-agriculture absolutism. So for those people the message “You can eat eggs laid by chickens living a good life” is way more appealing than “Banning caged eggs is a small but important step towards ending the animal holocaust we are perpetrating every day”. I think groups like PETA are very counter-productive, and send the message to many people that caring about animal welfare makes you a crazy extremist that splashes fake blood on people.

Some people obviously have a clear moral vision and are not willing to compromise for political expediency. I understand and respect that. But those people should not get involved in politics. It’s inherently a field where success comes from working with people you disagree with and making ugly compromises.