Is this about a contract? Yes. This should be subject to the lobbying rules because it is an expenditure of public money. This is about how public money is being used for a public purpose.
If there are people trying to influence the government on who should get that contract and for what.... I understand that if you have a small contract, there's a circle around contracts that are small enough that you don't need this kind of transparency, and that's fair enough, but if you're talking about a large enough contract that it's a significant chunk of change from the public's perspective, there's nothing wrong with having transparency around it.