A lifelong partisan of the conservative cause, Lynton Crosby’s techniques helped the Australian Liberals to a string of victories, reports Stephen Mills
The only Australian to have built an international business as a campaign consultant, Lynton Crosby no doubt offers David Cameron essentially the same successful campaign model he has provided to conservative leaders in Canberra, Ottawa and Wellington.
The model’s strategy is all about targeting key voters and their key issues. Tactical execution emphasises political messages that cut through because they are simple, clear and relevant. Its managerial structure delivers professional advice direct to the parliamentary leader. And the model as a whole is driven by market research which penetrates the emotions and values of voters and finds points of leverage to influence them on election day.
If this all sounds technical and dispassionate, Crosby also has to be understood as a lifelong partisan of the conservative cause. Born in 1956 in Kadina in South Australia’s copper belt, he joined the Liberal party – Australia’s Tories – as an 18-year-old, and recalls handing out leaflets in Adelaide’s Rundle Mall attacking the Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam in the 1970s. He was an active Young Liberal, worked as a staffer for an assortment of Liberal MPs, and waved the Liberal banner as a candidate in a safe Labor seat in the 1982 state elections. An economics graduate from the University of Adelaide, he signed his letters to voters ‘Lynton Crosby B Ec’. For so grossly overestimating the Australian voter, perhaps, he lost heavily.
It was not in parliament but in the party’s head office that Crosby made his contribution to the Liberal cause. From the late 1980s, Crosby was involved in one election campaign after another in South Australia, in Queensland as state director, in Canberra from 1994 as deputy federal director, and then as federal director of the Liberal party for six years from 1997. The strategic mastermind behind two of prime minister John Howard’s four election wins, Crosby is the ablest, most experienced and most successful campaigner to have emerged from the Liberal side.
In Australia, party officials are chosen by the organisation, not the parliamentary leader, so they are more autonomous than their British counterparts. The most senior of them – the Liberals’ federal director and Labor’s national secretary – automatically serve as the national campaign directors. In that capacity they set the campaign strategy, hire the marketing consultants, commission the market research, plan the television advertising, coordinate the grassroots, run the campaign headquarters – and pay the bills.
Interviewed as part of my recent doctoral research project, Crosby defined campaign strategy as answering the question: ‘Who will decide the outcome of this election? Where are they? What matters to them? How do you communicate with them?’ An early Liberal convert to the professional model of campaign management, Crosby recognised that real campaigns are unlike those described in a civics textbook. For the campaign manager, the point is not about informing a deliberative electorate how to choose rationally between rival platforms. It is not about reassuring the party faithful, appealing to the nation, placating interest groups, or pleasing the media. It is about winning. To win, parties need to focus their campaigns on the relatively few marginal seats they need for a parliamentary majority – and, within them, to focus on those voters who, if they change their mind, will deliver victory.
Crosby learned this lesson the hard way, coming of age during an era of Labor dominance. Under prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating the party perfected marginal seat campaigning, pulling off repeated against-the-odds triumphs. In 1990 Hawke won a comfortable majority on less than 40 per cent of the primary vote. Crosby’s big break came when, in the lead-up to the 1996 Australian election, federal director Andrew Robb told him to develop the Liberals’ marginal seat skills.
Crosby visited the United States to learn targeting techniques from the Republicans in 1994 and in Australia coordinated a barrage of direct mail, advertising and other activities into the Liberals’ target seats. He shot 20 advertisements with 20 Liberal candidates in different parts of the country uttering 20 local versions of the same national anti-Keating message, and broadcast them on regional, not national, TV stations. The advertisements may not have lifted the standards of civic discourse; they were simply aimed at winning. In a Brisbane city council election in 1994, Crosby had put on air an advertisement about Labor’s urban infill policies. It featured a woman opening a sardine can. It was cheap, negative and dislikeable – and yet it cut through. Crosby lost that campaign, but in 1996 his regional TV ads contributed to the Liberals’ return from the wilderness.
Effective marginal seat campaigning relies on effective market research. The most important relationship in Crosby’s career has been with market researcher Mark Textor. Textor, a ponytailed statistician from the Northern Territory, had been hired by Robb in the early 1990s and, swapping the ponytail for a chrome dome, became the Liberals’ first in-house pollster. Robb admired Textor not just for his focus groups but for translating them into campaign messages; as he put it in the doctoral research interview I conducted, ‘He seemed to have strategic insight.’ Many researchers, he continued, can ‘tell you what’s in people’s minds very accurately and very well, but they can’t translate that very well into strategy and to see the points of leverage. This is where Textor stands apart.’
Textor’s major contribution in 1996 was to identify and describe the type of voters the Liberals needed to target: the so-called ‘Howard battlers’. These were former Labor voters, typically blue-collar, low-income, working-class males who had drifted away from Labor, put off – according to Textor’s research – by Keating’s preoccupation with social and cultural issues (like making Australia a republic) instead of bread-and-butter issues (inflation, jobs and supermarket prices). These Australian versions of the ‘Reagan Democrats’ became the focus of the Liberals’ electoral strategy. Howard became their champion, and once-safe Labor seats in the outer suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne became the Liberals’ new hunting ground.
To seduce them, Crosby and Textor developed ‘wedge’ strategies against Labor. In 1998, Labor had successfully used its own wedge against Howard over the controversial xenophobe Pauline Hanson, forcing him to alienate either his conservative supporters who liked what they heard from Hanson or the moderates whom she appalled. When the next election came around in 2001, the Liberals reversed the wedge. Howard refused to allow the Norwegian merchant vessel, the Tampa, to land hundreds of asylum seekers rescued from a sinking fishing boat. The Howard battlers loved it, and Labor’s leadership chose to support Howard accordingly while its pro-asylum supporters defected to the Greens.
Crosby, unapologetic, claimed Howard’s position on ‘illegal immigrants’ showed his strength as a leader. For targeting the battlers was both a political and a rhetorical strategy. Textor’s research shaped Liberal advertising and even informed Howard’s choice of words and deliberately plain style of speech. Labor’s advertising consultant Neil Lawrence commented admiringly in 2007 that ‘the shortest political contact line in this country is Mark Textor to John Howard.’ Meanwhile, more than a decade later, Labor has still not regained the trust of the battlers in western Sydney, while the Greens continue to pick off their supporters from the left.
With election wins in 1998 and 2001 under his belt, Crosby quit head office. ‘I once had fire in my belly. The belly got bigger, the fire has got smaller,’ he quipped to a journalist. On the contrary: Crosby promptly teamed up with Textor in an eponymous consultancy offering their research and campaign skills to the world. The Sydney office of Crosby Textor is lined with framed magazine articles about their corporate clients; their political clientele, never discussed, has included New Zealand’s National party under John Key and the Canadian Conservatives under Stephen Harper, along with British Conservatives Michael Howard, Boris Johnson and Cameron. On its website, Crosby Textor promotes a new market research tool which promises to provide ‘the words, the phrases and the concepts’ to build ‘the widest possible base of public or political support’.
If you had to summarise Crosby’s campaign management style, you could say: target, cut through and wedge. Crosby himself is far too sophisticated a strategist ever to resort to such crude simplification. ‘Really,’ he told me, ‘I’ve always been interested in campaigns. 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.’
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Stephen Mills is a lecturer at the graduate school of government at the University of Sydney. His recent doctoral research on campaign professionals included interviews with every living Labor and Liberal campaign director
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