The Professionals: Strategy, Money and the Rise of the Political Campaigner in Australia

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Copyright © Stephen Mills 2014.

Stephen Mills asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Mills, Stephen, 1954- author.

The professionals : strategy, money and the rise of the political campaigner / Stephen Mills.

9781863956710 (paperback)

9781922231727 (ebook)

Campaign management--Australia--History. Political campaigns--Australia--History. Communication in politics--Australia. Marketing--Political aspects. Public relations and politics--Australia. Elections--Australia--History. Australia--Politics and government.

324.70994

CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Military Prototype

2. Numbers Man

3. A Meeting in London

4. National Campaign Director

5. A Bloodletting

6. A Question of Money

7. A Philosophy of Power

8. Contested Terrain

9. A Liberal Ascendancy

10. A Ground War

11. A Line of Succession

12. Micro-Targeting

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Notes on Sources

Bibliography

Index

For Helen, Janet, Chris

and of course Shane

FEDERAL/NATIONAL SECRETARIES OF THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY

FEDERAL DIRECTORS OF THE LIBERAL PARTY

INTRODUCTION

Election night, September 2013: Before a whooping crowd in the ballroom of Sydney’s Four Seasons Hotel, the prime minister-elect claimed victory for the Coalition parties. Thanking those who had contributed to the victory, Tony Abbott singled out for special praise the Liberal Party’s federal director, Brian Loughnane, who, he said, had run our most professional campaign ever. The moment passed with more cheers – but it raised important questions about contemporary Australian politics. What is a professional campaign? What does it mean to run such a campaign? The Liberal Party, of which Abbott was the parliamentary leader and Loughnane the organisational head, had been in existence for nearly seventy years and had won seventeen national elections, along with plenty more in the states and territories. So was 2013 actually their most professional campaign? To answer these questions, we need some way of defining party professionalism and measuring it across different election campaigns – and, for that matter, across different political parties; was the Liberals’ 2013 campaign more professional than that of the Labor Party, which was defeated after six turbulent years in office? And that leads to even bigger questions. Does professionalism actually work – that is, can it translate into electoral success and if so, how? If it does work, by somehow influencing the behaviour of voters, then the next question must be whether that is a good thing: if election campaigns are crucial events in our democratic life, are we happy that they are being run in a professional way? Do professional campaigns aim to provide what is best for the electorate, or simply what is most effective and efficient for their parties? Is a professional campaign something to be celebrated?

The prime minister’s compliment for the party official may have left the television audience scratching their heads over a simpler question: Brian Who? Party officials such as Brian Loughnane, or his Labor Party counterpart, national secretary George Wright, are far from household names. They stay out of sight, or at least off-camera, working in head offices and campaign headquarters that are closed to the media and to voters. Their work remains secret and invisible: formulating a campaign strategy, assembling a campaign team and raising the funds to deliver victory. Part of their identity as political professionals is a reticence, a protective silence about the party and its affairs. Loose lips sink ships. They might be glimpsed during an election campaign: shadowy backroom figures, briefing the candidate on their latest focus groups, or boasting about their campaign preparedness, or negotiating the rules for a leaders’ debate. Their names can be heard spoken rapidly at the end of TV advertisements, which by law must be authorised by them. On election night in 2013, it was Brian Loughnane who had interpreted the results and at around 8.45 pm privately told Tony Abbott he would win; he got a bear hug in exchange. After all the votes are counted, and whether their party has won or lost, the party officials make rare outings to the National Press Club, to spin the result as best they can. In this zero-sum contest, everything they say and do is directed at advancing their party’s interests relative to their opponent.

As a consequence of this secrecy and spin, Australians have lacked a convincing account of who these party officials are, what they do, and how they have come to change the conduct of Australian politics. In turn, we have not been able to address the broader questions about professionalism. This book attempts to fill those gaps. It seeks first to assemble those episodic glimpses of party officials into a continuous narrative – to put flesh on these shadowy figures, to peer underneath their mask of professional reticence – and thus to recognise them not as incidental spear-carriers but as influential political actors in their own right. By retrieving the lost lineage of these party officials it is possible to provide a new perspective on Australian election campaigns and to create an alternative narrative of Australian political history. Instead of thinking about politics solely in terms of what happens in Parliament House – the rise and fall of prime ministers and opposition leaders, the clash of interests in Cabinet, the theatre of Question Time, the scope and impact of ministerial decision making – this narrative shifts the focus to the parties’ head offices. It shifts our attention from the public activities of candidates and voters to the more secretive operations of party officials.

The raw material for this narrative is provided by the national party officials themselves. Loughnane stands at the end of a line of party officials that began with the formation of the Liberal Party in 1945. He is the eighth person appointed to the job of federal director of the Liberal Party of Australia and in 2013 was directing his fourth federal election campaign. George Wright, directing just his first federal campaign, is Labor’s fifteenth national secretary in a series that stretches back nearly 100 years to 1915. In all, twenty-three individuals have served as Labor Party national secretary or Liberal Party federal director, of whom by good fortune more than half were still alive when I was researching this book. All of them – nine from the Labor Party and five Liberals, with careers stretching back to the 1960s – agreed to be interviewed about their experiences in head office and their attitudes towards professionalism.

As well as giving us an insight into the careers of these influential figures, these interviews (supplemented by contemporary documents and reports) allow us to locate them within the bigger picture of Australian politics. Instead of treating individual officials and election campaigns in isolation, this narrative places them within a longer history, allowing us to trace changes in campaigning over many decades. Further, instead of placing the Labor and Liberal parties in separate boxes, this narrative considers how they overlap: these parties are eternal rivals, of course, but they have much in common. Put simply, they both want to win elections, and they are both determined to adopt the most effective – perhaps, the most professional – methods of doing so. The interviews shed light on what a professional campaign looks like from within, from the perspectives of the people running it. From this foundation, this book seeks to address the bigger questions about what professionalism means in the context of Australian politics – and whether it is a desirable thing.

Brian Loughnane was far from the first Australian party official to be described as a professional. The word has been applied to party organisations for more than fifty years. As long ago as 1961, when Menzies was still prime minister, one Canberra journalist wrote about the highly paid, highly skilled team of professional political experts working in the Liberal Party’s national head office. In 1968, Labor’s federal secretary, Cyril Wyndham, was praised by another journalist as a professional among amateurs. In the lead-up to the 1972 election, Labor’s structure was reorganised by the party’s national campaign director, Mick Young, to provide what he called a more professional, unified approach. For the commentator Paul Kelly, the re-election of the Hawke government in 1990 was a case study of Labor’s superior professionalism, while in 2001 Brian Loughnane’s predecessor as Liberal Party federal director, Lynton Crosby, attributed the re-election of the Howard government in part to the professionalism of the Liberal Party team. Many other actors in Australian politics can also be described as professional: MPs, their numerous staffers, marketing experts such as pollsters and advertising agents, consultants, journalists and lobbyists. Sometimes the word has positive connotations, but it can also carry darker meanings. In 2006, a disillusioned Liberal Party member bemoaned the rise of a class of political professionals in his party, whom he described as hacks … young men and women who want to spend every hour of their day playing party politics. By 2012, the former Labor minister Lindsay Tanner was criticising the ALP’s distinct class of political professionals for being adept at the mechanics of politics but largely uninterested in its purpose.

Before proceeding further, then, it is necessary to deal with the obvious problem: how to define this word professional? It is widely used, but its application and meaning are ambiguous.

*

Money, of course, provides a basic point of differentiation between the professional and the amateur political operator. Cyril Wyndham was appointed Labor’s first full-time federal secretary in 1963. The post came with an annual salary of £3000 – around $80,000 in today’s money. Interviewed in 2011 about his professional status, he acknowledged that his job put him in a different category from the rank-and-file party members:

Most of the people in branches are amateurs. That’s alright. No disparagement to them. But you can’t be in a job like I had, and be an amateur.

This points to the first and most obvious aspect of political professionalism. Professionals are paid for their work: they can make a living out of it. It is their full-time job. This economic aspect is fundamental to an understanding of professionalism. In tennis and golf, so in a political party: there is a chasm between the pro and the am.

Labor’s national secretary in the 1990s, Bob Hogg, made the same point about work in head office: "It’s not Amateur Hour. You’re dealing with important things. His predecessor in the 1980s, Bob McMullan, described campaign work as not a part-time activity for dilettantes. In the Liberal Party, Lynton Crosby likewise dismissed party members who loved to play the game of politics, stacking branches and all that. That’s not professional politics." Crosby went further:

In some countries – and the [British] Conservative Party has been like this somewhat – politics … has been the pastime of the well-meaning amateur … What I mean by a political professional is someone who as a career course effectively chose politics, and it wasn’t a thing that you did on weekends and got excited by.

As paid employees of the party, the officials are different from the volunteer members – and from the party’s elected MPs, who are paid by the taxpayer. Even within head office, the officials stand apart from those around them. In both parties, formal decision-making authority lies with an elected committee: Labor’s national executive and the Liberals’ federal executive. These central executive groups are responsible for selecting and hiring the party officials, and in a formal sense these officials report to the committees’ elected chair, the party president. Originally, then, the paid employees were subordinate to the honorary office holders and provided them with clerical and logistical support. (This was of course the original meaning of the word secretariat.) In practice, however, this structure has gradually been turned on its head. The employee has become an employer, running a large central office of staff and consultants; the bureaucratic functionary has become the primary decision maker; the secretariat has become a head office and campaign headquarters. As Crosby observed:

Once I think it was a case that the director was … [someone who] provided a secretariat service to a committee of people who provided decisions. But that’s changed. The federal director/campaign director is now a professional, a person professionally engaged to be the campaign manager … Of course there is an elected president but you are the professional, and people work for you directly.

Alongside this transformation, the work of the party officials has also become much more complex and demanding. A second characteristic of political professionalism relates to the technical competence of the party officials: they have to be very good at what they do. Campaign managers need high-level skills in a diverse set of disciplines, and need the judgement to apply those skills within a challenging and ever-changing political environment. Tim Gartrell, Labor’s national secretary in the 2004 and 2007 elections, compared campaign management to assembling a puzzle:

You’ve got to be skilled and understand how a campaign works, you’ve got to understand the role of strategy, the role of focus groups, advertising, the party, how it all fits together. It’s quite a complex puzzle to put together. I’d argue that’s a pretty reasonable professional achievement.

For Andrew Robb, Liberal federal director in the 1990s, professional campaign management required an appropriate mix of the science (technical know-how) and the art (judgement). Getting the balance right is a matter of practical experience and learning:

I did learn that judgement was important. But … the science had to come first. Then trying to predict what you do about the issue – that’s when the nose came in, the experience.

Moreover, these skills must be applied within a context of resource scarcity and intense competition. Campaign managers make choices between what is technologically available, strategically desirable and financially affordable. Trade-offs and efficiencies are necessary; few campaigns can afford everything. As Gartrell’s successor, Karl Bitar, Labor’s national secretary during the 2010 hung Parliament campaign, put it, A professional does their job to the best of their abilities given the resources they’ve got, that’s how I view it.

How do campaign managers acquire these skills? Part of their expertise comes from formal education. Since the 1970s university degrees, usually in arts or economics, have been the norm for national secretaries and federal directors. Yet Gartrell probably spoke for most of them when he said his tertiary education was less relevant than his exposure to practical politics: Doing political science at uni [is relevant but] less so than understanding the [labour] movement. Coming up through the movement is really important. For party officials, it is repeated exposure to campaigns over a long period of time, and regular practical experience, that builds professionalism. Gartrell went on: [It’s] not something that someone can pick up very quickly. You can’t just walk in the door and do it. Gartrell’s predecessor, Geoff Walsh, who directed Labor’s 2001 campaign, suggested that you just acquire skills by practice. For Walsh, professionalism came with practising those skills at the highest level over a long period, developing confidence in my judgement based on what I knew on what would and wouldn’t work.

The same point was made by the Liberal Party officials. Crosby defined a professional as someone who permanently works on it – doesn’t just get involved in a campaign [without] that reservoir of experience and skill obtained over a long period of time. Brian Loughnane declared that Experience matters in these jobs … There’s no other job quite like them and there’s no adequate external preparation, really.

Where is experience acquired? Party organisations have increasingly looked for opportunities to expose potential managers to the challenges of campaigning. Both major parties operate active exchange networks with their international counterparts, allowing their officials to experience campaigns in the US, Britain and New Zealand. But better opportunities – more frequent and more relevant – are provided in Australia, in state and territory election campaigns. For many years, Labor’s national head office had the edge in managerial experience because it promoted only party officials who had already managed campaigns for their state branches. This reached a high-water mark between 1969 and 1982, when three Labor state secretaries, David Combe, Bob McMullan and Bob Hogg, managed fifteen state-wide campaigns between them (in South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria respectively) before arriving in the national head office. Labor then changed tack, selecting its next national secretary, Gary Gray, not from the ranks of the state secretaries but from within the national head office, where he had experienced at least five campaigns as assistant to McMullan and Hogg.

The Liberals came late to the practice of promoting experienced state secretaries. Only Lynton Crosby and Brian Loughnane came to the national head office as former state directors, of Queensland and Victoria respectively. Nevertheless, the Liberals have consistently promoted from within, with their last three federal directors – Andrew Robb, Lynton Crosby and Brian Loughnane – all serving as deputies in head office and getting high-level campaign experience before taking on the federal directorship. For both parties, then, only seasoned campaign practitioners are selected for the national head office.

Many of the officials I spoke to stressed their passion for campaign work in particular, as distinct from other types of political work. As Crosby declared, I can administrate but I’m not an administrator, and I’m not a press person and I’m not a policy person. I’m just interested in campaigns. Karl Bitar said much the same thing, recalling his apprenticeship as an organiser in Labor’s NSW branch:

I absolutely loved the campaigning … It is so full-on … It is impossible to do in twelve hours. We were working eighteen-hour days for years. [When] I look back on it, I say I cannot believe I did it at that age … I threw myself into it. It was hard, hard work. I loved the campaigning – absolutely loved the campaigning.

They may relish the work – but technical skills and practical experience, they stress, are more important than passion. Campaign management is for the dispassionate expert, not the emotional partisan; for the full-time player, not the part-time enthusiast who, as Crosby put it, gets excited about it at weekends. For Crosby, the professional is a quality controller, capable of understanding voter behaviour in a rational or clinical way. Party officials are equipped with special knowledge about political reality, and part of their job therefore is to discipline the politicians, who may not be so rational:

All too often [in politics] people operate on anecdote rather than reality. It’s very hard, particularly for a lot of politicians, to be sufficiently clinical – because they’re caught up in it – [in] what needs to be done and what’s happening. In a way you’re a quality controller, because you’re trying to get to the core of things, because you’ve got to get people [i.e. voters] to behave in a particular way. You’re seeking to understand why people are motivated or why they are thinking a particular way, not what they’re thinking.

Bob Hogg similarly insisted that professionalism required rigorous analysis:

I think I am professional in my conduct and approach, et cetera, if that means – not being infallible, but trying to be rigorous intellectually, and fair and reasonable, and put aside prejudices.

Thus for the party professionals, politics is a chaotic world of raw passion and brutal clashes of ideas and egos. They don’t run away from that – they just think it gets in the way of winning elections, where the real job is to identify and respond to the needs of voters. That requires objectivity and deliberation, methodology and measurement, rather than passion and prejudice. Campaigning in this view is a scientific exercise. According to Andrew Robb, inspiration has given way to method, and guesswork has been supplanted by measurable effectiveness:

In the end you’re running a professional outfit if you can measure the effectiveness of a lot of what you do. I thought in the end we were able to see where we had performed well and where we hadn’t. We had some reasonable capacity to judge the effectiveness of our direct mail, for instance.

Lynton Crosby again:

Politics involves people, and people have their different hopes and aspirations, so it’s not about dehumanising it. It’s just putting a structure and process and – what’s the opposite of professional? Amateur? – not being amateurish: not thinking we can design a leaflet and we’ll win. It’s getting to the core of what really drives people, and responding in a professional way to that.

The logical consequence of this approach might be that campaign professionalism becomes completely impersonal, detached from any political commitment. It is already clear that officials from both major parties define their professional challenges in very similar ways. Could an official trained in one party apply their technical expertise, their dispassionate scientific skills, for the other party? Karl Bitar conceded the hypothetical:

Q: Would you have been able to do [Brian] Loughnane’s job? Would he have been able to do yours?

A: Could I have done his job? What aspects of his job? Could I have chaired his National Executive? No.

Q: Run a campaign?

A: It took me fifteen years to appreciate what it takes to run the Labor organisation. It took him just as long to tell how to run the Liberal organisation. Could I just go in and run a Liberal Party campaign? Probably I could, yes, why not? If you gave me enough time … Could Brian come and run my campaign? I have no doubt. I know Brian well, and I have no doubt he could run a really professional campaign for the Labor Party … Not dealing with the National Executive, not dealing with the unions, if you said to Brian, Do your research, develop ads, brief the leader, for the Labor Party, I reckon Brian could do it. And I could probably do it for him.

You wouldn’t do it. But you could, because you are a professional at campaigning.

You wouldn’t do it – you could, but you wouldn’t, campaign professionally for the other side. Bitar’s frank assessment underlines that professional party officials – like professionals in more traditional fields, such as doctors and lawyers – are obliged to serve their clients. Professionals devote their technical skills to the best interests of whomever they are working for. Political professionals do the same to serve their client, the party. And they do so as partisans – cool, dispassionate partisans perhaps, but they are party members, animated by commitment to the cause; they are party insiders; and they are reliant on their party for the training and experience on which their professional competence is based. Without a professional commitment to serve their party, officials would be open to the charge of being careerists or mercenaries or mere contractors – guns for hire offering their technical skills to the highest bidder. In fact these party officials are exclusive in their partisan attachment; they would not cross party lines to help the other party win. Labor’s Gary Gray was uneasy about the professional label precisely because it seemed to downplay this commitment. He insisted on partisanship:

For me, my time as a party official [was] driven not by the fact that I got paid for doing it. It [was] driven by a very deep passion and a commitment to the agenda … I think professionalism can sometimes be taken to mean you’re a gun for hire. A good political professional is a professional partisan.

The notion of serving one’s client, however, does provide what can be termed the prevailing ideology of the professional – not in the sense of a political ideology, but in the sense of a code or core set of principles which guide the professional’s conduct. Many party officials expressed a view that their job required a commitment to the party as an enduring and overriding priority. For Cyril Wyndham, professionalism was accompanied by commitment to a cause:

Whilst you had to be professional, you also had to believe in something. Which I did. l believed … It’s like running a business. Running a business with a cause.

For Bob Hogg, a party official was a bit like a public servant:

In other words, you had a service duty to the membership and to the organisation, to its growth and its betterment, its expansion, its intellectual capacity.

For Labor’s George Wright, the same attitude prevailed:

When I came to [the national head office], I thought the main job is to run the campaign, and of course that’s a very important part of it … But then you start to realise that you are actually also the custodian of an important institution, that you’ve got a responsibility to ensure is healthy and functioning and capable of sustaining itself.

For Lynton Crosby, the office of federal director carried a similarly long-term obligation to the party:

As the federal director you are a steward of the party’s interest … You have a job to protect the party’s interests. While leaders come and go, the party goes on forever. So you’ve got an obligation to ensure the party continues to be strong and has continuity.

Tony Eggleton, Liberal Party federal director for seventeen years from 1974, also articulated this understanding of professional service to the party as a whole:

I saw myself as a professional