Qualification on your disagreement
First of all, there is so much work to do that often if you miss those meetings, you miss out. Except on their key issues, politicians tend to become figureheads, rubber stamping choices made by staffers. So a lot of policy is made at what is supposedly a non-policy level. And conversely, after policy is made, what it turns into depends on how it is implemented at lower levels.
But I do agree that there are plenty of meetings that are useless to monitor. (You can remove the words "to monitor" and I still agree with the sentence.) That said, if there is an "out" which government and industry can use to "fly below the radar" on controversial stuff, I firmly believe that they will seek the shade. Therefore I am not inclined to leave them with any.
Cheers,
Ben
