 
#

Published by Black Inc.,

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Copyright © Stephen Mills 2014. 

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

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 

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 | LIFE DATES | TERM IN OFFICE | ELECTIONS AS NATIONAL CAMPAIGN DIRECTOR

---|---|---|---

ARCH STEWART | 1867–1925 | 1915–25

|

DANIEL McNAMARA | 1876–1947 | 1925–46

|

PATRICK KENNELLY | 1900–1981 | 1946–54

|

JACK SCHMELLA | 1908–1960 | 1954–60

|

F. E. CHAMBERLAIN | 1900–1984 | 1961–63

|

CYRIL WYNDHAM | 1930–2012 | 1963–69

|

MICK YOUNG | 1936–1996 | 1969–72 | 1972

DAVID COMBE | 1943– | 1973–81 | 1974, 1975, 1977, 1980

BOB McMULLAN | 1947– | 1981–88 | 1983, 1984, 1987

BOB HOGG | 1937– | 1988–93 | 1990, 1993

GARY GRAY | 1958– | 1993–2000 | 1996, 1998

GEOFF WALSH | 1953– | 2000–03 | 2001

TIM GARTRELL | 1971– | 2003–08 | 2004, 2007

KARL BITAR | 1971– | 2008–11 | 2010

GEORGE WRIGHT | 1968– | 2011– | 2013

FEDERAL DIRECTORS OF THE LIBERAL PARTY | LIFE DATES | TERM IN OFFICE | ELECTIONS AS NATIONAL CAMPAIGN DIRECTOR

---|---|---|---

DON CLELAND | 1901–1975 | 1945–51

|

ROBERT WILLOUGHBY | 1908–1993 | 1951–69

|

BEDE HARTCHER | 1918–1977 | 1969–74

|

TIM PASCOE | 1939– | 1974

|

TONY EGGLETON | 1932– | 1974–91 | 1975, 1977, 1980, 1983, 1984, 1987, 1990

ANDREW ROBB | 1951– | 1991–97 | 1993, 1996

LYNTON CROSBY | 1956– | 1997–2003 | 1998, 2001

BRIAN LOUGHNANE | 1957– | 2003– | 2004, 2007, 2010, 2013

#

# 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 in the sense of a professional behind-the-scenes person, who would make things happen, bring all the sections of the party together, enjoy the confidence of the parliamentary party and the organisation, and perform a professional job for the party.  Delivering on a professional job for the party was how I saw my life. 

So what are the best interests of this client, the political party?  How are those enduring responsibilities of service and stewardship to be fulfilled?  For the party official there is only one answer: it is only by winning elections that the party can attain power, implement its policy goals and endure as an institution.  Others in the party can bother about setting those goals; the party officials see it as their job to enable their achievement through electoral victory.  Labor's Bob McMullan was insistent on this point:

We're not running a debating society where the significant thing is, "How much chance did I get to speak?"  We're running a political party that aspires to govern the country... [The] fundamental drivers, the thing that distinguishes [the party] from other organisations you run, is that its job, its only real job, is to win the election. 

Lynton Crosby was just as definitive in relation to the Liberals:

Professional politics in my book is... acting professionally in an objective and impartial way to provide considered advice and support for the party to achieve its objectives of winning elections by running good campaigns.  That's what I mean... There is no point in having a well-run organisation where the paper flows in a timely manner if you never win an election. 

Those opposite numbers in the 2010 campaign, Karl Bitar and Brian Loughnane, agreed on this point:

I saw my primary job as getting the government re-elected.  I saw that as my primary role.—Bitar

The other way to look at it is, my job is to win elections... We are a political organisation.  We are not a business.  We exist to win elections.  We are not a lobby group.  So the key focus is to win elections.—Loughnane

*

In summary, political professionalism can be defined as a combination of economic, technical and ideological traits: the professional earns a living by applying scarce and specialised skills in the interests of a client.  As the interviews suggest, this definition applies to, and is accepted by, party officials of both major parties.  Labor and Liberal officials have fundamentally similar ideas about the professional character of their work. 

None of this should suggest that party officials are "professionals" in exactly the same sense as doctors and lawyers.  They share a similar commitment to serving a client.  But where entry to the medical and legal professions is strictly controlled through peer assessment, this is not true of political professionalism.  Doctors and lawyers with appropriate credentials are able to self-employ, to set appropriate fees, and to join colleges or societies that govern their compliance with agreed standards of ethical behaviour.  The same cannot be said of the political professional.  There is no certificate, no college and no fellows.  Critically, where the professions of medicine and law are based on an extensive body of knowledge, the skills of political professionals are, as we have seen, largely derived from practical experience.  One political scientist, Maggie Scammell, has described this knowledge as more like "folk wisdom," and on that basis describes campaign managers not as professionals but as practitioners of a craft. 

The problem with this approach is that it positions political professionalism as some sort of recent derivation from those other more traditional occupations.  Professionalism in fact has a long history in scholarly discussions of representative democracy.  In the classic distinction made by the German sociologist Max Weber in 1919, one can make a profession out of politics in two ways.  One can live "for" politics, making it one's vocation, deriving inner meaning from political pursuits – or one can live "from" politics, earning a livelihood from it.  Weber insisted that these are not mutually exclusive; indeed they often go hand in hand: "Generally, one does both," he observed.  In this sense, elected politicians and their skilled advisers, engaged full-time in paid political work either as a vocation or as a source of income, are essentially different from the citizen-voters who are called upon occasionally to deliberate, speak out or cast a vote, but who live their lives apart from politics. 

Weber's insights are borne out in the Australian political context.  Loughnane and Co. certainly live "from" politics, earning incomes and building careers through their work in the party organisations.  Yet money does not appear to be a significant motivation for them.  More powerful is that they seem to live "for" politics, wholeheartedly engaged in the partisan contest and pursuing a vocation as much as a career. 

Weber's portrait of the political professional was given more contemporary clothes in the 1980s with the scholarly identification of a new class of party officials, the "electoral professionals" – skilled knowledge workers capable of campaigning in the modern era of polling and mass media.  In the Australian party context, "electoral professionals" introduced a new model of professional campaign management.  They built centralised campaigning structures, in which they coordinated the efforts of the whole party – state branches, party members, candidates and the parliamentary leadership – and of an expanding cast of external marketing specialists.  They designed campaign strategies based on market research, targeting potential supporters (swinging voters) in strategically significant locations (marginal seats) with relevant messages via the media.  They took responsibility for raising the funds necessary for these increasingly expensive campaigns, harnessing the donations of business, individuals and taxpayers as campaign budgets skyrocketed.  They did all this as professionals, devoted to promoting what they saw as the best interests of the party. 

But they encountered resistance. 

From the outside, political parties might look like united armies.  Especially at election time, they seem to have a single leader, to march in the same direction, sing the same battle hymn, share the same aspirations, ideology and identity – and to fight the same enemy.  Such appearances can be deceptive.  Like any organisation set up to attain collective goals, parties contain a world of competing interests.  Some of these revolve around different policy goals and ideological preferences; others are centred on the ambitions and authority of powerful individuals; others still reflect broader social cleavages of geography, class and religion.  Some of them concern the best way to conduct election campaigns. 

In seeking to professionalise campaigning, the national party officials were engaged in a disruptive process of institutional transformation, which affected all the other actors, structures and processes within the party.  The new cohort of professionally trained technicians challenged the party's traditional rules and conventions and introduced new behaviours, attitudes and identities.  Their professional campaign model displaced and downplayed the enthusiastic amateurs and volunteers in the party's grassroots; in seizing control of campaign management, they took on the old-style bureaucratic hierarchy in the state branches as well as the parliamentary leaders – who in turn challenged, tested, and at times threw off the new disciplines.  So professionalisation did not always proceed on a smooth forward trajectory; at times it was held back and even reversed, as contrary influences reasserted themselves.  Inevitably, too, these internal party reforms changed the parties' relationships with the voters.  In the professional campaign model, parties could ignore and take for granted many voters while relentlessly wooing those who happened to be undecided and to reside in strategically important locations.  Election campaigns became occasions for strategic calculation by the parties, rather than for informed deliberation by voters. 

This long contest between the campaign professionals and the rest of the party structure is the subject of this book.  The narrative is built around the succession of national officials of the Labor and Liberal parties, and is told in twelve stages, each chapter dealing with a critical moment in the professionalisation of the parties.  At each of these junctures, a party official has said or done something that pushed professionalisation forward.  This process – which continues today – has had significant implications for the character of our political system.  How and why the professional campaign model emerged should therefore be central to any attempt to understand Australian democracy.  

# 1

# MILITARY PROTOTYPE

Political parties are like armies: they exist to campaign, to compete and to prevail.  If the analogy holds, Donald Cleland was brilliantly qualified as the prototype Australian election campaign professional.  Cleland spent the Second World War in the Australian Army's Quartermaster General corps, organising supplies and logistics for the troops in North Africa and New Guinea, and emerging as a twice-decorated brigadier.  The role of behind-the-front-lines organiser provided the perfect preparation for his appointment in 1945 as the first federal director of the Liberal Party. 

Before the war, Cleland had been an active partisan of the conservative cause in Perth.  A solicitor, he joined the National Party, became its state president, and stood for Parliament in three successive state elections in the 1930s.  But this was an era of Labor dominance in the West, and he lost each time.  When he returned to civilian life in mid-1945, Brigadier Cleland immediately enlisted in the newly formed Liberal Party of Australia and, when the Labor prime minister, John Curtin, died in July, Cleland volunteered to fly the flag for the Liberal cause in the by-election for Curtin's seat of Fremantle.  This was the first by-election the Liberal Party had fought, and opposition leader Robert Menzies not only campaigned personally but also sent his press secretary, Charles Meeking, to organise Cleland's publicity.  The two got on well: Cleland was a "rather humourless cove," Meeking reported back to his boss, and was not good in front of a radio microphone, but was improving as he went along.  But perhaps John Curtin's voters were never going to reject his Labor successor, an energetic young teacher named Kim Beazley; whatever the reason, Cleland lost again. 

Curtin's Labor government had won a smashing re-election in 1943, partly because of the divisions and squabbling among the conservative opposition.  The major conservative party of the time, the United Australia Party, was in its death throes, balkanised among its state branches and challenged by a timber yard of splinter parties – Democrats and Liberal Democrats, Nationals and Nationalists, a Services and Citizens Party, a Middle Class Party, a Queensland People's Party, a Liberal and Country League in South Australia, and hosts of well-meaning independents.  Menzies emerged from the wreckage of the 1943 debacle as leader of this fractured opposition and, like many other anti-Labor figures, regarded organisational unity and discipline as the first priority.  Convening a conference in Canberra in October 1944 to forge the diverse fragments of Australian conservatism into a single united Liberal Party, he told delegates that while Labor's policies were "repugnant," he regarded its "unanimity and cohesion on the organisational side" as a decided political asset.  Addressing an audience familiar with war, Menzies argued:

When I consider the structure of the Australian Labor Party, and realise that the political warfare to which we have been committed for a long time... is a struggle between political armies, I am driven to wonder how we could ever imagine that a concerted force, under one command and with one staff, is to be defeated by divided units under separate commands and with no general staff. 

Labor's "concerted force" was so effective, he said admiringly, that a Labor supporter in Bunbury would express the same point of view, in almost the same words, as one in Townsville.  The new Liberal Party needed to match that organisational strength.  Instead, he pointed out, the new party did not even have a head office:

We have no federal organisation, which means that we have no federal secretariat, and therefore no true nexus between the federal parliamentary party and those who are to do the political work in the field. 

A year later, Menzies was looking for a united command for the new secretariat.  Cleland was a compelling candidate.  His defeat in Fremantle may have convinced the 44-year-old that his best contribution was not in the front-line but back in headquarters.  As a political loyalist from one of the smaller states, he would not exacerbate Victorian–NSW rivalries.  And his friendship with Meeking could have done him no harm.  Most importantly, a brigadier with experience organising a real war seemed well qualified to lead the civilian "general staff" into electoral combat.  There is no evidence that either Menzies or the party's president, Tom Ritchie, considered any other candidate; their nomination of Cleland was accepted by the federal executive without demur.  In October 1945, Don Cleland was appointed as the Liberals' first federal director – and the first salaried national official of an Australian political party. 

The Liberals already aspired to setting up "a permanent secretariat at Canberra," but for the time being Cleland and his head office were based in Sydney, sharing city premises in Ash Street with the NSW division.  Ambitious from the start, the party aimed to fund its secretariat with an annual budget of £1 million, rising to £2 to £3 million, raised from voluntary subscriptions from individuals and businesses.  Such aspirations were never attained, but the secretariat was staffed with a substantial team of paid executives: alongside Cleland there was a journalist, Eric White, who was the public relations officer, and a senior research officer, W. S. Bengtsson.  Cleland's first task was to embark on a national tour, accompanied by White, to inspect the party's state branches.  He was not impressed by what he saw.  Contrary to the new party's official expressions of optimism about national unity, Cleland and White discovered the competing perspectives of "six separate entities" in the state capitals, which "vary in efficiency and in extent" and which lacked campaign readiness.  In their report to the federal executive, Cleland and White observed: "Taken overall, the organisation is weak and spasmodic as compared to the overall organisation of the anti-Liberal forces."  The career soldier's dismay about the laxity of civilian affairs can be heard in their recommendation: "There is an urgent need for the inculcation of a true sense of loyalty and discipline within the ranks of the party to Parliament and organisational leaders." 

Unfortunately for Cleland, he began as he was to continue.  Menzies had called for a single command structure, but when it came to putting this principle into action, the new party created a set of rules that ensured "the maximum autonomy would remain with each state organisation."  In this structure, Cleland could not "command"; instead, as federal director, he was enjoined by the party's constitution to "coordinate" the state divisions and to organise party publicity "in cooperation with" state committees.  In contrast to a military command structure, functions of "coordination" and "assistance" imply persuasion and negotiation rather than direction.  For their part, the states were under no reciprocal responsibility to facilitate or even participate in any federal coordination. 

Cleland made the best of this ambiguous environment by convening and chairing an officials' forum, which brought the general secretaries from the state divisions together with his federal staff.  This organisational innovation quickly established itself as a principal focal point for national campaign cooperation.  Institutionalised after the 1949 victory as the Staff Planning Committee (SPC), it was the first of what was to become a key tool used by both parties to achieve a nationally consistent and centralised campaign.  The committee became, in the phrase of the Liberal Party historian Ian Hancock, the party's "brains trust," increasingly relied upon by the federal executive and Menzies himself for strategic and tactical advice. 

Cleland's first test as a campaign manager came less than a year after his appointment, when Prime Minister Ben Chifley called an election for September 1946.  The new party did manage to present a united front in terms of policy and candidates; the number of independents and small-party candidates fell sharply from 1943.  An American political scientist, Louise Overacker, was visiting Australia during the campaign and left an account of a "party battle" which is almost unrecognisable today.  The campaigns opened with the party leaders delivering policy speeches, which were broadcast live on ABC Radio, reported in the press as events of major importance, and widely discussed.  Public meetings attended by leaders and candidates were a key campaign activity, although they could be very modest events.  Overacker herself went to a "dimly lighted street corner" in inner-suburban East Sydney one evening to listen to the Liberal candidate, a war veteran, address by loudspeaker "a handful of small boys [and] a few adults," including those who thrust their heads from nearby windows. " Probably no votes were won, but the young candidate had gained useful experience," she noted. 

Chifley and Menzies, meanwhile, embarked on arduous national speaking tours, addressing large public meetings; one of the most useful skills a candidate could have was the deft put-down of a heckler.  On one "admittedly extreme" occasion, Menzies penetrated the Labor heartland to speak at the Maccabean Hall in Darlinghurst (now the site of the Sydney Jewish Museum).  His efforts were completely disrupted by rowdy Labor and Communist supporters who booed, hissed, cut the wires of the microphone, broke furniture and threw bags of pig-iron onto the stage; the police were called.  In the same campaign, Labor candidate Gil Duthie drove himself around the seat of Wilmot in central Tasmania for six months, giving no press interviews but meeting voters face-to-face and handing them leaflets.  He held thirty-three public meetings in small towns, and on one occasion travelled to Launceston to attend a meeting alongside Prime Minister Chifley; his defeat of the Liberal incumbent surprised everyone.  Distribution of "leaflets, handbills and snipes" (small posters pasted on poles and fences), as well as paid newspaper advertising, were important campaign activities in 1946, Overacker noted.  But "party managers and news correspondents" also told her that public meetings were less well attended and less important than during the pre-war years, "before radio came into its own."  According to "campaign directors," radio was among the most important means of campaign communication; in the weeks before state and federal elections, the airwaves carried "an almost continuous flow of partisan speeches." 

The impact of Cleland's new secretariat was immediately apparent in the extensive set of speaker's notes produced for Liberal Party candidates.  Of a scale and quality not previously seen in Australian elections, the plush two-ring binders contained material on seventy-six current issues – a factual background, as well as lines of attack, for use by candidates on the stump or in meetings with constituents.  Underlining its methodical work habits, the secretariat issued revisions and updates that could easily be inserted in the binders.  This perfectly embodied the role Menzies had envisaged for head office, providing a link between parliamentarians and campaign workers.  Each booklet carried the instruction that it was to be returned to party headquarters after the election; in the meantime, "every care must be exercised to ensure that these notes do not come into the possession of the opposition [sic] parties." 

Menzies' new party improved its position in 1946, picking up twenty-nine seats with its Country Party allies, but was again beaten soundly by Labor with forty-three seats.  It is no small irony that Labor's campaign machine was so respected by Cleland and Menzies.  Beating Labor at its own game appears to have been one of their key motivations for founding the Liberals' head office – but this was to be Labor's last federal victory for twenty-six years.  In reality, the ALP was much less well organised than its Liberal opponents imagined.  Even its modest level of operational consensus had emerged painfully slowly, over decades, and only in the face of entrenched internal opposition. 

Founded in 1891 by trade unions based in the various colonies, the "Australian" Labor organisation was inspired by a national vision but was content, long after Federation, to operate as an essentially state-based party.  There was no national head office, no federal secretary, and no federal executive.  The few administrative responsibilities of a national character, such as organising the triennial Commonwealth Political Labor Conference, were handled by the secretaries of the state branches on a rotating basis.  A proposal to create a federal executive was twice considered by national conferences in 1908 and 1912, and twice deferred.  Any form of centralised executive power threatened the authority of the state branches and was therefore, in the words of NSW delegate William Holman in 1908, "as far as Labor was concerned, a fundamentally mischievous exercise." 

It was not until the 1915 conference that the state branches sufficiently overcame what the Labor historian Fin Crisp labelled their "jealous attachment to 'home rule'" to form a federal executive to manage the affairs of the party between conferences.  Yet the rules devised by the state representatives for the new Australian Political Labor Executive did not encourage any expansive national view of its operations.  It was granted power only to organise the conferences and to implement conference decisions.  It was entirely reliant on the states for its funding and agenda, and the states provided all its members.  On principles of federal equality and internal democracy, each state branch regardless of size or wealth sent two elected delegates to the federal executive, and instructed them as far as practicable on how they were to vote.  The executive in turn was empowered to "elect and control" its own officers. 

At its first meeting in May 1915, two federal MPs, Queensland senator Tom Givens and NSW MP Billy Hughes, were elected unopposed as president and vice-president.  But there were two nominations for the post of federal secretary.  A ballot was necessary.  A South Australian delegate, J. H. Olifent, was defeated by the Victorian delegate Archibald Stewart.  Stewart was the son of a Scottish miner from central Victoria and a pioneering trade unionist and activist.  During the 1906 federal elections, as the Ballarat secretary of the Australian Workers' Union (AWU), he managed the unsuccessful campaign by James Scullin, a future prime minister, to unseat the current prime minister, Alfred Deakin.  He stood for Parliament himself three times and was defeated each time.  Like Cleland later, he perhaps realised that his talents lay in the backroom, and became Labor's state secretary in Victoria in 1911.  He was forty-eight years old when he defeated Olifent and became Labor's first federal secretary. 

To be a federal official in those days was not a burdensome task, and federal office-bearers remained active in their state branches.  As Fin Crisp observed, the federal job was "in most cases secondary or incidental" to their main role at state level.  Stewart stayed on in the more influential role of state secretary of the Victorian branch.  His authority as federal secretary was in any event "severely circumscribed" and, without any secretariat, he handled "little cash and less patronage."  During its early decades, the executive was repeatedly exposed as powerless to impose its decisions upon recalcitrant states.  At times, its very existence was in jeopardy.  As a Victorian delegate, Stewart was actively involved in the party's policy and political disputes.  But in his role as federal secretary, his remit travelled no further than that of the executive as a whole.  He literally provided secretarial services to the executive, handling correspondence and minutes, organising transport and logistics for executive meetings and the triennial conference, and banking the meagre annual fees paid by the states to sustain the modest national operations.  From time to time he was voted an honorarium of ten pounds or fifteen guineas, underlining that this was an honorary and part-time service performed by someone whose real job lay elsewhere.  At the end of its November 1924 meeting, held in the Melbourne Trades Hall, the federal executive voted a grant of twenty pounds to its secretary "for past services."  But the next meeting, in Sydney the following September, opened with the sombre recording of Stewart's death from tuberculosis in May. The executive carried a motion of deepest regret following "the excellent and faithful services rendered to the movement by our late comrade." 

Stewart's replacement as both Victorian and federal secretary was Daniel McNamara, the son of an Irish farmer and another AWU activist and talented party administrator.  McNamara was forty-nine when he took on the roles.  Federal executive elected him to the federal post unopposed – but not before a debate which revealed an emerging uncertainty about the appropriate status of their new creature, the federal secretary.  Must the secretary be elected from among the executive members, or could he just serve as secretary without also being one of the delegates?  The executive suggested a rule change to allow the latter course, and from 1931 McNamara ceased being a Victorian delegate and attended executive meetings solely as the federal secretary.  It was a small but defining step towards a more autonomous and distinctive role for the federal secretary.  But as for Stewart so for McNamara: the federal secretaryship was not his main focus.  McNamara remained an influential figure in Victorian politics as secretary of the state branch; he was also an elected member of Victoria's Legislative Council from 1917 and, for three short periods, a minister in the Victorian government. 

So, while the Liberal Party was setting up its head office and staffing it with three full-time executives, McNamara, a 69-year-old part-timer, constituted national Labor's entire staff apparatus.  He was certainly experienced.  But he was not well paid or well resourced.  He was paid an occasional "honorarium" – ten guineas in 1925 (less than $800 in 2014), which by 1944 had risen to £150 (less than $10,000), when it was described for the first time as a "salary."  There were further occasional payments to a minute secretary.  Labor was just indulging the fiction of operating a national office; in fact it was thriftily borrowing its national administrator from the Victorian branch for a pittance, knowing that the official's real livelihood was paid by Victorian party members and taxpayers.  Nearly twenty years after the federal Parliament had moved to the national capital, Labor's head office, such as it was, remained in Melbourne, where Labor's federal business was essentially run from McNamara's desk.  This was Labor's vaunted campaign machine! 

The reality was that, when it came to election campaigns, jealous and stingy state branches had for decades stonewalled or simply ignored the various centralising initiatives proposed by the federal executive.  Before the 1925 federal election, for example, the executive put up £20 to prepare campaign literature "of a uniform character in the different States" – but, lacking authority to act on this inspiration, had had to couch it as a recommendation to the caucus.  For the 1937 elections, the executive considered appointing McNamara as "campaign director" but – again uncertain of its powers – suggested any such appointment be made by caucus.  Nothing happened.  In 1938, debating the idea of a "general survey of the political situation with a view to preparing plans for the next federal election," the executive directed McNamara and the federal president, Norman Makin MP, to visit each state executive so as to "discuss... closer cooperation upon Commonwealth lines" – but again, there was no power to enforce the plan.  In 1943, the year of Labor's greatest electoral triumph, the executive scarcely met and contributed little to Curtin's campaign effort. 

In the lead-up to the 1946 election, the executive again tried to improve campaign coordination, calling on caucus and the states to focus on "better coordination... with a view to formulation of an effective plan for conducting future federal elections."  Caucus thought it was a good idea and recommended a rudimentary plan whereby state campaign managers would liaise with a designated federal MP to coordinate local campaigning by candidates and branches.  But even with this lead, the executive could only "recommend" that the states appoint their campaign directors "immediately."  In the event, apart from Prime Minister Chifley's initiative in meeting with state branches, there was little of a coordinated nature in 1946.  After the victory, apart from sending a telegram of congratulations to Chifley, the executive undertook no review to analyse why the party had won or how their new Liberal opponents had fared.  In a blunt reminder of who was in charge, the executive also resolved that:

in all future elections the federal members [of Parliament] shall be under the jurisdiction of the respective state campaign directors, and that the federal ministers shall be notified accordingly, and that a minister be assigned the responsibility with state campaign directors to control the movement of ministers in election campaigns.  Motion carried. 

If the Labor Party was the formidable campaigner Menzies described, it was not because of any apparent direction or resources emerging from its head office. 

Perhaps what Menzies admired about Labor existed not within its head office but outside it.  Labor had a longstanding relationship with a commercial advertising agent, the formidable Sim Rubensohn. " We need to face up to the fact that the Labor Party has a clever set of advertising tradesmen at work in the centre," Menzies told his colleagues after the 1946 defeat.  More than an advertiser, Sim Rubensohn was also fundraiser, political strategist and confidant of Labor leaders at state and national level.  South-African born, Rubensohn had been educated in Sydney and, as a 24-year-old in 1928, established an advertising agency.  His partner, Rupert Hansen, soon left, but the name Hansen-Rubensohn Pty Ltd survived.  By the early 1930s Rubensohn was managing advertising for the state Labor Party and, in short order, for federal Labor as well. 

If Rubensohn was the successful "suit," then his "creative" was also critical to the success of the agency.  Pip Cogger, an Englishman wounded while serving with the Royal Field Artillery in the First World War, had decided while convalescing to switch to copywriting.  He made his way to New Zealand and thence to Sydney, where he joined Rubensohn's firm.  He later told a journalist that he had served as "advocate-in-written words" for virtually everything "from the damnation of Communism to the deification of deodorants."  But advertising could be a murky business: in a sensational court case in 1935, it emerged that Rubensohn had assisted police in arresting, in his own office, an advertising salesman who was carrying 500 £1 notes in a brown paper parcel.  The salesman, Douglas McConnell, was charged with inciting Rubensohn to bribe an alderman of Sydney County Council to win the council's advertising account; he was ultimately acquitted. 

Prime Minister Chifley handed the opposition a ready-made campaign issue with his announcement, in August 1947, that Labor would nationalise the banking system.  Rubensohn was one of the many in the business community who opposed the plan.  The news of his disenchantment quickly reached the Liberals' federal president, Dick Casey (later Lord Casey, governor-general of Australia), who invited Rubensohn to defect and to bring his entire agency over to work for the Liberals.  Rubensohn agreed on both policy and commercial grounds: he received a 15 per cent commission on all campaign outlays and hoped for lucrative concessions for his other clients from a new Liberal government.  Chifley's approval for the defection was sought and – astonishingly – granted.  For the Liberals, it was a stunning coup. 

The massive radio advertising campaign mounted by Rubensohn and Cogger represented what Murray Goot has called "the longest and most lavishly funded political campaign ever seen in Australia."  Casey worked hard to extract donations from banks and other business interests in Australia and London, raising more than a quarter of a million pounds (around $13 million today); the total cost of the campaign is unknown but an estimate of £800,000 ($41 million) still impressed commentator Don Whitington a dozen years later.  Confirming Overacker's insights about the rising power of radio, the central element of the campaign was a long-running radio serial.  Twice a week for some twenty months in the lead-up to the 1949 election, a fifteen-minute satirical drama ran on radio stations around the nation.  The star of the show – host, commentator and animating spirit – was John Henry Austral, played by actor Richard Matthews.  Austral's smooth voice, educated accent and cool cynicism about life under the Labor government embodied the values of the Liberal Party and of Menzies' own "Forgotten People" broadcasts of six years earlier.  A fictitious persona, rather than a politician, was acting as party spokesman.  As his name suggests, Austral's political affiliations arose from his national identity: his was the voice of common sense, homespun wisdom and native morality; he spoke repeatedly of "your land – and mine" to a soaring orchestral backdrop of "Waltzing Matilda." 

The evidence is sparse, but it appears that the Liberals' federal director, Don Cleland, had little role in the campaign other than to vet the content of the scripts.  In the spirit of success having a thousand fathers, however, everyone shared credit for the victory.  With a national swing of more than 4 per cent, the Coalition won a majority of seventy-four lower-house seats to Labor's forty-seven.  Menzies entered the Lodge and Chifley departed, writing to a British Labour Party minister that Labor had "suffered a terrific barrage over the radio and through the press for twelve months; the opposition appeared to have unlimited money to spend."  Cleland, a win under his belt at last, stepped down from head office and returned to Papua New Guinea; appointed by Menzies as administrator of the territory, he was knighted in 1961 and remained in Port Moresby until his death in 1975 at the age of seventy-four. 

*

Cleland's appointment as federal director marked the start of a significant but little-understood transformation in Australian party politics.  Into the traditional cast of party actors – branch members and parliamentarians – it introduced a new player, a paid official, who owed allegiance to neither.  Alongside the party's traditional venues and meeting places – branch meetings, conferences, caucuses and legislative chambers – Cleland's appointment created a new stage for party activity, the national head office.  Over time, paid officials introduced new ways of working – in particular, new ways of conducting election campaigns – which came to influence and even dominate many of the traditional activities of their parties. 

The Liberals appointed Cleland, it must be noted, while they were in opposition, a vantage point from which they could enviously admire what they saw as the government's superior campaign organisation – and from which they could set about emulating and bettering it.  This required a large project of national unification and – of particular interest here – the creation of a new organisational structure.  In trying to match Labor in organisational matters, the Liberals created a head office model that far surpassed what was in reality an under-resourced, amateur Labor organisation.  This phenomenon of party competition as a spur to professional improvement is a recurring theme of this book. 

When in turn Labor found itself out of office, it too was spurred to respond to the Liberals' innovation by lifting its own game: the competitive cycle continued.  In February 1945, three months after the Liberals' Canberra conference, Labor's federal executive issued a call to state branches and the federal parliamentary caucus for "better coordination" at federal elections.  In May, the executive held a "long discussion" about a proposal "for a federal secretariat of the party to be set up at Canberra as early as possible."  Daniel McNamara was directed to work out the details, including the key question of how much this would cost the state branches.  He recommended a professional staff for head office consisting of "an officer with journalistic experience" and "an experienced stenographer"; by implication the secretary would continue on an honorary basis.  Salaries, rent and office costs would come to just over £2000 a year – say, $140,000 today – less, if one of the states provided the office space.  The states predictably baulked at the cost, and besides, McNamara was ailing and his enquiries stalled.  He fell ill in early 1946 and stood down as federal secretary; he died of a coronary at the end of 1947.  It was to take Labor nearly two decades to catch up with the Liberals' head office innovation.  But the pattern was already apparent: professionalisation thrust forward by the pressure of inter-party competition. 

It is important not to overstate the transformation at this early stage.  The concept of a campaign professional was, and remains, a contested one.  Was Cleland a professional?  He was of course a salaried employee; his Labor counterpart McNamara, the part-time honorary secretary, was more of an amateur in this respect.  Moreover, Cleland was a professional lawyer who went on to become a professional soldier, and he had the requisite training and qualifications in both roles.  McNamara lacked any such professional standing.  At a time when party organisation tended to be haphazard and mediocre, Cleland introduced advanced management skills, acquired in military service and supported by a trained staff; McNamara had no such resources.  Yet in other respects, perhaps Labor was the more professional organisation.  McNamara had a lifelong commitment to the labour movement, and his entire career was devoted to working within the Labor Party; Cleland by contrast was a neophyte and an outsider.  Perhaps there was a trace of class-consciousness in Menzies' description of Sim Rubensohn and his colleagues: they were not professionals but a "clever set of... tradesmen" and thus available for hire. 

Another important difference between Cleland and McNamara can be discerned in how they were selected for their respective jobs.  Cleland was appointed: having been discovered and engaged by the party president and the parliamentary leader, he was nominated to the party's executive, which duly confirmed him in the post.  This set the precedent for future appointments of the Liberal federal director.  Stewart and McNamara set a different precedent: in the spirit of Labor's tradition of internal democracy, they were elected by their colleagues.  And in the tradition of Labor penury, they were required to serve in a part-time capacity while continuing to work in their principal jobs as state officials. 

The difference between appointment and election is more than procedural.  In any organisation, the methods used to select officials, whether they are prime ministers, CEOs or public servants, create frameworks of accountability and expectations, which in turn exercise a powerful influence on what those officials do in office and how they behave.  So it has proven with party officials.  Menzies was trying to emulate Labor by creating a role at the apex of the party's administrative machinery.  But his was a top-down vision; he wanted a "nexus" through which the parliamentary leadership could direct the troops in the field.  McNamara, meanwhile, was a creature of Labor's extra-parliamentary structure; Labor's bottom-up model positioned head office as the agent of the party members – in practice, of the state branches.  It existed to meet their needs and to impose their priorities on their parliamentary representatives. 

The federal structure of both parties presented diabolical problems for each head office.  In the Liberal Party, Menzies may have preferred a unified "command," but in practice authority was dispersed and cooperation between the states had to be negotiated.  As Ian Hancock has noted, the dilemma between "two conflicting understandings of the concepts 'federal' and 'national'" was never resolved. " Nationalists" at the centre of the party wanted to prioritise nationwide interests above sectional concerns; "federalists" in the state divisions rejected such centralism as an infringement of their autonomy.  The same inherent tensions beset the Labor Party, where the national apparatus was the creature of the state branches, which predated the national party and the Australian Federation itself.  As the Labor historian Graham Freudenberg noted, the states had the "deepest vested interest in the fragmented federal structure" and would be weakened by a stronger national organisation. 

These dysfunctional federal dynamics created opportunities for pernicious game playing.  When states combined to defend their individual local prerogatives, they were very difficult to overcome; a common front could starve a mendicant centre.  Yet federalism also encouraged the states to compete – especially for resources dispensed from the centre – and states were prone to alliances of convenience.  Smaller states, for example, typically have more to gain from national income equalisation, while the larger and better-resourced states have more to lose.  The trump card of the national office was that national coordination would deliver more efficient usage of campaign resources and a better chance of electoral victory, even at the cost of individual states.  Again and again in this book, we will see energetic party officials attempting to pursue new initiatives in the national head office, only to encounter internal party resistance, particularly from the state branches. 

This was the point of Cleland and White's report after their inspection tour.  In its frustration with the state divisions, the Cleland–White report foreshadowed many of the concerns that would preoccupy officials in both parties in the decades to come.  Theirs was a national project, which inevitably and immediately challenged the "six separate entities" at the state level.  But in this system, while Cleland and his successors did achieve some degree of coordination, they had to do so largely on the states' terms.  

# 2

# NUMBERS MAN

The meeting of Labor's federal executive proceeded smoothly into its third morning before it reached the secretary's report.  The party of the workers had a weakness for long meetings, proper procedure and careful minute-taking – the bureaucratic price it paid for the principles of internal democracy.  To be fair, this meeting, held in Canberra in late September 1950, had a long agenda.  The new Menzies government was planning to dissolve the Communist Party, a policy that divided the Labor Party in what a later era would call a classic wedge tactic.  The parliamentary party intended to amend but not oppose the legislation, and Labor leader Ben Chifley had come to explain this position. 

When the meeting arrived at items twelve and thirteen on the agenda, Labor's most senior executive body at last, ten months after the federal election, attempted to get to grips with the reality of defeat.  The party secretary, Pat Kennelly, had been asked: why did we lose, and what can we do better next time?  His typed response ran to just three foolscap pages. " I have purposely refrained from writing a long report, or using a lot of padding," Kennelly explained.  He had written briefly "because I believe the facts stated here are the basis for a successful campaign."  Pasted into the executive's official minute book, a heavy leather-bound 300-page tome that now resides in the National Library of Australia, Kennelly's blunt recommendations showed the first glimmers of a more professional approach to election campaigning.  They also sketched a campaign strategy which, although Labor was far from able to implement it at the time, foreshadowed one of the foundations of contemporary campaign practice. 

Patrick John Kennelly, like his two predecessors as Labor's federal secretary, was a Victorian and a career party administrator; like them, he held the federal post concurrently with various other party positions.  Indeed, Kennelly had been employed continuously by the Victorian Labor Party since he was hired as a sixteen-year-old clerk in 1916; he was assistant state secretary from 1940 and state secretary from 1947–49.  After standing in for the ailing McNamara, he was confirmed by the federal executive as the party's third federal secretary in November 1946.  No mere administrator, Kennelly was also a member of Parliament, elected to the Victorian Legislative Council in 1938 and serving as a minister in the ephemeral Cain government (it lasted just four days) in 1943.  He was known for his characteristic stutter and his pragmatic aphorisms; he once declared, for example, "I d-d-don't care who's got the n-n-numbers, brother, just so long as I get to c-c-count the v-v-votes"; later, as a senator, he used his stutter to "vulgar comic effect, especially when referring to the Country Party." 

As his reports to the federal executive demonstrated, Kennelly was the first occupant of Labor's head office to develop a true concept of electoral strategy.  Why did Labor lose office in the 1949 election?  First, Kennelly blamed Labor's failure to put a positive policy to the people.  It had been in office for too long.  This was an implicit swipe at Chifley – who had opted to run on his record, delivering a pre-recorded policy speech that ran for only thirty-six minutes and contained "no glittering promises" – and an explicit nod to Menzies, who, Kennelly noted, had promised to act on petrol rationing, child endowment and communism.  Kennelly made no mention of the turncoat Rubensohn, who, disappointed with Menzies' failure to offer him any commercial concessions, switched back to Labor anyway in 1951.  But much of Kennelly's review would have warmed the heart of Cleland and his colleagues in the Liberal secretariat.  He conceded that Labor had been defeated by a stronger campaign organisation, modelled on Conservative Party lines following Casey's visit to London.  The Liberals' "overwhelming superiority" of money had funded "excessive advertising and wireless propaganda."  In Victoria at least, the Liberals had so much money at their disposal they could operate on a "commercial" basis – that is, employ staff – in contrast to Labor's model, which relied on trade unions and volunteers. 

What should Labor do better next time around?  On the policy level, Kennelly wryly observed that "human nature has some very peculiar attributes": voters, he said, are not concerned about what they have already received, but what they will obtain in the future.  So Labor should do what Menzies had done: make specific promises about what it would deliver if elected.  If this seems unexceptional now, at the time it risked offending Kennelly's ideologically minded colleagues.  He reassured them that he meant no deviation from the party's standing policy platform. " Nor do I for one moment suggest that we should make promises that cannot be fulfilled.  But I do believe that we should say to the people of this nation: if you elect Labor, Labor will do (a), (b), (c), (d) etc." 

The main thrust of Kennelly's approach, however, was not on policy but campaign strategy, and it was here that he broke new ground.  Kennelly had made his own visit to Britain, where he had witnessed the narrow re-election of the British Labour Party under Atlee in the 1950 general elections.  He had been struck by the effectiveness of "personal canvassing" – that is, doorknocking and other local activities by the endorsed candidate and his supporters.  For Labour, personal contact was an effective way to reach voters, particularly given the anti-Labour bias of Britain's mainstream press.  Kennelly wanted the ALP to do the same, for the same reason: to allow candidates ample opportunity to meet the voters and to sidestep the newspaper proprietors.  It was not enough, in other words, to campaign in the few weeks before the election; the party needed to contact voters over several months. " Essential work can and should be done prior to the election." 

But to do any of this, Labor would have to select its candidates earlier than it had been doing.  Preselection, then as now, was the prerogative of the state branches, so Kennelly recommended:

in regard to the forthcoming election, each state Executive should immediately call for nominations in those seats where they believe there is a chance of success. 

The important qualification came in those final words.  Kennelly's recommendation was confined to a small number of seats that Labor thought it could win from the government.  He provided his own list of the twenty-one seats which he believed were winnable from the Coalition.  The arithmetic was obvious: after the 1949 drubbing, Labor needed to win fourteen more seats, and hold its forty-seven seats, to form government.  But the politics and funding of Kennelly's proposal were more problematic.  Long-term campaigning meant long-term costs.  Kennelly proposed a novel funding arrangement to create a genuinely national campaign effort, focussed on these winnable seats:

I believe that with the Federal Executive, the leader of the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party and the State Executives, a system could be worked out, including the expense of same, whereby we would be able to have a candidate on the job for a considerable time before the election.  I believe, if money can be found, each candidate at least should be able to spend up to six months full time in his electorate prior to the elections.  This of course is governed by just when the election will take place. 

In a later report, Kennelly detailed how this new system would work: for each of the targeted seats, the federal executive, the parliamentary caucus and the relevant state branch would each contribute £5 per week (less than $200 today).  Intended principally as a salary for candidates, this was hardly a lavish war chest: over six months, Kennelly's scheme would have generated just over £8000, or just £390 per candidate ($15,000 today).  Even so, the state branches baulked.  Kennelly's reports were duly noted and endorsed by the federal executive, and his recommendations dispatched to the states.  But nothing happened – and Labor was soon overtaken by events, as Kennelly had foreshadowed: within six months of that federal executive meeting, Menzies had called a double dissolution and the nation was back at the polls. 

The April 1951 election saw the Coalition comfortably returned, with a slightly reduced majority of seventeen seats in the House and, for the first time, a clear majority in the Senate.  Labor had, however, won five seats from the Coalition – all of them on Kennelly's target list.  Kennelly persisted with his plan.  In July, he reported to the federal executive on the election defeat and again noted the Liberals' organisational presence "in practically every electorate in the Commonwealth."  Kennelly identified a revised list of twenty-one seats where the party should "concentrate" its campaign by a system of pooled financial resources.  The federal executive approved the idea for financial help to what they called, for the first time, "the barometer of marginal seats."  Given the party's state-dominated structure, it could do no more than urge the state branches to give it their "earnest consideration."  Kennelly had also secured opposition leader Ben Chifley's approval to take the plan to the state branches.  But in June 1951, as revellers celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Federation at a state ball in Parliament House, Chifley died of a heart attack in his hotel room.  Kennelly's plan was never implemented. 

*

Kennelly's strategy focussed on seats Labor thought it could win.  But how did he arrive at his list of twenty-one winnable seats?  In these pre-market-research days, party officials were devoted analysts of election results at national, state, electorate and booth level.  Voting figures, however, had several limitations as a source of strategic insight.  They are by definition retrospective; they are reliable only to the extent that voters have not changed their minds, moved house or died; and they usually indicate voters' first-preference votes only.  They are even more problematic when seat boundaries are redistributed, as in 1949 when the House of Representatives was expanded from seventy-four seats to 121.  But voting data did reveal the basic electoral landscape: given the uneven spread of political support across the nation, with Labor voters concentrated in the inner cities, Liberal voters in more affluent suburbs and Country Party voters in the bush, party officials could use voting figures to classify seats according to the size of the winner's majority.  The larger the majority, the "safer" the seat; seats were less safe when the party won by a smaller majority or, as it was often expressed, by a slender margin. 

This idea of marginality was well understood in Kennelly's time.  It was a commonplace of journalism of the 1940s and early 1950s that seats held by narrow margins were more likely to swing, and therefore that by watching these seats it was possible to forecast national election results – hence the term "barometer" seats.  Similarly, in the lead-up to the 1949 election, Canberra commentators routinely noted that – following the landslide to Curtin in 1943, which had swept several Labor MPs into Parliament on slender margins – these incumbents tended to be risk-averse and anxious. 

The Liberal Party, too, understood all too painfully the nature of marginality.  Following his new party's first electoral defeat in 1946, Menzies comforted himself that he had only lost by a few hundred votes in a handful of seats.  In the national head office, research officer Bengtsson used 1946 voting results to painstakingly forecast the makeup of the expanded House of Representatives, concluding that Labor would have a majority of twenty-two, and that more of its seats would be "safe."  In Sydney, the Liberals' young state director, John Carrick, published a booklet listing the "key seats" in the forthcoming 1949 elections – the nineteen "seats to watch" where Labor held majorities of fewer than 3000 votes.  There is some evidence that Liberal Party officials were thinking along similar lines to Kennelly, trying to focus campaign resources on these marginal seats.  Kennelly himself noted the Liberals' strong presence in 1951 "in what may be classed as borderline electorates," where, he claimed, they had more full-time employees than Labor had in its state offices. 

But Kennelly's proposal was something new.  As a party official, he was not engaged in commentary or analysis but political action.  For him, marginal seats were useful not to predict an election outcome, but to shape it.  Importantly, he was interested only in seats held by the Coalition.  His plan made no attempt to defend Labor's own marginal seats – not even, after 1951, the seat of the soon-to-be opposition leader, H. V. "Doc" Evatt, whose Sydney seat of Barton was held by a thread and was under siege from Nancy Wake, a Second World War Resistance heroine.  Kennelly's program proposed no extra assistance to Evatt, nor to the five seats Labor had won in 1951 and held by thin margins.  This was no oversight, but part of a strategy devised to maximise Labor's chances of victory.  Where Labor already held a seat, Kennelly decided or assumed that the sitting member was well known to voters and would in effect already be canvassing, with the taxpayer footing the bill.  Where the Coalition held a seat by a small margin, Kennelly, inspired by what he had seen in Britain, aimed to get a Labor candidate preselected and on the ground, campaigning with the financial support of the whole party.  Unlike the Liberal Party, Labor could not afford to employ salaried "agents" to campaign on behalf of sitting members or candidates.  Like any effective strategist, Kennelly cut his coat according to his cloth, trying to pool the Labor Party's more limited funds and direct them with greatest effect. 

The logic of targeting marginal seats relies on the recognition that, to win a parliamentary majority, parties need to win not just their own "safe" seats but must also contest and win enough "marginal" seats.  The logic posed a political challenge to Labor: to look beyond its heartland, which was predominantly in the working-class suburbs of the cities, and to aim at seats in the outer suburbs and regional towns – and to look beyond the interests of its sitting members to the task of winning and holding precarious marginal seats in unfamiliar territory.  This new approach stood in contrast to its behaviour in government when, having decided to expand the House of Representatives, Labor's MPs had been more concerned to secure their own political future in safe seats in the new Parliament and had taken little interest in the new electoral divisions.  The expansion was a "colossal lottery" for Labor, according to one MP, Fred Daly, and "proved to be Labor's downfall."  By contrast, the Liberals had preselected "nearly all" of their candidates three months before the start of the 1949 campaign, choosing a cadre of young, middle-class professionals and war veterans to contest, and in many cases win, the new suburban seats.  Successful Liberal candidates included the Olympic cyclist Hubert Opperman, who defeated a Labor minister in the marginal Victorian seat of Corio, and the war veteran Tom Treloar, who defeated another minister in Gwydir in rural New South Wales. 

After Labor's long period in government, Kennelly as party secretary in opposition took on some of the campaign management authority formerly exercised by prime ministers Curtin and Chifley.  By 1951, Kennelly was an influential powerbroker within the Labor Party.  By influencing preselections in Victoria and nationally – or, as he described it, choosing "horses for courses" – and by cultivating personal relationships with the party leaders (John Cain in Victoria and Chifley in Canberra), he exercised a personal influence much larger than the formal powers he possessed as secretary.  He became, in Weller and Lloyd's phrase, "the one federal officer before 1955 who gained considerable influence from his federal role."  But Weller and Lloyd stress that this was owing to Kennelly's personal skills and networks rather than any additional power bestowed on the secretaryship itself. 

Kennelly's informal influence was, however, strengthened by the revival of Labor's plans – which had been shelved when McNamara fell ill – to create a full-time secretariat on the Liberal model.  The revived plan was a substantially different proposal from the one McNamara had recommended.  There was no funding for support staff, and Kennelly was to receive not an honorarium but an annual salary of £750 ($35,000).  The new arrangement began on 1 January 1950 – the beginning of Labor's first year in opposition – and Kennelly stood down as Victorian state secretary.  At the same time, the party's rules were overhauled to ensure that, as the national party's first salaried employee, the secretary was to be appointed, not elected; furthermore, the role would be subject for the first time to performance standards: Kennelly's appointment was "subject to good conduct, satisfactory performance of duty and adherence to the Policy and Objectives of the Party." 

Kennelly was also Labor's first national official to travel abroad to learn lessons about campaign management.  The main flaw in the strategy he adapted from the British Labour Party was not that it was a bad idea but that he failed to win support for it.  Federal executive liked the plan and Chifley apparently supported it.  The stumbling block was the states.  Kennelly's proposal represented a step towards national intervention in state functions – not to mention a new financial burden on the state branches.  He tried to meet the states halfway, conceding that the marginal seat campaign would only take place "under the supervision and direction" of the respective state branch and would apply only "in those seats where agreement was reached."  But all this negotiation took time, and diluted his efforts. 

Moreover, there was a darker shadow looming over Labor.  After years of stability and electoral success, Labor's delicate internal balances – between right and left, industrial and political – were being threatened as the party, powerless in opposition, struggled to adapt to the shifting geopolitics of the Cold War.  Staunchly anti-communist and steeped in the traditions of Irish Catholicism, the party was assaulted on the one hand by militant communism and on the other by a secretive and aggressive network of anti-communist Industrial Groups, or "Groupers," led by a young Catholic intellectual, B. A. Santamaria.  Kennelly, a prominent Catholic but also an anti-Grouper, found himself under attack; his post as national secretary, with its salary and influence, became one more battleground in the unfolding civil war. 

The attack on Kennelly took the guise of concern about a federal party official also being a member of state Parliament.  This concern about conflict of interest was new – McNamara had also been a long-serving parliamentarian and occasional minister, but had attracted no such criticism – and reflected worries that Kennelly's dual career path was providing him with too much power.  This had forced the small but significant change to his head office job description: the executive had recommended appointing a "full-time" secretary but, in recognition of his parliamentary commitment, the federal conference called him "permanent." 

In late 1951, the Groupers resolved to deny Kennelly preselection for his seat in the Victorian Legislative Council.  Amid the wrangling, family tragedy struck – Kennelly's thirteen-year-old son, Neil, was killed in a road accident just before Christmas.  When Kennelly lost preselection in the new year, he vowed revenge and promptly secured preselection for the federal Senate.  But now his critics claimed he should not serve as both secretary and senator: after the 1953 half-Senate election (in which he won a Senate seat) he was accused of having failed to coordinate the national campaign, the implication being that he had been preoccupied by his own candidacy.  The charge had some sting beyond the Groupers: not everyone in caucus was happy that the campaign purse strings were now held by a sitting senator.  The issue occupied a full day of sniping debate in the executive in November 1953, with Kennelly finally – but only narrowly – winning the ruling that the secretary could be chosen from "any qualified member of the Party" (that is, including a senator).  But it was a Pyrrhic victory.  Kennelly announced that he would resign as secretary after the next election in 1954; and no subsequent federal secretary has also been a member of Parliament. 

Labor's narrow defeat in that election, in May 1954, poses a tantalising but unanswerable question.  Labor won a majority of the primary vote (50.03 per cent) and picked up five seats, all of them from Kennelly's 1951 target list.  But it was not enough: the Coalition retained government with a 64 to 57 majority.  Labor racked up huge tallies in its safe seats, but fell short in key marginals.  What if Kennelly's strategy had been energetically implemented?  Could Labor have won the seat of Darwin in Tasmania, which it lost by 300 votes, or Corio (1300 votes), or Deakin (2500 votes), or Capricornia (3900 votes)?  This would have been enough to make Doc Evatt prime minister. 

In the electoral wash-up, Labor's federal executive voted in July to present Kennelly with a farewell present of "an inscribed wristlet watch."  With his marginal seat strategy, Kennelly had been the first federal secretary to elevate the role beyond its administrative focus and to make head office the engine of campaign strategy and resource mobilisation.  These were key advances in Labor's professionalisation.  But as Labor continued its descent into turmoil, Kennelly retired to the Senate benches.  In October, Evatt issued a dramatic denunciation of the Groupers, comparing them to fascist and communist infiltrators and blaming their disloyalty for the narrow election defeat.  In Hobart in 1955, a tumultuous meeting of the federal conference, amid denunciation, venom and abuse, supported Evatt and withdrew official recognition from the Groupers, who ultimately formed the Democratic Labor Party (DLP).  Disputes had become divisions which became the Split. 

# 3

# A MEETING IN LONDON

When the British Labour Party issued invitations to its fraternal parties from around the Commonwealth to attend a conference in London in 1957, the Australians leaped at the opportunity.  A trip to London must have seemed a respite, even a reward, after the frantic domestic politics of recent years.  The three-man delegation, all veterans of the bitter defensive struggle against the Groupers, was led by Doc Evatt, irascible, bruised, but entrenched as party leader as the 1958 election loomed.  For party president F. E. "Joe" Chamberlain, the trip to London represented a return to the city of his birth, which he had abandoned, jobless, in his twenties to chase a fortune in Western Australia.  After dairy farming in Busselton and labouring and bus driving in Perth, he had found his true career in the trade union movement and the Labor Party, rising to dominance with his election in 1949 as WA state secretary.  It was Chamberlain who had moved the decisive resolution at the Hobart national conference in 1955 to exclude the Groupers.  A flinty hard-liner, he was at the peak of his powers. 

The third member of the delegation was the federal secretary, Jack Schmella, the son of an Italian miner from Charters Towers.  Kennelly, ever the numbers man, did not step down as federal secretary before ensuring the post would not fall under Grouper influence.  He backed Schmella, the Queensland state secretary and a "famous hard drinker," over the NSW right-winger Bill Colbourne.  Schmella defeated Colbourne eight votes to four when the national executive voted in July 1954.  He went on to play a prominent anti-Grouper role at Hobart and then in Brisbane, where the Split accentuated already deep divisions between the trade unions and the Labor government of Premier Vince Gair.  Just a few days before leaving for London, Schmella had moved the vital resolution that led to Gair being expelled from the Labor Party; this was followed, in quick order, by the split of the state Labor Party, the collapse of the state Labor government, the blockage of supply, early elections and a victory for the Country–Liberal opposition. 

In London, the job of looking after the Australians fell to a young party official, just twenty-seven years of age.  Cyril Isaacs had joined the British Labour Party's "Labour League of Youth" at the end of the Second World War as a fourteen-year-old.  As a schoolboy he had canvassed for Labour candidates in his home suburb of St Helier in West London – at the time, a rock-solid Labour area – and when he was seventeen he wrote to the Labour Party seeking a job.  He started as a clerk in the party's headquarters in Transport House.  Netta Burns, an Australian who later worked with him in Canberra, recalled him as "the office boy who handed me my money every week."  But Isaacs was on the rise.  He won a year's trade union scholarship to the London School of Economics, was promoted into Labour's international department, travelled throughout Europe, and was then appointed personal assistant to the general secretary, Morgan Phillips.  Along the way he managed to get himself elected, as a 21-year-old, as an alderman on the local council.  Looking over the list of delegates for the Commonwealth Labour Parties' Conference in 1957, he recalled being shocked to discover that proper accommodation arrangements had not been made for the Australians. " I've got the list of delegates, looked at it and, Oh my godfathers!"  he recalled. " I rang Morgan and said, 'I've got to come and see you.'" 

For his troubles, Isaacs was given the task of acting as the Australians' host while they were in London.  Chamberlain recalled that Isaacs "did a great job of looking after us."  The Australians might have been a handful, not least because Schmella took every opportunity – before the flight, on the flight, upon arrival in London and after the conference – to drink.  Chamberlain, highly disapproving, later described Schmella as a tragic alcoholic, recalling that these London binges reduced the federal secretary "to a state of insensibility."  The conference itself yielded little of note; there was a difficult meeting with the Africans about the White Australia policy.  Chamberlain and Schmella returned home via the US, where Schmella's drinking continued.  Evatt was impressed by the diligent young Isaacs and invited him to come back with him to Australia, via a side trip to Israel, and to join his staff in Canberra. " I was only going to come out for two years, to see what it was like," Isaacs recalled later. " But then I met my wife and we married, and I stayed of course."  His marriage lasted more than fifty years.  But his involvement in the Australian Labor Party – and not least his relationship with the powerful and complex figure of Joe Chamberlain – was shorter and much more tempestuous, as he became both an agent and a victim of Labor's troubled path to professionalisation. 

On arrival in Australia, Isaacs decided to change his surname.  He may have been keen to put what he recalled as childhood bullying behind him, or maybe he had accepted advice that the surname – despite its distinguished association with Sir Isaac Isaacs, chief justice and the first Australian-born governor-general – would set him back.  Inspired perhaps by the popular science fiction writer John Wyndham, he chose the unambiguously English name Cyril Wyndham. 

As Cyril Wyndham, he built a close relationship with Evatt and remained loyal to him throughout the older man's political twilight.  Wyndham did not fit in with the other staff, who, he felt, treated Evatt with shocking disrespect.  The 1958 campaign, as documented by the political scientist D. W. Rawson, saw the Labor Party held back by a "serious" lack of personnel at the federal level.  Reaching outside the office, Wyndham worked with the journalist Maxwell Newton, jointly drafting Evatt's 1958 election policy speech.  But the new chum was given an early taste of Labor campaigns, Australian-style, when he realised Evatt's itinerary was effectively driven by competing state demands. 

There was one ridiculous occasion when for Doc Evatt, he was speaking in Adelaide, then speaking in Brisbane, then had to fly all the way back to speak in Hobart.  I said, "What bloody nonsense.  Why doesn't he go from Adelaide to Hobart then up to Brisbane?" 

In a federal structure, he discovered, "The left hand never knew what the right hand was doing.  Western Australia could say one thing and New South Wales the other.  There was no coordination." 

When Evatt at last relinquished the leadership and quit the Commonwealth Parliament for the NSW Supreme Court in 1960, Wyndham was the only Evatt staffer taken on by the new leader, Arthur Calwell.  But perhaps the chemistry wasn't right; by the end of the year, and with the support of Calwell and Chamberlain, Wyndham threw his hat into the ring for the election of state secretary of the ALP's Victorian branch. 

As a newcomer lacking any factional or union power base, Wyndham presented himself as a loyal and talented but independent outsider.  Decades later, he recalled his job interview with the party's state executive.  One "nasty individual," a prominent trade unionist, asked Wyndham:

"What's the difference between a servant and a vassal?"  I said, "A servant has the courage to tell his employer, no – or to advise he is going the wrong way." [ But] he wanted a vassal.  Yes, yes, yes!  He wanted somebody who would just do as they were told and not ask questions. 

That was not how Wyndham saw his contribution to the Australian Labor Party.  Industrious, capable and dedicated, he would seek to serve the party as a whole, even if that meant warning against going the "wrong way."  Wyndham's predecessor as state secretary, Jack Tripovich, "just did as he was told, and as a result became a member of the Upper House."  By contrast, Wyndham well understood that "servants" who speak truth to power, who put the right way ahead of the easy way, risk losing the lot.  But for the time being Wyndham was in favour, defeating twelve candidates to be elected to the post. 

Labor's electoral record in Victoria was dismal.  In the 1961 federal election, Labor under Calwell had won big swings in every state except Victoria and fell short of government by a single seat.  In Victoria, the splinter DLP group had captured 15 per cent of the primary vote, carrying many former Labor votes over to the Coalition via second preferences.  The following year, however, when the sitting Liberal member for the state seat of Broadmeadows died, Wyndham orchestrated Labor's by-election campaign.  It featured, alongside the usual political fare, the cream of Labor's TV talent – quiz show champion Barry Jones (later Labor's federal president) and "Uncle" Doug Elliot, a Labor MP and commercial spruiker on the popular World of Sport program. " Great fun, that campaign was," Wyndham later recalled. " Much to everybody's surprise, we won it." 

While Wyndham was energetically establishing his credentials in Melbourne, the national Labor Party was continuing to edge ever closer to setting up a full-time national head office in Canberra.  Despite many false starts, stumbling blocks and backward steps, this remained an elusive goal for Labor.  Kennelly's "permanent" role had proven impermanent, and when he had left the organisational role in 1954 to take up a representative position in the Senate, Labor not only lost his strategic talents, it also abandoned the idea of a full-time salaried national officer.  Perhaps it seemed too expensive a luxury, or perhaps, during the Split, too tempting a prize.  In any event, Jack Schmella became secretary on terms more reminiscent of the pre-Kennelly era.  Schmella was the honorary part-time federal secretary and continued as the Queensland state secretary.  The national business of the party was conducted in Brisbane.  Six years later, when Schmella died at the age of fifty-two, federal executive recorded his service "with distinction during a most troublous period."  Joe Chamberlain, the party president, seized the opportunity to become national secretary – an unprecedented move which signposted the rising influence of the secretary's role in the Labor organisation.  He too remained as state secretary; Labor's national head office shifted to Chamberlain's home base of Perth. 

For all his jealous protection of his own powers as a state official, Joe Chamberlain had become convinced that the party as a whole needed a full-time salaried secretary.  As federal president he developed a proposal which he presented to the federal executive and, in April 1961, to federal conference.  Chamberlain's plan unconsciously echoed Menzies' speech at the Canberra conference fifteen years earlier.  He admitted Labor's organisation was failing:

It is generally conceded that grave organisational weaknesses exist, with no real central administration to provide for long-term planning in presentation of policy and establishment of good public relations. 

The previous part-time secretaries had managed the routine administrative tasks, he wrote.  But it had been impossible for them to attend to all the important policy matters, let alone maintain a firm and continuous relationship with the parliamentary leadership.  Again, it came down to the problem of money – state branch money:

If £40,000 to £50,000 [$1 million to $1.3 million] a year was available for our purpose we could of course proceed to establish a national administrative centre consisting of a number of experts in administration, public relations, research, a librarian and all that goes with the modern requirements of a political organisation. 

However as we are called upon to initially examine the project on the basis of seeking financial support from the state branches, it would at this stage be quite without profit to set out in any detail any such ambitious proposal.  It should be looked upon as a target for the future. 

The immediate practical approach must be on the basis of what is a reasonable financial approach to the states? 

In Chamberlain's more modest proposal, Labor would pay its federal secretary a salary of £3000 ($80,000), while also paying for a "female secretary and assistant" and office expenses.  Even this would entail quadrupling the levies paid by the states, according to their membership numbers, to belong to the federal party.  Chamberlain's report was shot down: New South Wales and Victoria – which, as the largest states, needed federal support least, and would have had to pay the most – opposed it, although some of the smaller and needier states were supportive.  All this happened as Chamberlain was moving to replace Schmella as secretary.  Years later, in his posthumously published autobiography, Chamberlain insisted he was motivated only by the needs of the party and had "lost the desire to sit in the cold corridors of power in Canberra."  But that retrospective explanation is belied by the speed with which he moved to fill Schmella's shoes which, he acknowledged, had sparked accusations that he wanted to "feather [his] own nest." 

Yet his proposal was deferred, not defeated, and Chamberlain continued to push the idea.  Throughout 1962 the state branches finally came on board, and in January 1963 the position of a full-time salaried ALP federal secretary was advertised.  Cyril Wyndham was encouraged to throw his hat into the ring and the executive unanimously selected him from a field of five.  Joe Chamberlain did not contest the position, but the old Londoner clearly supported the young Londoner as his replacement.  Others in the party were just happy to get the old Londoner out of the national office.  Wyndham recalled:

I didn't really want it... They wanted to keep Joe Chamberlain out... [Party president] Jim Keeffe and others pressed on me to take it on.  Greatest mistake of my life was leaving Victoria.  I should never have left Victoria.  In fact when they were saying farewell to me... [they] said, "Are you sure you're going?"  and I look back and I think to myself, I wish I'd said "no."  But it's no good living in the past. 

Wyndham was appointed by executive in May 1963, confirmed by conference in July, and told to start work on 1 October.  On 15 October, Prime Minister Menzies called an early election for 30 November.  The Victorian branch of the ALP, having just lost its state secretary, found itself unprepared for the campaign; it asked the federal executive to defer Wyndham's start date, so that he could remain in Victoria and direct the local campaign.  Thus Labor conducted its national campaign for the 1963 election without a national secretary – an unprecedented example, even for this centrifugal party, of federal decentralisation.  Wyndham recalled that towards the end of the campaign he was driving from Victoria's La Trobe Valley to Melbourne:

There was a police officer flagging me down and I thought, "What have I done wrong?" " Sorry Mr Wyndham, urgent phone call for you." " Where can I take it?" " Come in here and take it here."  I phoned – I've forgotten who I phoned now – it was President Kennedy been shot.  And I thought, "That's us, we're finished.  No way, no way, can we win this election." 

Menzies won what was to be his last campaign with a comfortable majority: the Liberals won seventy-two seats to Labor's fifty.  Wyndham and his wife moved to Canberra, and he opened Labor's first national office in January 1964.  Newspaper headlines nicknamed him "Cerebral Cyril," Labor's "Mighty Atom," "the Cockney Sparrow," "a new broom for an untidy party."  The Melbourne Sun explained:

The "mighty atom" tag comes from a combination of his slight build and tremendous vitality.  He never seems to walk anywhere, but prefers to go at a half-run.  His conversation is similarly quick, to the point and unfrivolous... Looking older than his age, with deep-sunk eyes, pale and thin complexion and thinning hair, he regularly astounds people with his energetic organisational ability. 

Another profile appeared in the Australian Financial Review, edited by Maxwell Newton – equally flattering but concluding with an insightful caution:

Cyril Wyndham is inclined to resent criticism – personal, or of the party – and to worry about it.  This tendency has made his job in Victoria a wearing one.  As federal secretary he will become a much bigger target.  His friends are hoping he curbs, or loses, the worrying habit. 

Wyndham established Labor's national headquarters in Ainslie Avenue in central Canberra; they were recalled by one journalist as "a small, ratty office suite at the top of the world's most ancient lift."  The party's "grand plans for an adequately staffed national secretariat" to support Wyndham were never delivered.  In 1967 the full staff complement was "Cyril plus two" secretaries.  But Wyndham lived up to the "mighty atom" billing.  He was an impeccable shorthand typist and minute keeper, and immediately improved the party's administrative efficiency.  He analysed voting statistics to trace shifts in popular sentiment at national and state level.  A fluent pamphleteer, he articulated the party's case against communism and the National Civic Council, both at the direction of the federal executive, and promoted the party in lengthy articles in public journals.  He wrote speakers' notes, "to see that everyone was speaking the same language in Western Australia and New South Wales." 

He also became an articulate internal critic of party attitudes and structures – showing the courage that he had advocated years earlier, no doubt, to advise his employer about right and wrong.  In a speech to the Young Labor Association in 1965 he attacked those who "prevaricate our policy, indulge in the futile exercise of factional strife, and behave like a collection of political delinquents."  In 1968 he reportedly told the Labor Women's Organisation that aspects of the party were "ridiculous, absurd and criminal."  Most ambitiously, he embarked on the difficult and dangerous task of reforming Labor's antiquated national decision-making structures.  The so-called "Wyndham Plan" was a wide-ranging proposal to enlarge and reconstruct the federal conference and the federal executive, provide rank-and-file members with direct input into the federal party, improve party finances, and broaden the party's appeal to women and young voters. 

Under the existing rules, it was the executive, not the popularly elected parliamentary leaders, who essentially determined party policy – as had been dramatically highlighted in March 1963, when a special national conference was held to deal with the Liberal government's proposal for a joint US–Australian military base at North West Cape in Western Australia.  Arthur Calwell and his deputy, Gough Whitlam, had addressed the thirty-six delegates at Canberra's Hotel Kingston, urging them to accept the base, but they had no say in the conference's deliberations, and no vote.  Instead, Calwell and Whitlam were photographed outside the hotel at midnight as they waited to hear the outcome.  The Daily Telegraph's front-page splash condemned the incident as "the all-time nadir of Labor parliamentary leadership."  Menzies coined the "faceless men" tag to deride the powerful and anonymous figures whom he accused of running the Labor Party.  A key element of the Wyndham Plan was to include the parliamentary leaders on the federal executive. 

This, however, would have diluted the power of the paid state branch officials.  Wyndham later described his job as to "stop the states from bickering" but that was only half of it.  Wyndham's plan placed him at the intersection of powerful fissures within the party: between traditionalists and modernisers; between the Left faction, which dominated the executive, and the Right; between the party organisation and the parliamentary leadership; and between the state branches and the emerging influence of the federal structure with its full-time secretary.  In particular Wyndham was squeezed between powerful individuals.  His erstwhile promoter Chamberlain, with his power base in Western Australia, his reliance on "the book" of party rules and his mistrust of parliamentarians, represented the archetypal Left traditionalist who stood to lose from reform.  Chamberlain opposed the Wyndham Plan.  Whitlam – moderniser, parliamentarian – vigorously supported it.  The plan was debated at the 1965 federal conference – and was shelved.  Wyndham changed tack, attempting to force change on the state branches from below, by directly appealing to rank-and-file members.  But the executive ordered he be "kept away" from branch members; Netta Burns, his secretary, recalled that Wyndham was barred from travelling outside Canberra without the executive's permission. 

Labor's electoral debacle of 1966 no doubt further weakened Wyndham's position; he certainly felt he was made the scapegoat.  Following Menzies' resignation, the Coalition parties under Harold Holt won nearly 60 per cent of the two-party preferred vote and held two-thirds of the seats in the House of Representatives.  It was the end of the road for Calwell, who was soon replaced as leader by Gough Whitlam.  Wyndham had been one of Whitlam's closest collaborators; after 1966, however, their relationship began to deteriorate.  The ostensible reason was a disagreement about a proposed redistribution but there were personal niggles as well.  Wyndham bristled at what he described as Whitlam's "casual and offhanded treatment" when he tried to have a discussion with the leader about campaign finance; Whitlam was "still too arrogant."  More generally, Wyndham was increasingly frustrated with the whole party: its archaic structures, deep factionalism, petty squabbling and resistance to reform.  Newspaper columnists were taking note of the tensions in Labor's head office, describing Wyndham as "a professional among amateurs," a "frustrated reformer," and "the little Englishman, who... worked like a drover's sheep dog to rehabilitate the ALP."  Privately, Wyndham was scathing about his employers on the executive, writing in March 1969:

[Jim] Keeffe as the Federal president is a wretched individual; incompetent, cheap and admirably described as a "crumb," [Victorian state secretary Bill] Hartley is gross, also incompetent, and I am sure has not the slightest idea of what democratic socialism is about. [ Queensland state secretary Tom] Burns is a larrickin [sic].  Chamberlain the albatross around everyone's neck and a leech, sucking us dry of energy and creditability. 

In another note, he described these and other members of the executive as a "power cabal" that dominated the executive and the party:

The clique, with which I will not grace the name of left-wing since they are simply a power cabal, insulates itself completely from public and party opinion.  It hears and sees only what it wants to hear and see, of course it deludes itself into believing that they are the purists, the upholders of principles and great defenders of the party.  Anyone who so much as crosses their path must pay the penalty of their vindictiveness and jealousy.  The clique is able to dominate party affairs because no one else will challenge their supremacy. 

For their part, Netta Burns recalled, the clique "made it impossible for him [Wyndham] to stay."  The executive commissioned an audit of Wyndham's management of party funds from mid-1967; discrepancies were allegedly discovered.  Wyndham was said to have wasted, misused, or even misappropriated party funds, variously in order to hold party meetings in "luxurious" surroundings, or to cover his travel costs while on party business, or to pay a garage bill for his wife's car.  Wyndham later explained that he "came a cropper" because he had used party funds to help Whitlam pay for a dinner with the federal executive on a visit to Sydney:

We had the executive to lunch somewhere in Sydney.  The meeting was in Sydney. [ Gough Whitlam] said to me, "I suppose I'd better pay for these bastards."  Now I knew he was stretched.  So I said, "OK, I'll go halves with you."  Now I had no allowance, so it had to come out of party funds, and that was half my problem... They purported to find that I'd been rifling funds, which I hadn't.  I'd been helping Gough out. 

Whatever the actual charge, Wyndham defended himself stoutly at a finance committee meeting, reading out a four-page statement that declared he had "lived on a razor edge ever since the Secretariat was created." 

Having, therefore, carefully consider[ed] my position and my own self-respect, I have reached the conclusion, regrettable and distasteful as it is to me, that I no longer wish to serve in my present capacity.  I accordingly tender my resignation as from the moment I complete reading this statement. 

Taciturn, unhappy, exhausted, Wyndham resigned as federal secretary in March 1969 to take up the vacant state secretary's role in New South Wales.  But the vendetta against him had further to run.  The auditor's report was debated at a two-day meeting of the executive in May; Wyndham was found to have provided "misleading" answers and was unanimously censured.  Refusing to defend himself in the media or the defamation courts, Wyndham took himself and his wife to Norfolk Island.  When he failed to report for duty in New South Wales the following week, he was dismissed from his role as state secretary.  The assassination of the party's first paid full-time secretary was complete; politically, his career was "finished."  He was thirty-nine years old. 

Yet the smear campaign continued.  Alan Reid reported that Wyndham's enemies continued to "feed out" highly damaging material against him; Netta Burns stated that scurrilous leaflets were circulated at the party conference in Victoria in June.  Wyndham was badgered by lawyers and friends to mount a complaint, but this would have been inflammatory in an election year; he loyally kept his mouth shut.  Wyndham's only defender was his old press gallery contact, Maxwell Newton, who had become publisher of an influential Canberra newsletter.  Newton issued a statement that Wyndham had been "ill-treated, maligned and smeared" by members of the executive and offered him a job; Wyndham worked for a decade as editor of the Daily Commercial News.  He then lived in retirement with his wife in Newcastle until his death in July 2012. 

With Wyndham's appointment, Labor at last had its own version of the Liberals' Don Cleland, but it had taken the ALP nearly twenty years to catch up.  Of course by then the Liberals had even more resources.  Wyndham's salary was £3000 a year in 1963; the Liberal federal director was getting "something over £4000 a year" in 1961.  Wyndham's support staff consisted of two typists; if they both went on leave, he worked alone.  The Liberals' head office had been staffed from its inception with a substantial professional team.  The tripartite staffing structure established under Cleland – in which the federal director was assisted by a public relations officer and a senior research officer – was retained, although White had been replaced by Edgar Holt in 1950, and Bengtsson resigned to join British Tobacco in 1955 and was replaced by his deputy, Bede Hartcher.  Both Holt and Hartcher were on "about £3500" each.  Despite their regular complaints about under-resourcing, they were supported by six staff members in the research team, a generous publications budget, and international travel to observe political developments in the UK and US.  This was just at the federal level.  In the NSW division in the late 1940s, a paid staff of forty-five reported to the general secretary, including more than two dozen field staff.  By the 1960s, the Liberal Party employed between sixty and seventy full-time staff around Australia, with perhaps another forty full-time field organisers. 

Although it was tiny in comparison, Wyndham's Canberra office was an important symbolic and practical statement.  Previously, Labor had had no national head office.  Instead it was accommodated in a series of state branch offices, shifting according to the home town of each new federal secretary: it was in Melbourne from 1915 to 1954 under Stewart, McNamara and Kennelly, then in Brisbane under Schmella and Perth under Chamberlain.  By locating its head office in the national capital, Labor had, at least in one respect, beaten the Liberal Party.  The Liberals had aspired to a permanent secretariat in Canberra since their formation, but until 1965 the national head office was in Sydney, sharing space with the NSW division.  When the Liberals finally made the move, however, they did it in style, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the party's founding with the gala opening of "Menzies House," a purpose-built, Georgian-style headquarters in Canberra's parliamentary precinct. 

*

Despite the vast disparity in their physical resources, the individuals leading these rival organisations came from strikingly similar backgrounds.  After Cleland's resignation as federal director of the Liberal Party in 1951, Bob Willoughby was "personally selected" as his successor by Menzies and the party president, Tom Ritchie.  Born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1908, Willoughby had emigrated, like Chamberlain and Wyndham, to find new opportunities in Australia.  Two weeks after stepping off the boat in Adelaide in 1924, he answered an advertisement by the Liberal Country League for an office boy and, like Wyndham and Kennelly, began his political career as a teenaged clerk.  He spent fourteen years in the South Australian state division, rising through the ranks in what the journalist Peter Smark described as a "meticulously anonymous" fashion.  His roles included chief clerk, sub-accountant and field organiser; the job titles themselves give a sense of the larger, arguably top-heavy, bureaucratic machinery that characterised the non-Labor parties. 

In 1938 Willoughby shifted to the parliamentary wing, working as private secretary to the South Australian Liberal senator George McLeay.  When McLeay, as leader of the opposition in the Senate, joined the Australian delegation to the 1945 San Francisco conference that established the United Nations, Willoughby accompanied him.  In 1947, aged thirty-nine, he made the most important move of his career, joining Menzies' staff in opposition.  As a personal assistant to the party leader, Willoughby commenced a lifelong relationship with, and loyalty to, Menzies; Ian Hancock said that Willoughby "worshipped" Menzies, whom he called "the Chief."  Again, there are echoes of Wyndham's devotion to Evatt.  Working as a liaison between the parliamentary leader and the head office, Willoughby was well placed, when the time came, to succeed Cleland as federal director. 

Here the parallels end.  Willoughby went on to serve as federal director for an astonishing eighteen years, outlasting Menzies himself as well as Harold Holt; he was finally swept aside by the new prime ministerial broom of John Gorton and retired to the garden suburbs of Canberra in 1969.  He died in 1993, aged eighty-five.  Cleland, too, enjoyed a long career; after retiring from party politics, he was appointed administrator of the territory of Papua New Guinea.  Labor's brutal ouster of Wyndham after just six years provides the strongest contrast; there was no retirement to the Upper House for him, as there had been for his obedient predecessor, Tripovich.  Even Kennelly, whose departure from head office after eight years was scarcely voluntary, was paid off with a lengthy retirement in the Senate.  Indeed, of Labor's six federal secretaries between 1915 and 1969, only Chamberlain and Kennelly could be said to have survived.  Stewart, McNamara and Schmella essentially worked themselves to death; Wyndham was purged. 

How are we to explain the impressive rise and shameful demise of Cyril Wyndham?  Was it purely the result of his own character – his energy and enterprise, his reformist instincts, his prickly resentment of criticism, his refusal to be a vassal?  Or were more complex institutional factors at play?  In selecting a youthful outsider as their first full-time salaried officer, the state officials on federal executive may have thought they had someone they could push around, or at worst ignore.  The job came with a troubled history and an ambiguous standing within the Australian Labor Party.  Perhaps Wyndham thought the new elements of this job – the salary, the full-time hours and the Canberra office – would overcome the problems his predecessors had faced.  Instead, the parts of the job that did not change – the lack of resources, the uncertain authority, the entrenched power of the state branches – proved to be more influential in determining how he did the job and, ultimately, how long he could survive in it.  Having spent decades arguing about whether to follow the Liberals' example and pay their national officials, Labor engaged in protracted contests about who should serve and under what conditions; more often than not, the result was high turnover, exhaustion and traumatic disruption. 

In this sense, Wyndham's career can be seen as an object lesson in the inherent tensions between institutions and the individuals who work within them.  Political scientists have long been interested in the capacity of institutions to impose order on an otherwise chaotic world.  Through rules, policies, hierarchies, routines, norms and identities, institutions shape the behaviour of the individuals within them and their relationships with one another.  But even long-enduring institutions, such as the Australian political parties, change.  The 1946 contest between Chifley and Menzies involved the same two parties as the 2013 contest between Rudd and Abbott – but over those decades the parties have been transformed.  They have amended their rules, developed new practices, modified their conventions, adopted new identities.  They have, in a word, professionalised.  This was not a matter of relentless forward progress; it was not instantly achieved by paying someone a salary in a national head office.  Cleland was appointed as a national official, but the states remained autonomous.  Kennelly proposed an innovative electoral strategy; the states resisted.  Wyndham believed it was his job to advise the party that it was going the wrong way; he was ignored and eventually kicked out.  Professionalisation is a contest, a struggle, between different elements of the institution, as they seek to develop the most appropriate means to achieve the party's goals.  But unexpectedly, Wyndham's demise opened the door for a party official whose efforts did succeed in professionalising both Labor's and Australia's election campaigns.  

# 4

# NATIONAL CAMPAIGN DIRECTOR

With Wyndham on the way out, the "power cabal" had its candidate ready.  Tom Burns, the Queensland state secretary, one of the first to make allegations about Wyndham's financial management, now looked likely to succeed him.  But when the federal executive gathered in Canberra in April 1969 to elect Wyndham's replacement, that plan fell apart.  The vote was scheduled for the evening session, and the meeting had adjourned as usual for a dinner break.  Caucusing with his supporters over dinner at the Hotel Civic, Joe Chamberlain revealed that, at sixty-nine years of age, he wanted the secretary's job – again.  So much for his distaste for Canberra's cold corridors of power! 

Burns stood aside.  But Chamberlain, despite twenty years' experience on the federal executive, had overlooked the South Australian state secretary Mick Young, who had been a member of the party for just twelve months.  Young had not been part of the negotiations over dinner, and when he heard the latest turn of events he was alarmed.  In fact he thought the move would be "an absolute political disaster." 

I did not want to return to South Australia saying I had supported Joe Chamberlain in becoming, at his age and with his views, federal secretary of the party. 

Young was especially concerned about "the feeling" – hostility would have been more accurate – between Chamberlain and Whitlam.  He announced that if nominated, he would stand for the position himself, "as a token of protest."  Contested elections for the federal secretaryship were not new.  But this contest offered an unprecedented contrast.  At thirty-three, Young was less than half Chamberlain's age.  Where Chamberlain was hostile to Whitlam, Young was a fan.  In Young's view, the job of the party secretary was to get Whitlam elected prime minister.  And where Chamberlain was a traditional powerbroker, Young was a specialist in a new style of campaign politics and had the credentials to prove it. 

Those credentials can be best understood against the backdrop, proudly unique, of South Australian politics.  In South Australia, the Labor Party had avoided the worst excesses of the Split and erected a system of internal management that promoted talent and shared spoils in what political scientist Geoff Stokes has identified as a stable "consensus method."  Perhaps this was a response to its unprecedented record of electoral failure.  The South Australian Liberal and Country League – itself an unusual amalgam of city and rural conservatives that maintained its own identity within the national Liberal Party – was led by a Gallipoli veteran, Tom Playford, who governed the state for twenty-six years.  Thanks in part to an extraordinary electoral malapportionment, or "Playmander," his term as premier from 1938 to 1965 is still a record for an Australian political leader.  Playford was defeated in the 1965 election and Labor's Frank Walsh, an old-school 67-year-old stonemason, became premier.  Walsh, however, was outclassed on all fronts – both by the new LCL leader, Steele Hall, a 38-year-old moderate, and by his own attorney-general, the articulate 39-year-old reformer Don Dunstan.  Dunstan replaced Walsh as premier in 1967, setting the scene for a 1968 contest between two young leaders, and so offering South Australia a sniff of an exciting new cultural and social era. 

Labor's 1968 campaign was directed by Mick Young.  Sydney-born and educated by the Marist Brothers until the age of fifteen, Young had moved to South Australia where he took up the "honourable and colourful profession" of sheep shearing.  He always retained the competitive spirit and crude bonhomie of the shearing sheds.  But behind the "golliwog's shock of black hair and a face that was a map of Ireland" there was a sharp intelligence, fierce ambition, and an openness to new ideas.  Young became an organiser for the AWU and then, in 1964, for the Labor Party, working alongside state secretary Geoff Virgo in the "cramped and shabby quarters in one corner of the Trades Hall" in Adelaide.  Young had played a role in Frank Walsh's victory in 1965; in 1968, because Virgo was campaigning for his own seat in Parliament, Young was appointed campaign director. 

Labor's campaign for the re-election of the Dunstan government in 1968 stands as Australia's first recognisably modern, marketing-driven campaign.  The government's media and marketing effort was built around Dunstan's modern image, his flair for publicity and his smooth television presence.  In an important innovation, Young wanted market research to guide the Labor strategy; he commissioned Marplan, the research arm of Sim Rubensohn's ad agency (now called Hansen Rubensohn-McCann Erikson, following its sale to a US multinational).  Young used Rubensohn's new American connections to borrow ads from the recent campaign of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and to adapt them to Australia – the first time US-style TV advertising had been seen in an Australian campaign.  Dunstan won 52 per cent of the vote but lost the election; he was returned to office at the next state election, in 1970.  Young, meanwhile, succeeded Virgo as state secretary in 1968 and twelve months later found himself facing Joe Chamberlain across the table of the federal executive. 

Both Chamberlain and Young were nominated, and Wyndham as returning officer organised a ballot.  Fourteen executive members voted and Wyndham, to the astonishment of all, announced that the result was tied seven-all.  Chamberlain had miscalculated.  Unknown to him, one of his usual supporters, the Tasmanian senator George Poke, had used the dinner break to telephone home for instructions.  There was a Tasmanian election due later in the year, and with Chamberlain as secretary there would be a risk of a party backlash: Poke was given permission to switch sides.  A second ballot was ordered, in case anyone wanted to change his mind.  No one did.  Chamberlain, reportedly "white with anger," withdrew, leaving Young to be elected unopposed.  It was 11.15 pm and the new federal secretary was caught unprepared:

At the conclusion of the meeting all the delegates left, without offering any encouragement or any discussion of plans for the forthcoming election.  After locking up the meeting venue, I found myself standing alone on the foot-path on Ainslie Avenue late at night, wondering what the hell I had allowed myself to get into. 

As it happened, the role Young now stepped into was not the same as the one Wyndham had departed.  The trauma of the Wyndham experience had apparently convinced the Labor executive that the experiment with a full-time national secretary was over.  Perhaps this was owing in part to the candidates on offer: all of the available contenders were already serving as state secretaries, and were perhaps justifiably reluctant to surrender their local power base.  Young was interested in leading the federal organisation only, it seems, as a detour on his career path which, thanks to the South Australian consensus method, was heading to a seat in Parliament.  In any event, Wyndham's successor served as a part-timer; the Canberra head office was shut down and resumed its peripatetic national tour by shifting to Adelaide.  Young, it was reported, "carried the federal secretariat around in his briefcase for several years."  In this sense, Young's election represented a backward step in Labor's professionalisation.  In practice, however, the new federal secretary propelled Labor, and indeed Australian politics generally, into a new phase of professionalism. 

*

In his new role, Young had three months to organise a national conference and six months to prepare a national election campaign.  The 1969 conference in Melbourne's Chevron Hotel was a triumph, both for Whitlam's reformist program and for Young's policy of media transparency.  Where previous conferences had taken place behind firmly closed doors – leading to such PR disasters as the "faceless men" incident – Young insisted the 1969 conference be open to the media.  Moreover, he hosted an open bar for journalists in his suite, ensuring that they came to him for information. 

The election campaign was another matter.  Whitlam's tireless advocacy saw Labor recover from its 1966 wipe-out to pick up eighteen seats in 1969.  Labor did particularly well in South Australia and Western Australia.  Victoria, however, underperformed dramatically, and the Coalition was returned to government with 66 seats to Labor's 59.  Speaking on national television on election night, Young claimed that "one more state to the west of Western Australia and we would have won."  But privately he was scathing about the national organisation's contribution to the electoral outcome. " We patched things up and struggled through," he said later.  But the "very uneven" result demonstrated the need for an entirely new approach in the next campaign.  What Young had in mind was a truly national campaign built on a long-term strategy.  In a crucial planning memo in March 1971, he wrote, "Victory in 1972 depends on many things, but a properly prepared campaign would give a huge boost to our chances." 

Young's idea of "proper" preparation meant time, money, national coordination, and maximum use of professional campaign techniques, including opinion research and TV advertising.  Labor's previous campaigns, he pointed out, were deficient in each respect.  The three-month preparation for the 1969 campaign was "virtually a last-minute effort," and the 1969 budget of $50,000 needed to be expanded five-fold.  Professional opinion research should be conducted months before the campaign, as Young had done in South Australia in 1968.  Most crucially, Labor's old decentralised approach, in which "state campaigns have been conducted completely divorced from the federal, and vice versa" and the party "had more slogans than candidates," needed to be replaced by a centrally organised effort. 

Young insisted on a nationally integrated campaign coordinated by the National Campaign Committee (NCC), which he effectively led.  He strengthened Labor's head office by appointing three professional staff members and consultants – David White, Peter Martin and Eric Walsh – all of whom had backgrounds in journalism and publicity.  He organised an innovative "mini-campaign" of policy announcements in 1971, both to draw media attention and as a dry run for the campaign itself.  Through the party's advertising agency, still led by the resilient Rubensohn, he commissioned a confidential nationwide survey of attitudes towards Gough Whitlam and his wife Margaret, and used the findings to develop a national advertising campaign for television, radio and newspapers. 

The key to the campaign was a two-word slogan, which perfectly captured the mood of the time and encapsulated both Labor's electoral strategy and Whitlam's policy program: "It's Time."  The phrase was suggested by a brash young copywriter in Rubensohn's agency, Paul Jones, in a strategy document written for the NSW branch.  The NSW secretary, Peter Westerway, sent a copy to Mick Young – this in itself revealed a new mood of cooperation – and Young immediately saw the line's potential for the national campaign. " The one thing we've got to have is a national slogan," Young told Westerway.  Short enough to fit on a badge or T-shirt, but substantial enough to underpin an entire policy speech, Young launched the slogan – after more market research – in early 1972, almost a full year before the election was due:

I was quite nervous about taking the decision so early... But our strategy demanded early decisions and a decisive start to our campaign if we were to avoid the pitfalls of previous campaigning.  The "It's Time" slogan was the lynchpin, the centrepiece, of our campaign. 

In August, "It's Time" was put to music, sung by a choir of celebrities from screen and stage, and broadcast repeatedly in Labor TV advertisements: "It's time for freedom / Time for moving / It's time to begin / Yes, it's time."  It was an anthem of hope and promise: "Time for better / days to be here / It's time we moved."  And it was all about the leader.  Images of Whitlam – as a boy, as a university rower, in the RAAF during the war, getting married, working on his papers, meeting China's leaders – were interspersed with the anthem, softening what the market research had revealed as his aloof, evasive, intellectual image and showing him as experienced, thoughtful and ready to lead.  On 13 November 1972, Whitlam presented himself to a cheering crowd at the Blacktown Civic Centre to launch Labor's first successful national election campaign in twenty-three years.  On 2 December, with a net gain of eight seats and a 67–58 majority, Labor won government. 

*

Mick Young's approach represented a watershed for Labor and for campaign management in Australia.  It can be best understood as a set of three innovations, which built on one another in a cumulative fashion.  Each of these innovations deserves more detailed discussion. 

The first was a new focus on electoral success as the primary purpose of campaigning.  This might sound obvious – surely victory is by definition the object of political campaigns.  For many party adherents, however – and not just in the Labor Party – political activity takes forms and offers rewards that have little to do with electoral success.  For some, the party provides career opportunities and social connections; for others, ideological identity and opportunities for political expression.  These are provided whether or not the party is in government; indeed, they may be more fully enjoyed – especially perhaps in progressive parties – without the burden of elected office.  A prime example of this way of thinking, and this way of life, was provided by Joe Chamberlain throughout his long career.  In the wake of Labor's defeat in 1949, Chamberlain disparaged "the tendency in certain quarters to measure our progress solely in terms of parliamentary seats":

This [labour] movement did not come into existence to provide safe seats in Parliament for any Tom, Dick or Harry who may be looking for a soft job.  When it comes to a question of Labor principle versus political expediency, then expediency must be rejected.  Far better to go into the political wilderness...

Still in the political wilderness after seven years, Chamberlain, by now the party's federal president, continued to disparage "safe seats" (while occupying, of course, a remarkably safe perch as a paid party official in Perth).  After Labor's heavy defeat in the 1955 federal election, Chamberlain again insisted there was "much to be thankful for":

If... Labor has found its soul, and rediscovered its purpose, the mere fact of not winning an election is a very insignificant happening.  It should be said with emphasis that the Labor Party did not come into existence merely to win seats in the Parliament. 

It was precisely this attitude that Whitlam, newly elected as party leader, attacked in his 1967 speech to the ALP conference in Victoria, the heartland of Labor electoral defeatism:

We construct a philosophy of failure, which finds in defeat a form of justification and a proof of the purity of our principles.  Certainly, the impotent are pure... Let us have none of this nonsense that defeat is in some way more moral than victory... I did not seek and do not want the leadership of Australia's largest pressure group.  I propose to follow the traditions of those of our leaders who have seen the role of our party as striving to achieve, and achieving, the national government of Australia. 

Young had already seen in South Australia how long electoral droughts can be broken, and knew that at the federal level "more and more people" in the ALP were thinking "in terms of winning, rather than of simply closing the gap between Labor and the Coalition Government." 

The wish, of course, is far from the achievement.  Young's second innovation was to design a campaign strategy that would maximise Labor's chances of winning.  In doing this, he was the first to exploit for national electoral purposes the potential of the revolutions underway in market research and media, translating to the national arena the techniques pioneered in South Australia under Dunstan.  Specifically, he saw the potential in using and integrating market research and television advertising. 

By the 1970s, market research had been dramatically improved from the guesswork and hucksterism of the pre-war years, thanks to the development of scientifically random sampling.  In Australia, published surveys of voting intentions, gathered Gallup-style from randomly selected doorstop interviews, had been an established feature of federal election campaigns since 1943, pioneered by the enterprising Roy Morgan of the Herald and Weekly Times newspaper group.  The telephone provided pollsters with a new means of accessing and measuring public opinion, and in the lead-up to the 1972 election, no less than three polls were being regularly published in competing newspaper groups.  Market research was also extensively used and refined by commercial marketing groups, seeking to tap into consumer preferences and moods and to identify groups of consumers by geographical, socio-economic and attitudinal classifications. 

This commercial research, which is not usually published, offered tantalising possibilities to Young, who needed to understand what voters really thought about Whitlam – and how they could be persuaded in sufficient numbers to do what they had never done before and vote Labor.  Young used Rubensohn's Marplan and another agency, Spectrum International, to conduct surveys and focus-group discussions about Whitlam and about the "It's Time" slogan.  He later confirmed that market research was an "integral part of all our decision making at the campaign level." 

This revolution in the measurement of public opinion complemented the more visible revolution of television, which transformed how parties communicated with voters and became a major – later, the major – arena in which campaigning takes place.  By US standards, Australian parties were "late adopters" of television.  For both parties, print advertising in city-based newspapers, and broadcasts on local radio, continued as the main forms of paid communication into the 1970s.  Eisenhower had been elected president in 1952 using a clever "Eisenhower Answers America" series of TV ads, but television broadcasting did not even commence in Australia until 1956.  In the 1958 Menzies–Evatt election, just 10.5 hours of commercial television time were devoted to political broadcasts, and these were typically studio-based discussions.  By the early 1960s, the Liberals remained wary of the new medium, reluctant "to translate public men into inferior entertainment figures."  Labor, interested in the potential of TV but restricted by lack of funds, commissioned Rubensohn and Cogger to produce a ten-minute documentary-style broadcast for the 1961 campaign.  In 1964, Rubensohn proposed an even more audacious plan: nothing less than a re-run of the John Henry Austral radio serial he had produced in 1949 for Menzies, but this time on TV.  He unveiled the plan at a meeting with Wyndham and followed up with a letter:

In the two years before 1949, when Labour [sic] was ousted from power, it would have been difficult to find a worse image than the Liberal Party's in general and Menzies' in particular.  The changeover was effected by means of the John Henry Austral campaign, which was directed towards members of the general public, and designed not so much to push Liberal plans as to denigrate the Labour side.  The reverse situation between the parties obtains today. 

This may have been an accurate acknowledgement of the weakness of Labor leader Arthur Calwell – but Rubensohn, ever the salesman, surely overestimated Labor's ability to fund what he called "a continuing campaign along the general lines of Austral strategy, designed for the new medium." 

Once the campaign became established and its value apparent, finance for a continuing campaign to carry right through to the next general election should not be too difficult to obtain as the Trade Union movement, in particular, would have had actual proof of the impact of this highly effective form of propaganda. 

The plan got no further. 

Public life, however, was inexorably becoming televised.  The aftermath of the Kennedy assassination and, locally, the disappearance of Harold Holt in the surf at Victoria's Cheviot Beach in 1967, were television events that took place in the living rooms of the nation.  The media industry, transcending state boundaries in covering public affairs, was further fuelling the emergence of a national consciousness: the Australian Broadcasting Commission launched Four Corners in 1961; Melbourne and Sydney TV networks were linked by coaxial cable from 1962; and Rupert Murdoch launched the first national daily newspaper, the Australian, in 1964.  Mick Young was the first to exploit this potential for election campaigning.  Although it was not until 1972, "It's Time" decisively shifted campaigning from local and parochial stages and onto a single, genuinely national, plane. 

In breaking new ground, Young was not universally applauded. " It's Time" spoke to the heart rather than the head; it was a message of hope and trust, not policy costings.  Labor stalwarts were aghast at its commercial slickness, its soft-sell approach.  MPs who fancied themselves experts on reading the electorate were suspicious of market research and the implication that their own political instincts might be insufficient.  Even Sim Rubensohn was sceptical, Young recalled: "He really wasn't into this business of going out and polling... He wanted to tell [voters] what they should think rather than getting their views." 

Having focussed the party's organisation on the task of electoral victory, and having adopted the tools necessary to achieve it, Young's third innovation was a new management structure for the party.  Neither of the other changes would have been truly effective without this third element.  Young imposed on a traditionally state-dominated party a structure in which authority lay firmly with the national centre.  The key was Young's appointment as national campaign director. 

Prior to 1972, neither party had campaigned on a genuinely national scale.  Campaign management was the responsibility of the officials at state level.  A Labor secretary in South Australia, in other words, or a Liberal director in New South Wales, was responsible not just for managing campaigns for their own state parliamentary elections but also for managing, within their state borders, each federal election.  Joe Chamberlain recorded how this decentralised system worked in practice.  As state secretary in Western Australia, he listed his campaign duties as arranging public meetings; preparing advertising material such as leaflets and, after the advent of TV, scriptwriting and hiring actors and producers; staffing polling booths; researching opposition policy statements for inconsistencies and inaccuracies; providing media commentary on campaign matters; and negotiating preference deals. 

Considering his term as state secretary ran from 1949 to 1974 and spanned ten federal elections, Chamberlain's failure to mention any form of coordination or even consultation with the federal party was an implicit assertion of state authority.  Indeed, thanks to a combination of personal antagonism and the deeper challenges of federalism, national interests were often subordinated to sectional interests.  As Wyndham recalled of his time in the Labor Party:

There was a lot of animosity between the states... The states, as I've said, played one off against the other.  It was incredible.  There was no Australianism.  There were six separate states.  Federal was notional.  In fact it was a bloody nuisance to most of them. 

That the London-born Wyndham should decry the lack of "Australianism" in the ALP is perhaps ironic.  But achieving an "Australian" approach to campaign management had so far proved impossible.  In Wyndham's time, a National Organising and Planning Committee had been established in which he, the state secretaries and the Rubensohn agency formulated "the broad national lines" of Labor election campaigns, onto which the states "grafted" their own campaigns.  But against the backdrop of antagonism and obstructionism, and in the absence of a compelling national strategy, the committee produced little of real use.  Wyndham's diagnosis was endorsed by Mick Young:

One of the grave deficiencies in the Labor campaigns of the past had been the lack of a truly national effort.  To win federal government we had to run a properly coordinated national campaign.  The biggest hurdle the party had to clear in order to run a successful campaign was the jealousy and suspicion that existed between the national office and the state branches.  Previously everyone had run their own campaigns. 

The solution was Young's appointment as national campaign director.  Young was the first party official to carry the title or to perform as a national campaign director.  In this capacity he chaired a national campaign committee, a group that included all the stakeholders involved in campaign planning and execution: the head office itself, Whitlam and his staff, the advertising agency, and the six state secretaries.  Through this committee, Young imposed his national vision on the states, obtained the information needed for the campaign, and secured formal imprimatur for his decisions.  According to Neal Blewett, an academic at Flinders University who went on to become a senior minister in the Hawke government, it was this that allowed Young to establish his "mastery" over campaign planning "almost immediately," and thus become Labor's "organiser of victory." 

This was not of course a command environment.  It required Young's special combination of intelligent pragmatism, campaign experience and dedication to the cause to direct the whole campaign structure from the centre.  Young was also assisted by generational change at the state level, which saw the emergence of a new cohort of state officials; less inclined to be obstructive, they shared his hunger for national electoral success.  With Westerway in Sydney and Young's protégé David Combe in Adelaide, and with the removal by national intervention of the entire Victorian administration including the obstructive state secretary Bill Hartley, Young had a clearer path than Wyndham had ever had.  By 1975, two future national secretaries, Western Australia's Bob McMullan and Victoria's Bob Hogg, had joined Labor's national coordination efforts. 

"It's Time" was a powerful slogan.  But had it only been applied in some states, while other states or individual candidates ran with different or additional messages, it would not have had the same force.  It was the national party, through the NCC, that directed and paid the ad agency to produce the TV and radio spots, in many cases determining specific media schedules in the states.  Even so, the state branches adopted the national campaign with varying degrees of consistency.  South Australia ran an almost pure national campaign, while Queensland, under the hand of would-be national secretary Tom Burns, still had candidates deploying their own slogans and colour schemes; this "defies the very thing we are trying to do of building... a mood that the government has to be changed," Young grumbled.  In Perth, an ailing Chamberlain stood aside from much of the campaign work, instead contributing "a steady stream of pessimism about the deteriorating electoral situation."  When Whitlam visited Perth during the campaign, Chamberlain had planned a public meeting – but was persuaded to cancel it so that Whitlam could concentrate on his television appearances: a neat summary of the diverging priorities of the old and the new. 

Young's success as national campaign director was to have profound implications for the emergence of the campaign professional.  Having established control within their own parties, party officials needed to rise to the challenge of actually directing a national campaign.  National campaign management involves a welter of discrete tasks: mobilising and organising a large and widely dispersed group of candidates, volunteers and supporters; crafting campaign messages, communicating them to voters and interest groups, and monitoring the messages of other parties and groups; coordinating the activities of the parliamentary leaders; handling a host of operational logistics such as itineraries, event management and broadcast advertising schedules; complying with regulatory constraints; and raising campaign funds.  These tasks are performed within a complex and volatile environment, both externally and potentially inside the party – all the while in competition with another, equally determined, rival organisation.  Pressure is high and tolerance for error is low.  The challenge is further complicated by the protracted but inherently unpredictable time frame, which extends over the whole electoral cycle and culminates in an intense finale, the scheduling of which is, in Australia at least, uncertain and in the hands of the prime minister – but which, once known, is entirely inflexible.  The stakes are high and the winner takes all. 

All of these tasks, while important in themselves, are ultimately part of an overarching campaign strategy.  This strategy is a plan of action, identifying the goal (electoral victory) and prescribing the most efficient and reliable path to achieve it.  It is not enough, then, for national campaign directors to ensure that the myriad individual tasks are performed.  They must also, first and foremost, create the strategic rationale for them, such that they all make a coherent and coordinated contribution to electoral success.  This strategic task forms the foundation of the professionalised campaign; after Young, it became accepted that the distinctive and primary task of the national campaign director was to design and implement this strategy. 

After managing Labor's 1972 triumph, Young resigned from head office and returned to South Australia, where he secured preselection for the safe federal seat of Port Adelaide.  In 1974 he became the first national party official to make the transition to the House of Representatives.  His maiden speech dealt with two topics close to his heart: the industrial condition of sheep shearers, and the conduct and funding of election campaigns.  His replacement as national secretary was David Combe, who followed in his footsteps from Adelaide.  Born in Glenelg in 1943 to a conservative family, Combe was educated at Prince Alfred College, one of the Adelaide establishment's private schools of choice.  As a second-year politics student at the University of Adelaide, however, Combe was inspired to join the Labor Party after hearing a speech about the White Australia Policy by Don Dunstan, who was then an opposition frontbencher.  A friendship developed and when Dunstan became attorney-general and then premier, Combe was his press secretary.  After Labor lost government in South Australia in 1968, Young's promotion to state secretary created a vacancy for an organiser; Combe filled it.  Young's election as federal secretary likewise created an opportunity for Combe to play a larger role in state campaigns.  And when Young resigned as federal secretary, Combe was a leading candidate to succeed him.  His succession was complicated by the ambitions of NSW's Peter Westerway, who had also been a significant contributor to victory in 1972.  But Combe secured the support of Whitlam, and Westerway withdrew.  Combe was elected unanimously – at thirty years of age, the youngest person then and since to head a national party office. 

Young's success as national campaign director had evidently persuaded Labor, once again, of the merits of a full-time national secretary.  And this time, the innovation stuck.  Combe inherited Young's title and national campaign machinery and reopened Labor's head office in Canberra.  In a subtle shift, the party simply dropped the language of federalism; henceforth, it referred to its national conference, national executive and national secretary.  In the 1974 double dissolution election, however, Combe soon discovered that the task of maintaining the organisational focus of a federal party was never done – especially perhaps in a party so unaccustomed to government.  The NCC, such a critically important vehicle for Young in 1972, became under Combe bogged down with "a cast of thousands."  After initially launching a "disjointed and dispirited campaign," Labor was "rejuvenated" by a mid-campaign change of strategy in which Mick Young, while running for Parliament, had to be drafted to assist. 

In 1949, the Liberal opposition leader persuaded the Australian electorate to accept his message of change.  Menzies' appeal was supported by extensive and expensive electronic advertising, organised by the Liberals' new national head office and delivered by the "clever tradesmen" hired from under Chifley's nose.  It took Labor more than two decades to develop the capacity to campaign in this centralised and coordinated way.  During those decades, communication was revolutionised by new technologies, new marketing tools emerged, and demographic change enlarged and transformed the Australian electorate.  Even so, the essential features of Mick Young's 1972 campaign bore a strong resemblance to the Liberals' 1949 model.  Centralisation was key, enabling the effective use of new technologies and marketing techniques.  It was only then, after twenty-three years, that the government changed hands once more.  As previously, competition between the two parties was spurring each organisation further down the path of professionalisation.  In catching up with the Liberals, Labor had in fact passed them, building its centralised structure around an influential and determined national campaign director.  Next, it would be the Liberals' turn to catch up and, in the process, to fight a bitter internal battle.  

# 5

# A BLOODLETTING

For the Liberal Party, losing government in 1972 was, literally, unprecedented.  Yet as they had shown in the 1940s, life in opposition presented opportunities for electoral revival through radical organisational reform.  Two days after election day, as Whitlam was still preparing to be sworn in as prime minister, the Liberal Party's president, businessman Bob Southey, declared the need "to re-examine the organisation's role [and] to undertake whatever reforms may be necessary."  As Menzies had done, so his 1970s descendants looked to Labor – not out of flattery, of course, but in order to discern in a dispassionate way what their rivals had done that they might do, and do better, to win government. 

There was the "It's Time" slogan, for a start, which the new deputy leader of the Liberal Party, Phillip Lynch, described as "the brightest and most bouncing baby ever to be conceived and brought forth within the marriage of advertising and politics."  But it was Labor's campaign structure – and particularly Young's new role as national campaign director – that the Liberals ultimately sought to emulate and adapt.  To do this, they had to overcome some of their own internal problems, and this would require a phase of bloodletting. 

These internal problems had been brewing under the surface for decades.  For all their electoral successes over the previous twenty-three years, the Liberals had long suffered from their own version of the federalist dysfunction.  Since its formation, the party had recognised the need for a national head office and yet, having created one, denied it the authority to perform as intended.  Instead of the single command structure Menzies had envisaged, the first federal directors, Don Cleland and Bob Willoughby, operated in an environment of uncertainty and conflict.  Despite enjoying salad years in government that their Labor opponents could only dream of, Cleland and Willoughby were caught up in the inherent dysfunctions of federalism. 

These tensions were embodied in the unresolved contest between Willoughby and the powerful state directors in Sydney and Melbourne, John Carrick and John McConnell.  McConnell's employment by the Liberal Party dated back to its very inception in Victoria; an accountant and ex-serviceman, he was appointed the first Victorian general secretary in 1945.  Carrick, an economics graduate, army officer and ex-POW (he had been in Changi and on the Burma–Thailand railway), was appointed as the research officer in the NSW division in 1946 and became the state director the following year.  Both O'Connell and Carrick remained as state directors until 1971; McConnell's epic twenty-six years is the longest term of any Australian party official, Labor or Liberal, state or federal. 

For Willoughby, these state officials were the "real enemies" throughout the 1950s and 1960s.  They resisted any expansion of federal authority and fiercely defended their right to run their own shows, including in federal election campaigns.  This was despite their very different track records as managers of state campaigns: the Victorians were in office non-stop from 1955 to 1982, while the NSW Liberals didn't win a state election between 1941 and 1965.  Ian Hancock notes that "none of the divisions was prepared to hand over the key functions of selecting candidates, employing field staff, conducting their own public relations, and fighting elections."  He suggests that, for Carrick and McConnell, the federal secretariat was little more than a "central post office which supplied propaganda literature, organised meetings, and assisted contacts with the federal government."  The states created their own advertising strategies; in New South Wales, the relationship with the Goldberg advertising agency predated the formation of the Liberal Party itself, stretching back into the 1920s, and Carrick took a hands-on role in designing, writing and approving advertising copy.  Carrick and McConnell both wrote and circulated "Political Appreciations," shrewd assessments of the political landscape based on internal intelligence from candidates and members, as well as statistical analysis of voting data and polls.  In the absence of party-commissioned market research, these reports were the gold standard; they were used to devise campaign strategies and to propose tactics to parliamentary leaders and officials.  In Queensland, another entrenched state director, Charles Porter, held the role from 1949 to 1966.  He had a different but equally forthright view about advertising and other campaign material: it was "all a waste of money and effort."  Polling about leaders was a "prime piece of pointless nonsense."  For Porter, campaigns were fought with the "sweat of the brow" and relied on the "gut feeling" of experienced on-the-ground campaigners like him. 

Willoughby wrote in 1954 of the "growing recognition of the need to speak with one voice" but like Cleland could never issue a command to that effect.  His deferential manner was no match for the strong-minded state directors.  The Liberals' federal machinery had bureaucratic complexity, but not decisive authority, either over the state divisions or the parliamentary party.  Cleland's Staff Planning Committee (SPC) coordinated public relations at a national level, but it acted largely within limits set by the states.  At the same time, continued electoral success seems to have made the prime minister less likely to take direction from the organisation, notwithstanding that his success was in part the result of its concerted campaign efforts. 

Nevertheless, a federal director who survived for eighteen years in this fractious environment cannot have been doing everything wrong.  Willoughby's backroom involvement in seven consecutive victorious federal election campaigns, from 1951 to 1966, is a record unlikely ever to be surpassed.  He built an effective relationship with his "Chief," acting as shock absorber, fixer and occasional sounding board, and then made a successful transition to Harold Holt's administration.  He assembled and maintained a head office in "splendid condition."  When Willoughby decided to stand down in 1968, having found it "difficult to work with" PM John Gorton, a replacement was readily found: Bede Hartcher was appointed the Liberal Party's third federal director.  Carrick was reportedly overlooked, but his ambitions to shift to Canberra were fulfilled in a different fashion when he won preselection to the Senate; he served as a minister in the Fraser government.  The Victorian party, by contrast, refused McConnell's bid to fill John Gorton's Senate vacancy when Gorton shifted to the House in 1968 as prime minister; the long-serving party official became "disillusioned" and resigned in 1971. 

Born in Sydney in 1918 and educated by the Marist Brothers in Darlinghurst, Bede Hartcher completed an economics degree at the University of Sydney while working as a clerk for the NSW State Railways.  He responded to a Liberal Party newspaper advertisement in 1947 and was hired as a research officer, working as part of Cleland's team based in Sydney. " A tall, slightly stooped, loosely built man who looks as though he has just stopped leaning against the verandah post of one of Drysdale's country pubs," according to journalist Don Whitington, Hartcher was to spend the rest of his career with the Liberal Party.  An employee of the national office, he spent time on secondment to the state divisions, including setting up a research team in Victoria in the mid-1950s.  Hartcher's whole political experience was in policy – developing it, explaining it and disseminating it for the benefit of MPs and party organisations around the country.  In a rare newspaper interview on the eve of his appointment as federal director, he pointed to his shelves of speakers' notes to indicate his work over the years.  This "think-tank" work not only improved policy outcomes, he told the reporter, but also achieved "unification of policy" across the party's federal divides. 

While there are many explanations for the Liberals' defeat in 1972, it seems easy with hindsight to recognise that Hartcher – an easygoing, consultative policy wonk, inexperienced in election campaigning – would be no match for Mick Young.  He possessed neither the personal nor the organisational authority of the ALP's national campaign director.  Hartcher's somewhat amateurish approach to market research and advertising proved ineffective against the nationwide rollout of "It's Time," and by mid-1972, when Labor was in full combat mode, Hartcher was reportedly "not prepared" to make major decisions. 

In the aftermath of the 1972 defeat, the Liberal Party president, Bob Southey, announced a decisive response: a review of party platform and changes to the party rules, both intended to increase the organisation's say in policy development.  Southey also announced the formation of a new "special research unit" and "a national campaign committee to ensure that future federal election campaigns will be nationally coordinated and of a long-term nature."  All of these announcements carried implicit criticisms of Hartcher.  Ominously for him, the research unit would operate in Sydney, while the communications unit would be attached to the office of the opposition leader, Bill Snedden; neither of them, that is, would be in Hartcher's head office. 

Like previous Liberal Party presidents, Southey considered it his responsibility to identify new talent for the secretariat.  Labor's federal secretaries had all come up through the state branches, but Liberal federal directors had always been appointed from outside the party organisation – except Hartcher.  Southey was not about to repeat the experiment.  Through his connections in the Melbourne business community – probably via the rising Melbourne businessman John Elliott – Southey got a message to a 29-year-old management consultant, Timothy Pascoe: was he interested in heading up the new Federal Policy Support Unit?  Pascoe was interested and was certainly well qualified, with a double undergraduate degree (engineering and economics) from the University of Adelaide, a doctorate in operations research from Cambridge, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.  Having been recruited in New York by the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, Pascoe returned to Australia in 1969 to work in McKinsey's Melbourne outpost, where, fatefully, he shared an office with John Elliott.  He joined the Liberal Party in 1970. 

As Pascoe considered the offer, Southey was working on a bigger recruitment coup.  Tony Eggleton had worked as press secretary to Menzies, Holt and Gorton, and had started working for his fourth prime minister, Bill McMahon, when he accepted an appointment in London as information director for the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1971.  Now, Eggleton was made "an offer I couldn't refuse" to return to Canberra to establish and run a "new communications shop" for the party; John Elliott phoned to offer to "help finance" his return. 

The appointments of Pascoe and Eggleton were announced in February 1974.  The onset of a double dissolution election in May forced a tweak in the succession planning: Eggleton was employed by head office as adviser to Snedden – the party communications role never materialised – and "took over the supervision of the whole campaign."  Pascoe, on discovering that the party was entering an election campaign with no formal policy document, convened an intensive brainstorming session of shadow ministers and policy experts in Melbourne over the Easter holiday weekend, drafting and editing a 136-page document that was immediately sent to the printers and distributed as "The Way Ahead."  During the campaign proper, Pascoe set up a campaign headquarters or "war room" in Snedden's Sydney office – an innovative way to track itineraries and provide a clearing house for information between Snedden and his frontbenchers. 

Although they were defeated in 1974, the Liberals had sniffed victory, and plans for a dramatic restructuring of the head office continued.  Pascoe was deeply critical that Hartcher's secretariat had not contributed to any of his policy development or campaign management; he scathingly recalled it as "moribund, incompetent, boring [and] useless," more concerned with doing "what the Secretariat thought was right" than with "cooperating with the leader's office" or "getting the party elected" – echoes of Young's critique of Labor a few years earlier.  Pascoe had no wish for a long career in the head office but was determined to force change.  He met with Eggleton privately.  They agreed that Pascoe should become federal director for twelve months, during which he would, as he put it, "turn the place around and do all the bloodletting," before standing aside for Eggleton.  Pascoe recalled:

Because I was only there for a short period of time, I could call it as I saw it... I was there to do a very particular thing and in some ways my objectivity, my outsider-ness, was what enabled me to do it.  Because I didn't have to worry about my future political career, and offending them. 

Eggleton's recollection confirms the arrangement – and the metaphor of blood:

Tim Pascoe said to me, "Look Tony, I think this is a crazy idea having these two organisations [outside the secretariat].  I think we should persuade the powers that be to not go ahead with that, but to simply make a stronger and better secretariat."  He said, "If it doesn't hurt you Tony, I'd like to suggest that initially perhaps I take over the secretariat.  You continue to work as an adviser to Bill Snedden.  I'll have the blood on the floor of the secretariat and clean it all up, and then you can come in clean to take over the new secretariat.  It would be much better for someone to come in after all that's been done, than to have to carry that burden as the new director."  I said, "If Bob Southey agrees, I can see the merit in what you're suggesting."  Bob Southey was a little taken aback but he could see the merit of it.  That's how it happened. 

Pascoe's appointment as the party's fourth federal director was announced in July 1974.  Both Hartcher and the federal public relations officer, Edgar Holt, stayed on in the secretariat.  It was a delicate and unstable situation.  Hartcher continued to occupy the director's office while Pascoe "sat in a small office at the end of the corridor, and yet I was supposed to be running the place."  One journalist was told that the head office would be split into three: Pascoe's policy unit and Eggleton's communications unit working out of Snedden's office, with Hartcher responsible for unspecified "liaison between Canberra and the states."  But this did not work for Pascoe, who regarded it as unacceptable that senior staff like Hartcher and Holt should be "paid to do nothing"; he recalled:

My role was like being brought into a company, to turn it around.  It was a turn-around.  Bede was just running a machine that was just running down.  Literally just cranking, turning the handle, but I think at a slower rate. 

Pascoe was determined on a more decisive resolution, a clean sweep, and requested a meeting with Southey.  The incoming party treasurer, Sir Robert Crichton-Browne, was present, along with his predecessor Sir Charles McGrath.  Pascoe presented them with a paper putting his case:

What I said basically was, "This is ridiculous.  These two guys [Hartcher and Holt] have got to go.  And this is how I think we ought to proceed."  I gave it to them each.  They read it.  Sir Robert Crichton-Brown was the first to finish... and... said, "Gentlemen, I know I'm the new boy, would you mind if I spoke first?  Gentlemen, I have a very clear view on these sorts of matters.  Timothy's put a very dramatic proposition to us.  My view is we either endorse it, or we fire Timothy.  And my view is we endorse it."  It was insurrection, even though I was supposed to be the boss, and it meant going against what had been agreed with the federal executive.  The others fell into line immediately. 

With that, Hartcher became the only federal director ever purged from head office.  Edgar Holt was also pushed.  In Hancock's interpretation, Hartcher and Holt "stood out like dinosaurs" in the eyes of the "so-called McKinsey set," and were "brutally removed."  Even Eggleton, in his understated way, acknowledges there was "considerable unease and unhappiness about it all."  A spot was found for Hartcher as finance director in Ash Street, but the sense of loss was sharpened when he succumbed to a serious illness; he died in August 1977.  The party's senior research officer, Dr Graeme Starr, who also left the secretariat at this time, dedicated his documentary history of the Liberal Party to Hartcher's memory. 

* * *

Tony Eggleton provided devoted service to Liberal leaders from Menzies to Howard in opposition and in government.  A scrupulously neutral organisational man, he was compared to a "built-in wardrobe" – invisible and discreet – or, as Ward O'Neill depicted him in 1999, a faithful family steward. 

Source: National Library of Australia, Ward O'Neill collection, used with permission

* * *

For Pascoe, however, there was no time to waste.  He hired energetic replacements in policy and communications and rebuilt the organisation's relationship with the parliamentary leadership and shadow ministry office.  In the NSW division, Carrick had been replaced by another ex-McKinseyite, Jim Carlton: Pascoe and he "worked on getting it so we led from the centre, both in election campaigns and in a lot of other stuff."  His twelve-month term complete, Pascoe stepped aside and shifted to Melbourne to head up the party's Victorian division.  Eggleton became federal director in mid-1975 – only the fifth since 1945 but the third in the space of twelve months. 

Once more, the Liberals had appointed a federal director from outside.  Tony Eggleton was a journalist, and not even a member of the Liberal Party.  But at a time of change, his long experience as a prime ministerial adviser also made him a familiar and trusted figure with the party.  Born in 1932 in Swindon in the UK, Eggleton migrated to Australia as an eighteen-year-old journalist.  He was employed by the Bendigo Advertiser – where in 1950 he interviewed a newly elected Liberal senator, John Gorton – and then by the Australian Broadcasting Commission in Melbourne and Adelaide, gaining wide experience in news gathering, including in the new medium of television.  When the Navy Department advertised for an experienced radio, television and newspaper reporter to run its public relations, he applied for the job knowing he was well qualified.  Gorton, by now minister for the navy, recalled the Bendigo interview – and recognised the potential advantages of harnessing this smart young operator.  Eggleton recalled that he "spent a lot of time at Parliament House rather than [at the navy offices at] Russell Hill."  In February 1964, after the navy destroyer HMAS Voyager collided with the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne, killing eighty-two sailors, Eggleton managed the media with a sure hand.  The same year, while chairing a committee to create the National Press Club in Canberra, Eggleton had reason to write to Prime Minister Menzies, who happened to be looking for a new press secretary.  In December, during the half-Senate campaign, Menzies arranged for Eggleton to serve as press secretary to the defence minister, Shane Paltridge.  Satisfied with what he had seen and heard, Menzies appointed Eggleton to the vacancy in his own office. 

Although Eggleton had been a Young Conservative in the UK, he had never joined the Liberal Party.  Menzies reassured him it was not necessary:

"Laddie," he said – he called me laddie the whole time I knew him – and this is not something that you would hear today – "I don't mind what party you support, as long as you feel you can be loyal to my government.  But I'm not interested in your politics.  I'm interested in whether you do a professional job as press secretary to the Prime Minister."  I thought, yes, that was all satisfactory to me. 

Within a year, at Kirribilli House over the Christmas break in 1965, Menzies confided in Eggleton his intention to retire. " He handed me on to Holt," as Eggleton put it.  Paul Hasluck, a Liberal MP with his own leadership aspirations, regarded Eggleton as a "little twerp" who helped to destroy Holt's stature by feeding his weakness for publicity.  In the days after Holt's disappearance in December 1967, Eggleton came to wide public attention through his dignified and composed television briefings.  His high profile is suggested by the fact that, when Liberal MPs gathered to vote for Holt's successor, it was Eggleton who admitted the cameras to the party room before the vote, and who announced the result to the waiting media afterwards: Gorton was the new prime minister. 

Eggleton remained as press secretary but his relations with Gorton, an unconventional bon vivant, were strained.  When, after the annual Press Gallery Ball in October 1968, the prime minister made a late-night visit to the US embassy in the company of the journalist Geraldine Willesee, Eggleton acted as prime ministerial wingman.  Eggleton also wrote a highly critical internal report after the 1969 election campaign about Gorton's media performance, especially on television.  He urged that a campaign manager be appointed to provide "closer supervision of the campaign."  Eggleton would eventually have that job, but not before seeing Gorton replaced as prime minister by Bill McMahon in a party room coup.  Eggleton worked with McMahon for a few weeks but soon accepted a position with the Commonwealth Secretariat in London: "I had already gone through a number of prime ministers, and I thought working in an international job in London was appealing."  He enjoyed the work in Marlborough House, but when Snedden, Southey and Elliott started to lobby him to return, he acquiesced in 1974.  Following Pascoe's restructures, Eggleton became federal director.  It was his first job with the organisational rather than parliamentary wing of the party.  It was only at this point that he joined the Liberal Party:

I'd been clearly identified with and associated with and voted for the Liberal Party, but I hadn't been a card-carrying member until I became federal director. 

Eggleton was described in newspaper profiles as dapper, deferential, and conservative in dress, inspiring nicknames including "the Maltese Falcon," "King Penguin" and "discreet chameleon."  He was a "quiet, calm force."  David Barnett described him as "like a built-in wardrobe" – invisible and discreet.  Barnett, who followed in Eggleton's footsteps as prime ministerial press secretary to Malcolm Fraser, also pointed out that Eggleton had no particular policy interests or beliefs; he accepted only the premise that "policies are necessary" for campaign purposes. 

In 1974, the Liberals had experimented with a national campaign committee.  But Hartcher had not been made national campaign director, and the organisational uncertainty in head office meant there was no real central management of the campaign.  Now the inevitable next steps were taken.  For the next election, the executive decided, "the federal campaign committee's authority will be vested in the federal director during the campaign proper.  In effect the federal director will control the conduct of the campaign."  Vested with a new level of authority, Eggleton immediately set to work:

I am a very strong believer in winning elections before an election.  I would start planning an election – if I had any knowledge of a likely election debate – a year before. 

He replaced Hartcher's preferred advertising agency, Berry Currie, with Masius Wynn Williams, a British-owned firm with deep Liberal roots; it had bought out the Goldberg Agency, which had conducted advertising for the Liberal Party and its UAP forerunner for decades.  Eggleton also realised the party needed "a stronger link" in market research.  Hartcher had appointed George Camakaris' Quantum Research, but Eggleton "established a close rapport" with the pollster Roy Morgan.  Morgan, the pioneer of the Gallup methodology in Australia, had as early as 1954 fed "private information" to the Liberal campaign organisation.  With both Masius and Morgan based in Melbourne, Eggleton committed to setting up the party's national campaign headquarters there as well. 

By mid-1975, Snedden was replaced as opposition leader by Malcolm Fraser, who announced that he would not block supply to the Whitlam government unless it engaged in "extraordinary" or "reprehensible" conduct.  The government's efforts to raise an offshore petrodollar loan provided Fraser with such a justification, and in October the Senate refused to grant supply.  Amid the crisis, Pascoe found he could not support Fraser's high-risk strategy, recalling that "he and I had a terrible fight" about it.  Pascoe set out his objections in a memo, asserting that while Fraser was likely to succeed in forcing an election in the short-run, "if you win government this way you'll never have the moral imprimatur to do what's needed."  Pascoe presented the memo to Fraser at the party's federal council meeting in Canberra later that month.  Fraser was "ashen" when he read it and later burnt the document. " I don't think he ever forgave me for it," he said.  On 11 November 1975, the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, dismissed Whitlam and installed Fraser, on the proviso he call an immediate election. 

Just as "It's Time" had encapsulated the mood of the nation in 1972 and summarised Labor's entire policy thrust, so Eggleton recognised the need for a theme that would channel the emotions generated by Fraser's daring political strategy.  Masius developed ads that used newspaper headlines and images to remind voters in a sombre yet alarmist way of the Whitlam years, and offering them the hope for change: "Turn on the Lights, Australia."  Eggleton recalled:

I still remember putting up the idea of "Turn on the Lights" as the theme for the '75 election campaign.  A big chap sitting next to me [i.e. Malcolm Fraser] said, "I don't understand that Tony, I'm not sure I like that."  I said, "Well let's fly with it."  And of course he was very pleased subsequently... "Turn on the Lights" lent itself to so much use by cartoonists and the media in general.  In the first week I had a few of the state divisions ringing up and saying, "We're not sure we like this."  I said, "Give me a few more days."  Within a week they were all coming back and saying, "Oh fantastic." 

The Liberal advertising also explicitly recognised the need for a mixture of positive messages, such as "Turn on the Lights," and more negative attacks. " We ran some very hard-hitting negative campaigning for the 'Turn on the Lights' campaign – the Dark Days of Labor and Whitlam and all these kinds of things – while keeping a balance with positive messages," Eggleton recalled.  Unlike Labor's campaign in 1972, which had been locked down months in advance, the Liberals retained some tactical flexibility – ads were researched and developed but then discarded as new opportunities arose.  Where the "It's Time" ads had run for weeks, the central themes developed by Masius and the Liberals were complemented by quickly produced variations.  Eggleton compared it to working "like a news agency":

We'd actually develop new ads day by day, to respond to the changing circumstances, both press and television.  Masius... would turn an ad around in about twelve or thirteen hours.  Something could happen on Monday, and by Tuesday we're actually running ads that picked up on a mistake by Labor or developing a new initiative for ourselves. 

In a formal sense, Eggleton's authority as national campaign director was limited to the campaign period.  In practice, however, he took control for much longer and, rather than taking direction from the NCC, provided leadership to it:

I put my plans and recommendations to them to consider and endorse... Occasionally we would get the committee to meet during the campaign, but it was significant how much authority the Federal Director was then given for the campaigns. 

Eggleton made himself essential to all the important conversations that took place during the campaign, and this was the key to his effectiveness.  He imposed the routines of a bureaucracy and used these to coordinate dispersed activity, gather information and enforce his own authority.  There were early-morning telephone hook-ups to monitor overnight media coverage and rehearse responses to the "likely dangers for the day," and late-night conferences with the advertising agency.  He briefed the two Coalition leaders, Fraser and Doug Anthony, daily, so that they could coordinate their public positions on emerging issues.  There were meetings with the state directors "so they could keep me in touch with what was going on around the place," and meetings of the party's long-standing Staff Planning Committee. 

Eggleton's position at the apex of all this activity was made more complicated by an unexpected addition to his duties.  Malcolm Fraser was a strong supporter of Eggleton's efforts to "have a truly national campaign" and supported Eggleton's appointment as national campaign director.  But he also insisted that Eggleton travel in the prime ministerial plane to all of Fraser's own campaign commitments.  This gave the new campaign director an unprecedentedly "hands-on" role and unparalleled influence in day-to-day decision making.  It also created a logistical nightmare.  Eggleton had to find opportunities to "slip back" to Melbourne; he would schedule late-night meetings in Masius' St Kilda Road offices in order to approve the latest TV advertising.  The constant travel removed Eggleton from direct management of the Melbourne campaign headquarters; in his absence, Pascoe was saddled up again and ran the Melbourne office. 

The Coalition's landslide victory in 1975, followed by another in 1977, vindicated the national approach and silenced any remaining doubters.  Eggleton as federal director built a relationship of unprecedented intimacy with the prime minister. 

[Fraser] had a direction to his staff: everything I sent him in writing was sent on a special blue coloured paper, and every morning when he came in to his desk he would look at "Tony's blues" to see what the organisation was up to.  It was a great strength for the organisation.  It was a good system. 

He also invited me over to the morning strategy meetings, and he also introduced, at my suggestion, pre-Question Time briefings where a few people would meet with the Prime Minister for 45 minutes... I would sit in for that and contribute to that, and then he would want me to sit in his office... with the loud speaker on, listening to Question Time and then he would come back in, and we would have a cup of tea, and discuss how it had gone.  So I had this daily communication with the prime minister. 

Eggleton's relationship with Fraser was so close that it became "slightly contentious."  Some Liberals felt Eggleton was acting too much as Fraser's personal adviser, and not enough as the director of the party organisation.  Eggleton would fend off the criticism:

I used to say to people, "This is a great asset to the organisation."  If any issue came up from the organisation requiring the leader's approval I could get it in an hour or so.  He insisted on a direct [telephone] line between me and him, which again worried some people – why have they got a direct line?  It was because we could do things quickly together.  And we did. 

After Labor's humiliating defeat in 1977, Whitlam was replaced as Labor leader by Bill Hayden.  The Liberals now had to work harder for electoral success.  Eggleton speaks of the 1980 election campaign with a tinge of regret:

The worst campaign for me was in 1980, when we did some very harsh negative campaigning and only just got over the line, when a Labor shadow minister was unwise enough to talk about taxing people's homes. 

The ALP finance spokesman, Peter Walsh, had suggested that Labor might consider a wealth tax.  His comments were quickly picked up by a new media-monitoring unit Eggleton had set up in head office:

We were well behind in the polls in the second week of the campaign according to Morgan, and we just threw everything into full-page ads about taxes, and that got us over the line.  It's a campaign which I look back upon with some reservations.  Well we won, and I'm happy that we won, but it was such a negative campaign.  I did not feel great pride in it. 

After three election victories, Eggleton then oversaw three successive defeats, in 1983, 1984 and 1987, as the party entered what he recalled as its "period in the wilderness."  Unlike its previous periods in opposition, this time the Liberals did not engage in radical organisational reform.  Indeed, amid continuous rivalry for the leadership between John Howard and Andrew Peacock, Eggleton became a "quiet calm force," a scrupulously neutral broker between the warring factions.  But Fraser's departure after the 1983 defeat posed challenges for Eggleton's authority as campaign director.  Neither Howard nor Peacock required him to travel with them during the three election campaigns, so Eggleton operated out of the Melbourne headquarters.  This created opportunities for the leaders, and their staffs, to set their own agenda.  When head office suggested an itinerary for Peacock during the 1984 campaign, his staff decided on a different schedule.  Eggleton had to crack the whip and reinforce the need for "one person [to be] totally responsible for the campaign." 

The leader's office should become a cohesive part of the total campaign and not be out there running a separate campaign for the leader separately from the national campaign.  These were lessons that we were very firm about. 

Following the 1987 defeat, Eggleton had to reassert his authority.  He told journalist Alan Ramsey he had appealed to the federal executive for:

a new approach to election campaigns which would give the federal campaign director real control of the campaign, not just its federal elements such as advertising and Federal campaign headquarters, but actual operational responsibility for everything including the leader's staff. 

I made it pretty clear I didn't know what people might want me to do in the future, but that I certainly wouldn't be prepared again to be Federal campaign director unless I got that authority.  If you have the authority, and things go wrong, then you put up with the kicks.  But it's a bit irritating if you get the blame for matters you have no control over.  That was totally endorsed. 

Eggleton repeatedly offered to step aside during this period.  But John Elliott, the party's treasurer from 1984 and its president from 1988, insisted he remain and directed more resources into the organisation, reportedly doubling the secretariat's budget to $1 million and then doubling it again.  After a fourth election defeat in 1990, Eggleton finally retired from head office on his fifty-ninth birthday in 1991.  He had served for seventeen years as federal director – not quite as long as Willoughby, but Willoughby had only served three Liberal leaders.  Counting his time as press secretary, Eggleton served eight, five of them prime ministers. 

*

Eggleton's appointment as federal director once more vindicated the Liberals' practice of importing eclectic talent into the national head office.  Where Labor routinely elected state party officials, the Liberals had at critical times appointed outsiders: an army logistician (Brigadier Don Cleland) and a management consultant (Tim Pascoe).  Now, at a time when campaign management was shifting to an intense focus on media and communications, Eggleton brought long experience working in and with the media; and when a national rather than state perspective was needed, he arrived with a CV steeped in national institutions including the Australian Broadcasting Commission, the Commonwealth public service and the Prime Minister's Office.  Eggleton's ascendancy after the bloodletting of 1974 represented a severe rupture with the past and a repudiation of the smooth internal bureaucratic progression of the Willoughby and Hartcher years.  But in another sense, he represented a reversion to the Willoughby style: both arrived as teenagers from Britain and became lifelong party apparatchiks, well connected and trusted by all including, especially, the parliamentary leader.  Once they arrived, they stayed.  Don Cleland and Labor's Mick Young both lost one election (1946 and 1969 respectively) before achieving victory (in 1949 and 1972), and both then promptly left head office to pursue their careers elsewhere; but Eggleton, having been successful in his first campaign (1975), stayed on to serve the newly elected government.  This was, after all, what he had been doing for most of his career, from his earliest days as a departmental press officer and as press secretary to successive prime ministers.  He was never tempted to enter Parliament himself:

I never saw myself as a parliamentarian.  I concluded that what I did I could do quite well, and that I should do that rather than have aspirations to do things I didn't think I would do so well... In fact for most of those years I felt I had a better job than any parliamentarian would have – because I was close to leaders of the parliamentary party.  I was involved in everything, in a way that you'd have to be a very senior minister to be involved.  I didn't want to do anything else. 

Reviving his interest in international diplomacy, he moved to Brussels to head the global aid agency CARE International.  Like Willoughby before him, Eggleton ultimately retired to suburban Canberra.  Eggleton's career, then, displays many of the distinctive, party-specific characteristics of the Liberals' path to professionalism.  But it would be misleading to see this process in isolation, solely through the lens of one party's traditions, practices and personalities.  The Liberal Party's response to defeat in 1972 provides further evidence that a critical driver of professionalisation was provided by competition between the two major parties – and in particular, by the yearning of opposition parties to return to office.  Whether an opposition party is shocked into action by defeat (as the Liberals were after 1972) or is hungry for long-denied victory (the Liberals between 1943 and 1949; Labor from 1969 to 1972), time out of office provides the opportunity to regroup and to catch up with its opponents.  This may require radical organisational reform, as with Labor's intervention in its Victorian branch in 1970 and the Liberal bloodletting in 1974.  Or it can take a more gradual, negotiated form: in both parties, the appointments of Young and Eggleton as national campaign directors represented a clear transfer of authority in the opposition party from the periphery to the centre – a response to the campaign dysfunctions that arose from each party's federal structure.  In appointing Eggleton to this role, the Liberals were tacitly acknowledging that Labor's initiative facilitated superior campaign management; through the unwieldy but necessary vehicle of the NCC, both national campaign directors were able to influence and coordinate their state counterparts. 

But there was much more to this appointment than co-opting the states.  The national campaign director was able to influence all the party's campaign actors – party members, candidates, parliamentarians and even, as we will see, the party leader.  The national campaign director was empowered to identify the central campaign messages and to mobilise and coordinate the party's resources and personnel from the top down.  They did so, and over increasingly longer periods: beginning with Young's "mini-campaign" in late 1971, campaigning became more and more protracted, spilling out from the formal campaign period and taking place on a virtually continual basis. 

National campaign directors were, moreover, free to engage and direct a growing cast of specialist external consultants – skilled consultants from market research and advertising agencies – and were thus able to develop and apply an ever-expanding repertoire of marketing techniques to the disciplined pursuit of electoral advantage.  Television allowed a party to say the same thing to voters everywhere: the party that could learn how to use this with consistency and uniformity would be rewarded electorally, and it was the national campaign director who was in a position to learn and apply this lesson.  By the same logic, the party that was inconsistent or inefficient, or internally divided about its message, would be penalised; again, the party officials, with their centralised authority, were best placed to prevent this. 

With all these new tools and techniques, all this market research, advertising, consultants and full-time staff, the parties needed one thing now more than they had ever needed it before: money. 

# 6

# A QUESTION OF MONEY

When Mick Young was elected as the member for Port Adelaide in 1974, he became the first national party official to transition from head office to the House of Representatives.  His first speech in Parliament promoted an idea that, when finally legislated a decade later, would transform election campaigns and further expand the influence and scope of the national party officials. 

As well as his time in the shearing sheds of South Australia, Young acknowledged in his maiden speech "some experience in the past few years [in] the conduct of election campaigns."  Campaign spending, he said, was "completely out of control" and needed to be reformed "as a matter of extreme urgency."  He estimated that campaigning in the 1972 and 1974 elections had cost the two major parties more than $5 million ($35 million in today's terms) – much more than in the previous decade – and this would only rise further with the expansion of television advertising.  What useful purpose did this spending serve at a time of hardship in the community, he asked rhetorically.  It was "socially wasteful," of doubtful effectiveness and imposed on parties the "obnoxious political chore" of fundraising or, as he put it, "stomping around the country drumming up funds for election campaigns":

There is something demeaning about having to hawk the principles of your political party in this way, and I am sure members of the opposition feel the same repugnance that I do to this obnoxious political chore... No matter how bluntly you insist that there are no strings attached, it is impossible to escape completely the feeling that you put your party under some sense of obligation. 

If Parliament did not act soon, he warned, it might be too late.  There was only one solution: the government should fund party campaigns, and should audit party spending after each election. 

Young went on to become one of Labor's most effective, humorous and sometimes savage parliamentary performers.  This speech shows why.  Couched in terms of civic reasonableness – he claimed to be speaking in a "bipartisan" way – it summed up many of the key critiques of campaign spending that have been made ever since by academics and others concerned about the state of Australian democratic practice: the inexorable rise of campaign costs, the disproportionate cost of television advertising and its questionable content, and the burdens and dangers of party fundraising.  In proposing a solution – taxpayer funding combined with taxpayer scrutiny – Young put campaign finance reform on the political agenda.  This was, in short, a turning point in campaign professionalisation. 

But Young's speech was important as much for what he did not say as for what he did.  He did not suggest, for example, that Parliament should control the cost of television advertising in election campaigns, or regulate its content, or limit its role.  Indeed, this was not a typical parliamentary reform speech, drawing attention to a social problem and outlining a policy solution.  Instead, behind the civics lesson, a more pragmatic and even partisan calculation was at work.  This was in fact special pleading, in three respects.  First, Young was speaking as a successful election candidate to an audience of other successful election candidates.  Their interest in campaign matters was certainly bipartisan, though not necessarily in a good way: the MPs were being asked to legislate on a matter from which they would, as a group, derive financial benefit.  Rather than limiting the use of TV advertising, MPs were being asked to provide a new source of funding for it. 

Second, Young was speaking with the particular expertise of a campaign insider on behalf, as it were, of the national head office.  Young's proposal would have smashed the traditional mould of party funding, which in both parties lay with the state branches and divisions; as in so many other respects, federalism advantaged the states and disadvantaged the nascent central offices.  All key sources of funding flowed in the first instance to the states and in both parties, the states held the purse strings.  Members paid their dues to local branches affiliated with state branches or divisions.  Interest groups and institutional supporters also typically channelled their financial support through the state level.  Trade unions, with roots pre-dating Federation, were and remain affiliated with Labor's state branches.  Commerce, likewise, had grown up in the capital cities, and businesses built ties with the various state-based anti-Labor forces – which, in any event, only organised into a truly national organisation with the creation of the Liberal Party in the 1940s.  In Young's wake, and partly thanks to public funding, national campaign directors of both parties were able to take control of party funding and, in turn, to buy the expensive television advertising that underpinned the professional campaign model.  Their influence within the party therefore increased. 

Third, of course, Young spoke as a Labor partisan.  With "It's Time," Labor had reversed a generation of electoral failure, and the Liberals, so far at least, were still scrambling to catch up.  Young deftly mocked the Liberals: they had superior fundraising resources, but they had not translated this wealth into electoral success. " If weight of advertising was the only cause of political success [in the 1974 campaign], the Liberal and Country Parties would be occupying the Government benches," he claimed.  But Young knew that if Labor was to maintain its success, it needed a new source of funding.  It needed to break free of its dire history of financial need and mismanagement. 

From its earliest days as a national entity, Labor had scrambled for money.  When the federal executive was set up in 1915, it required each state to pay an annual levy or sustentation fee of £2.  Every third year this rose by £5 per state; the money was used to pay for the national conference.  These paltry sums were to be paid to the national secretary but in practice were often late and never adequate.  The historian Fin Crisp noted that the federal party was "starved" of regular income and the federal executive lived for thirty years on a budget "which would have shamed an outer-suburban football team."  The federal secretaries received meagre honoraria; their offices were "austere to the point of dinginess"; they handled "little cash and less patronage [and] in these circumstances... apparently wielded very limited influence."  It was not until John Curtin was elected party leader in 1935 that the federal party was able to start consolidating campaign funding.  A former journalist, Curtin well understood the importance of the new media – radio, film, newspaper display advertising.  He persuaded the federal party to establish a fund for campaign donations from state branches, trade unions and other donors.  Formally established as the Special Publicity Fund, and known informally as the Leader's Fund, this was controlled by three trustees.  Apart from the federal secretary Dan McNamara, who was one of the first three trustees, every trustee came from the parliamentary wing and always included the party leader: in practice, the fund was at the leader's disposal.  It operations were shrouded in secrecy.  The journalist Alan Reid reportedly claimed that Chifley had, "during an election campaign," carried £32,000 in cash to a bank and deposited it into the fund.  During the Split, it was attacked by the Democratic Labor Party as a "slush fund." 

Labor's finances were further complicated by its complex and unconventional relationship with Sim Rubensohn.  With the exception of 1949, Rubensohn managed advertising for Labor from the late 1920s and into the 1970s.  For Labor, access to an agency of the scale and skills of Rubensohn's – "one of the largest businesses of its kind in Australia" – delivered campaign benefits far beyond the party's capacity to pay.  From Rubensohn's point of view, the Labor account could not have been profitable.  Wyndham acknowledged that Rubensohn "carried" Labor, not charging commercial rates for his services and permitting late payments: "He didn't push for the money."  Rubensohn himself confirmed that he "carried their debts for years at a time on his books, as well as writing off expenses with which normal clients would have been charged."  But Rubensohn's generosity came with strings attached.  His business had an impressive client list, including the government-owned airline TAA, several NSW statutory corporations, and private companies including Caltex Oil, Philips Electrical Industries and Marrickville Holdings.  Rubensohn appears to have acted as a conduit or middleman, channelling donations from his clients to the Labor Party and lobbying for political favours on their behalf.  Rubensohn candidly acknowledged that his relationship with Labor was a "combination of friendship with fundraising," which allowed him not only to advise the Labor Party but "also to complain."  The phrase is discreet yet carries a clear implication: enjoying a close campaign relationship with Labor leaders, including prime ministers and premiers over four decades, Rubensohn was able to use his political access to promote the interests of his clients. 

For example, in the late 1960s, Marrickville Holdings, a margarine manufacturer whose business prospects were limited by Commonwealth and state government protection of the dairy industry, lost its bid to overturn these production quotas in the High Court.  It then engaged Rubensohn to plan a television advertising campaign to lobby for change.  The ads featured a margarine-buying housewife, "Mrs Jones," and drew national attention to the cause.  Meanwhile Marrickville's managing director and chairman, Dick Crebbin (or, as Wyndham recalled him, "the margarine man"), became an active financial donor to the ALP – presumably via Rubensohn.  While it is hard to establish direct causality, both the Whitlam and Wran Labor governments did move to phase out and eventually abolish quotas on margarine production. 

The relationship between Labor and Rubensohn was a mire of conflicts of interest, commercial and political.  As both fundraiser and advertiser, Rubensohn was a major source of income for the Leader's Fund – and its principal beneficiary.  In turn, Labor parliamentarians were electorally reliant on Rubensohn's advertising and fundraising skills, and financially advantaged by his friendly bookkeeping habits.  Certainly Labor, a union-based party with a still-meaningful commitment to socialisation, had few other ways to attract donations from business.  Asked about Arthur Calwell's fundraising skills, Wyndham recalled: "Private donors?  Well, Arthur [pause] didn't have the pulling power." 

In the Liberal Party, finances were managed along radically different lines.  Its predecessor, the United Australia Party, had been funded and substantially influenced by "shadowy" finance committees made up of "small coteries of big business interests" in the state capitals.  The Liberal Party planned to raise and control its own funds, so as to "determine its own destiny" free of obligation to outsiders.  Menzies was particularly insistent that parliamentary leaders not be involved in fundraising, and thus remain free of any suggestion of influence by donors.  Fundraising became the responsibility of the party organisation.  This did not mean the federal director: the closest Willoughby got to fundraising was "lobbying" the government on behalf of donors and discreetly recommending them for imperial honours.  Responsibility instead lay with the party's federal presidents, powerful figures such as Dick Casey and Bob Southey, and its federal treasurers, a series of well-connected businessmen drawn from the Melbourne and Sydney business communities. 

In the event, it was federalism that really thwarted the Liberal Party's national financial aspirations.  As the party historian Katherine West has explained, South Australia refused to contribute anything to the federal party; the other smaller states failed to meet the agreed pro rata formula; and the two wealthiest states, New South Wales and Victoria, proved unable to carry the whole structure by themselves.  Inevitably the national party turned to the business community, launching a Federal Fund in 1952.  But this too proved controversial: duplication only served to confuse donors or offer them an easy opt-out; and as the target list of individuals and companies in Melbourne and Sydney grew longer, the Victorian and NSW divisions feared losing their own sources of funds.  By 1958 the federal treasurer, Sydney stockbroker Stanley Utz, proposed that the federal office employ a full-time fundraiser as the sole collector of donations from any company that operated across interstate borders.  Canberra would keep £50,000 ($1.4 million) for the federal secretariat and distribute the balance among the states.  Essentially the federal party was trying to eat the states' lunch and hand back the crumbs.  In a classic example of federal dispute, the smaller states with the least to lose supported Canberra in the expectation of "handouts," while the Victorian and NSW divisions stood together in bitter opposition to this incursion into their local networks.  Utz's plan led to an explosion at the 1959 federal council – "though not," West noted, "in the columns of the press."  The Victorians fulminated against the "atmosphere of intrigue and power politics" but the federal secretariat eventually won its £50,000. 

Between the 1930s and the 1960s, then, the under-resourced Labor Party involved its parliamentary party in a curious makeshift funding system, characterised by secrecy and questionable probity.  The Liberal Party excluded its parliamentary party from fundraising but remained vulnerable to the problems of federalism.  In both parties, a breakthrough came only with the intervention of the first national campaign directors.  The new style of national campaigning, with its paid staff, market research and television advertising, gave Young a clear incentive to control Labor's finances.  Young moreover saw Rubensohn's willingness to "carry" Labor's debt from one campaign to the next as an act less of generosity than of capture.  In fundraising for his first federal campaign in 1969, Young noted that Labor had had to pay off the "many thousands of dollars [that it] still owed" to Rubensohn's agency for previous campaigns in 1966 and 1967 – "not a very inspiring way to start the campaign, to say the least."  His criticism of both Rubensohn and Wyndham is implicit but clear.  He was later able to boast that, despite the high cost of the "It's Time" campaign in 1972, the party finished the campaign free of debt for the "first time in decades":

This was achieved by strict financial discipline by the campaign committee.  Because of our appalling history of always finishing previous campaigns in debt, the first decision our committee took was to spend only what we raised.  Strict instructions were given by me to the national advertising agency Hansen Rubensohn-McCann Erikson, that under no circumstances were they to commit us to any expenditure without my written authority. 

The next steps in restoring Labor's finances, and severing its relationship with Rubensohn, were taken by Young's successor, David Combe, who transferred responsibility for the Leader's Fund from the parliamentary wing to head office.  As late as 1974, the fund still held "most of the money raised for the election," and while Prime Minister Gough Whitlam had ceased to be a trustee, it was still controlled by the parliamentary party:

There was some fairly robust discussion between Gough and myself about to whom that money really belonged.  I must say that at the end of the day he accepted the argument that the money was given for campaigning purposes and it had to go towards the cost of the campaign. 

This breakthrough allowed Labor finally to break the Rubensohn debt cycle and, in turn, to select a new advertising agency more suitable to its needs:

We got ourselves in a situation where we paid out the advertising agency completely, which then gave us the opportunity to go into a selection process of the appropriate advertising agency [to] conduct the next campaign. 

For his part, Rubensohn professed to have "retired" from political advertising, refusing to play second fiddle in Labor's enlarged and market-research-driven campaign team.  Combe engaged the Sydney-based agency Mullins, Clarke and Ralph, led by Malcolm Macfie, to develop the national advertising campaign for the 1975 election. 

Combe's ambitions to expand the financial base of the secretariat were broader still; he wanted not just to avoid debt but also to build an income stream more reliable than the volatile cash flows from the state branches:

The only sources of income were from the state sustentation fees and from the sale of publications.  There were times – I'm sort of joking – when we had to step up selling publications to pay our wages because the sustentation fees just hadn't rolled in. 

Among the publications for sale was the 1974 Platform.  Combe put a $1 price tag on this previously free document and made a healthy profit. 

A more substantial fundraising initiative was to acquire a portfolio of income-earning properties.  In this, the federal Labor Party was late on the scene.  The NSW branch already earned income from its investment in the union-owned radio station 2KY, while unions also owned radio stations in Newcastle and Melbourne.  The Liberal Party owned its national headquarters in Canberra, although Menzies House never earned rental income and could not, under the Liberals' constitution, be mortgaged.  But Combe had his eyes on becoming a landlord.  Labor was already leasing a block of land in Barton, acquired through the National Capital Development Commission's scheme to encourage national organisations to build their national headquarters in Canberra.  In October 1973, Combe secured national executive approval to borrow $1.5 million to build on this land.  By mid-1974 the foundation stone was laid on John Curtin House.  Combe's plan was for the building to fund election campaigning in two ways: through rental income (from 1976, tenants included the Commonwealth Bank and some federal agencies) and as equity, which could be mortgaged to generate further funds:

We had the tenancies in place to guarantee that, provided we continued to occupy as small a proportion of it as possible, we would have an income stream in a relatively short period of time.  The concept was that as we built equity in it, it enabled us to use that equity to borrow against for election campaigns, giving us an orderly time frame within which to repay the cost of those election campaigns. 

Combe regarded this financial restructuring as his "single biggest achievement," which opened the way for further investment income:

The whole idea of the John Curtin House Limited entity was it would continue to become an aggregator of property... A real estate portfolio: that was the vision.  We got to that, but it didn't last very long. 

Combe also represents this legacy in terms of the centralising imperative: it improved the national party's position relative to the states:

I inherited an organisation where the Federal entities were the poor relations, dictated to by the states.  In accordance with the principle of, "He who pays the piper calls the tune," you're at the mercy of the big states who could withhold their sustentation fees if you didn't do what they were telling you to do. 

Labor's finances remained under severe pressure, however.  After the dismissal of the Whitlam government, Labor faced its third federal election within three years and was desperate for campaign funds.  Combe and Whitlam were approached by former Victorian state secretary Bill Hartley with the suggestion that they negotiate, through an intermediary, to secure a $500,000 loan from the Iraqi Ba'ath Party.  Assured that a substantial loan had been promised, Combe directed Malcolm Macfie to increase Labor's advertising program as the campaign progressed.  But the promised funds failed to appear, and Labor ended the campaign unable to pay its substantial debt to the agency, which faced bankruptcy as a result.  Combe attributes this "act of madness" to the financial pressures facing the party at the time:

The Iraqi gift affair.  You look back on it and you say how could one be so effing stupid to embrace that?  How could two allegedly sensible people like Whitlam and Combe embrace a proposal from an idiot, a known idiot, like Hartley?  What people don't recognise is the pressure we were under and the beliefs that we had at that time.  We had no money to run a campaign, there was none forthcoming, we had a minimum budget we had to meet and most importantly we were – I was absolutely convinced and I think Gough was too – that external forces were involved in the dismissal and were funding our opponents.  To be quite honest I still believe that.  Anyway we engaged in an act of madness. 

The party president, Bob Hawke, chaired a federal executive inquiry into the affair which "condemned" all three men for their "grave errors of judgement."  In his memoirs, Hawke says he was "intensely annoyed" by Combe's involvement but was "prepared to put it down to the thoughtless reaction of a secretary who was strapped for funds." 

Combe remained as party secretary through defeats in the 1977 and 1980 election campaigns.  His eight years as full-time national secretary, and his four campaigns as national campaign director, remain a Labor record.  Seeking to follow Young into Parliament, he was defeated in a preselection ballot in New South Wales and set up a Canberra lobbying business, hoping his political contacts with the soon-to-be-elected Hawke government could open doors for commercial clients.  Disastrously for him, one of his contacts was a Russian diplomat, Valery Ivanov, whose exposure as a spy forced Prime Minister Hawke to set up a Royal Commission into the affair.  Combe was essentially cut adrift by the party and his business imploded.  Although Labor's national conference in 1984 passed a resolution noting the "pain and distress" caused to Combe and his family, and noted there was "no present impediment" to his dealing with the government, his career as a lobbyist was finished.  Combe was later employed by the Australian Trade Commission as a trade commissioner in Canada. 

*

Mick Young's 1974 maiden speech did reap some immediate return.  The Whitlam government introduced a bill to limit campaign spending and require disclosure of campaign donations.  But the bill, twice rejected by the Senate in 1975, disappeared with the Whitlam government.  It was not until Labor's return to office in 1983 that campaign finance reform returned to the legislative agenda.  Young was now special minister for state, with particular responsibility for electoral matters.  He established a standing parliamentary committee to review and negotiate a public funding package.  Before he could put the legislation before Parliament, however, he too was caught up in the Russian spy scandal: having tipped off a friend about the expulsion of Ivanov, he was forced to resign from the ministry. ( Mick Young was later appointed to the immigration portfolio and also served as national president of the ALP.  He resigned from Parliament in 1988 to set up a business consultancy, and died of leukaemia in 1996.)  It was his successor in the portfolio, the Western Australian minister Kim Beazley, who shepherded Young's overhaul of the Commonwealth Electoral Act through Parliament.  This legislation changed the face of election campaigning in Australia.  Political parties were able for the first time to be reimbursed by the taxpayer for their campaign costs.  The parties faced a new world of campaigning. 

Public funding operated by a simple formula.  Each vote a party received for the House of Representatives generated a payment to the party of 60 cents; each Senate vote was worth 30 cents.  Only formal primary votes – not second preferences – generated payments, and a party had to reach a threshold of 4 per cent of the total vote before it could receive any payment.  This was a reimbursement scheme, not an entitlement scheme: parties had to submit proof of their campaign expenses before being paid.  Alongside this taxpayer subsidy, the legislation also introduced a disclosure scheme, which compelled political parties to disclose all donations above a certain threshold (although Young's proposal for a public auditor did not survive). 

This initiative did not have bipartisan support.  The Liberals were less in need of taxpayer help than Labor, and feared the disclosure provisions would deter corporate donors.  Labor, traditionally more reliant on money from affiliated trade unions, was less worried about disclosure and no doubt also content to discomfort their opponents.  The new system was in place in time for parties and candidates to receive $7.8 million after the 1984 campaign.  With the increase in campaign costs and the inflation adjustment of the per-vote formula, taxpayer support increased to $10.2 million in 1987.  By 1990 it was $12.8 million and by 1993, just under $15 million.  Of these totals, the ALP and Liberal Parties between them routinely received around 80 per cent. 

Party officials were given a prominent role in administering this new system.  Payments were made not to individual candidates or to the parliamentary party, but to the party officials or, in the language of the legislation, the party "agent."  Agents are responsible under the legislation for lodging claims for public funding, receiving payments and furnishing details of the party's expenses and donations.  Yet there was a glitch.  Campaigns may be managed nationally, but the electoral process itself is organised around electorates within each state.  So although this was Commonwealth legislation providing national funds for national spending, in practice the "agent" had to be a state official.  The rise of the national head office was impeded once more by the old problem of federalism. 

From the point of view of the national party officials, paying the money to state party branches was unacceptable.  Who was really in charge of campaigning?  A national campaign director running a national advertising campaign could not be dependent on the state branches.  Would the states accurately report their campaign costs?  What if – shudder – they didn't hand over the funds?  How could the national office recoup its campaign costs?  The new arrangement threatened the very basis of the national campaign structure.  Over the first decade of the legislation, spanning the four elections between 1984 and 1993, the parties experimented with different ways of dealing with this problem.  The ALP proved faster than the Liberals at achieving national coordination.  In 1990, all the ALP state and territory agents lodged nil returns while the national office under Bob Hogg claimed responsibility for 100 per cent of the spending.  The funds were still paid to the state branches, but these branches had essentially acknowledged the national origins of their campaign expenditure. 

There was another problem, however.  The millions of dollars flowing into the parties from the taxpayer had not solved the "urgent" problem Young highlighted in 1974: "out of control" spending on campaigning, especially television advertising.  Competitive as ever, and now addicted to high-cost campaign technologies, the parties' campaign spending continued to rise.  They continued to perform Young's "demeaning" and "obnoxious" chore of seeking private donations, and questions about whether strings were attached to these donations continued to be asked.  

# 7

# A PHILOSOPHY OF POWER

On a bright autumn Sunday in 1986, Labor's national secretary, Bob McMullan, drove to the Victorian bayside resort of Sorrento, at the southern tip of the Mornington Peninsula, to speak to a Fabian conference about socialism.  Two years into the second Hawke government, there was not a lot of socialism going on.  But far from shirking the subject, McMullan embraced it, telling the assembled group – Fabians are generally located at the cerebral-left end of the labour spectrum – that the ALP needed a "philosophy of power."  Drawing from the example of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, which had been in office for the best part of fifty years, McMullan said Labor should aspire to "long and sustained government, not short bursts of radicalism."  He didn't need to mention the Whitlam government's short and traumatic experience in office.  Only by one government laying the foundations for the next, he said, could Labor's reform program be enacted and become deeply entrenched in Australian society. 

Twenty-five years later, he again recalled the Swedish example:

If you're about being elected to change the country, you have to stay in power for a long time, so that you entrench the reforms that you made. 

When I became the national secretary the general view was that we were the party of occasional government.  The person who most profoundly changed that attitude was Bob Hawke, but I hope I contributed to the view that we were entitled to consider ourselves as the government equally.  If we were good enough we would win more of it.  And we should be about long-term government that makes lasting reform, not glorious periods of fiery opposition and occasional good fortune to be in government. 

Whitlam had railed against Labor's "philosophy of failure" in 1961.  Now McMullan was advocating a philosophy of power, reflecting a new commitment to electoral success in the Labor Party.  Bob Hawke, too, was "haunted" by the lost opportunities of the Whitlam government and promised not to win just once, but to win "again, and again, and again." 

This new approach required a new level of organisation in Labor's head office, as McMullan recognised:

The secretariat's job was to keep the party well organised, geared up to fight the election the government and the parliamentary party chose to fight – and to keep the party focussed on the need for long-term stable effective government that delivered decent reforms over an extended period. 

Bob McMullan's political career had begun under the aegis of Joe Chamberlain, who indeed exemplified that peculiar Labor commitment to "fiery opposition and occasional good fortune."  Born in 1947 and educated at the University of Western Australia in arts and economics, McMullan became, during the war in Vietnam, the first West Australian to be exempted from conscription as a conscientious objector on political (as opposed to religious) grounds.  An organiser with the engine drivers' union and then with the prison officers, McMullan was elected president of Labor's national youth organisation in 1971.  As assistant secretary of the state ALP branch from 1973, and with Chamberlain aged and frequently ill, McMullan often acted as state secretary and assumed the role in his own right in 1975.  He then managed three unsuccessful state election campaigns.  When Combe retired as national secretary, however, McMullan won the contested spot, defeating Combe's deputy, Ken Bennett, in a ballot. 

In Canberra, he found a head office that had "the bones of a good campaign":

Mick [Young] was a great campaign director but had not really set up a party infrastructure – because he was also state secretary in South Australia and that was his power base.  David [Combe] took over... and he built up a serious infrastructure of a national secretariat.  He did that intelligently and he was a very campaign-focussed person.  So when I came in the staff were competent people, and the focus wasn't on looking inside to control what went on inside the party, but looking outside to try to win the election. 

McMullan directed Bob Hawke's victorious campaign in 1983, and having done so remained in head office to assist the Labor government in the task of governing.  He and his successor, Bob Hogg, secured five wins in a row (1983, 1984, 1987, 1990 and 1993) under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.  This was certainly "long and sustained government," unprecedented in Labor's history. 

These victories also represented another turning point in the professionalisation of Australian campaigning.  Before the 1980s, key advances in professionalisation occurred when opposition parties surged to victory – in 1949, 1972 and 1975.  This was a history of insurgency and destabilisation.  The 1980s, in contrast, saw the emergence of successful incumbency strategies, developed by Labor governments intent on keeping power.  Nor were these lessons of incumbency lost on the Liberal Party.  The defeat of Labor and the election of John Howard in 1996 under federal director Andrew Robb led to another long period of stable and electorally successful incumbency; Robb's successor, Lynton Crosby, directed re-election campaigns in 1998 and 2001, and his successor, Brian Loughnane, did so again in 2004. 

The point is not that governments were suddenly being re-elected in the 1980s and 1990s.  Incumbent re-election is the norm for Australia.  Australian federal elections between 1946 and 2013 produced only seven changes of government; no incumbent has failed to be re-elected at least once.  Incumbent parties enjoy significant campaign advantages.  Their control of the Treasury benches provides opportunities to implement policy, command media attention and determine the national agenda.  They have more resources – staff, allowances, electorate offices – at their disposal.  Governments may use public resources to set up media monitoring units, conduct polling and advertise their policies.  Incumbent prime ministers determine the date of the election and the duration of the campaign, and so can seek re-election when economic conditions are favourable, or when they think the opposition is unprepared. 

The point is that the party officials have become central players in government, not just in opposition – and throughout the electoral cycle, rather than only in the run-up to the election.  Bob Willoughby under Menzies could not be said to have played any comparable role.  Eggleton, to be sure, remained in head office and devoted himself to supporting the new government; he spent so much time with Fraser, he was criticised for ignoring the organisation.  But from the early 1980s, party officials – first McMullan and Hogg, and then Robb and Crosby – became more influential in the process of government.  As national campaign directors, they developed and implemented strategies for the re-election of incumbents, and contributed to political and policy decisions throughout the electoral cycle.  They were immeasurably empowered in this task by the steady expansion and elaboration of market research, which gave them political intelligence relevant not only to the electoral contest, but also to the work of government.  It is no coincidence that the two long periods of incumbency, stretching for virtually a quarter of a century from 1983 to 2007, were supported by capable party officials and their influential market research consultants – Rod Cameron in the Labor head office, and Mark Textor in the Liberals'. 

Much of the history of head offices, and a key aspect of their professionalisation, can be told as the efforts by the party officials to refine their knowledge about the electorate and their capacity to apply that knowledge to campaigning.  Before the 1940s, the sole source of reliable information about voters was provided by electoral returns.  The head offices of both parties sweated over voting tallies from national and state elections, drilling down to specific electorates and booths to identify safe and marginal seats, and to track shifts in each party's support from election to election.  This data, however, was retrospective, episodic and concerned only with the collective act of voting. 

Over time, rival party officials sought ever more reliable, timely, detailed and confidential insights into voter behaviour.  They wanted to understand not just what voters did, but why they did it – what underlying opinions, values, attitudes and motives drove their voting decisions and might drive their future decisions.  The development from the 1940s of the basic opinion poll – based on door-to-door surveying of a scientifically assembled sample – provided a broader set of data.  Gallup polls were not, of course, intended as tools for campaign managers; they self-consciously promoted themselves as plebiscites, intended to help policymakers design and deliver appropriate responses to public opinion.  Moreover, because they were made available to all via newspaper publication, these polls did not satisfy the need of the party organisations for exclusive, campaign-specific advice.  Intrigued, parties made several early efforts to conduct their own surveys, thriftily using party members and volunteers as questioners; these in-house efforts rarely grasped the need for a reliable sample and, predictably, produced dodgy results. 

With Mick Young's 1968 South Australian campaign, a party for the first time paid a professional market research organisation to conduct an opinion poll to gather exclusive data to address its specific strategic need.  How was Premier Dunstan perceived?  Where and why was he popular?  What were the strengths and weaknesses of Labor's campaign?  This kind of quantitative research was quickly adopted by the national campaign directors.  While many marketing firms at the time were capable of conducting political opinion polls, few did so; they were distractions from their principal, commercial business.  Rod Cameron was the first Australian market researcher to focus chiefly on political survey work. 

A psychology graduate from the University of Sydney, Cameron had worked his way through university by writing cryptic crossword puzzles for the Sydney Morning Herald before joining the research firm Australian National Opinion Polls (ANOP).  He quickly came to the attention of Mick Young, who recognised that Cameron and his colleague Margaret Gibbs were "taking research to a new level," not just probing political attitudes but interpreting the results insightfully. " He just doesn't drop the raw figures on your desk.  He's able to point up what is important, what changes and trends have taken place in the surveys, what we ought to be keeping our eye on, what's lost and shouldn't be forgotten about," Young recalled in 1985.  This interpretive and advisory capacity was an "enormously important aspect" of his electoral research.  Cameron was retained by Combe as the party's national pollster and worked closely with Malcolm Macfie, who had been engaged by Combe as the party's new ad agent following the retirement of Rubensohn; McMullan inherited them both.  Discussing the task of developing strategy, McMullan said:

Before you can work out where you want to go to, you have to know where you are.  Research is about telling you where you are.  Then it's up to you to work out where you want to go.  If you make a bad decision about where you want to go, it's not the pollster's fault, it's your fault. 

Cameron came to specialise in the emerging techniques of qualitative market research, especially in-depth moderated conversations with selected "focus groups."  This research does not rely on random samples, which led critics to condemn a perceived lack of methodological rigour.  The Labor leader Bill Hayden reportedly described them as "séances."  But what it sacrifices in precision and replicability, qualitative research gains in richly detailed insights into voters' deep-seated attitudes and values, expressed in their own language. 

The most important insight Labor derived from Cameron's research centred on swinging voters.  Lacking partisan attachments, these voters occupied strategically contestable ground, yet it was precisely their lack of political interests that made them difficult to reach and motivate; they vote because they must, not because they care.  In a 1980 report, Cameron acidly described the swinging voters' "doubt, lack of confidence, disillusion, political apathy and cynicism" about politics:

Interest in political philosophy, ideology, is very low.  There is far greater involvement and interest in matters concerning their personal and their family's financial well-being, and their day-to-day interests (sport, family concerns, leisure, recreation) than in even simple questions of ideology and government...

Authoritarian, racist, hardline about "dole bludgers," refugees etc.  They want political stability, predictability and moderation. 

This was a critical development.  Labor in the past had seen its role as educating these voters, persuading them to accept the party's ideology, mobilising them around a platform of policies.  Cameron was essentially advising them to abandon those efforts, to realise that many voters were not interested and not listening.  Kennelly had identified thirty years earlier the need to target winnable marginal seats.  Now Labor, in opposition again, was capable of more precise targeting of the "swinging" voters within marginal seats; market research was essential at both levels, in identifying both which seats and which voters to target.  It became Cameron's task constantly to challenge Labor politicians to recognise and accept the essential selfishness of these voters – and to appeal to them with messages they found relevant, using emotive advertising via their preferred medium of television.  By 1980, Kennelly's successor McMullan was able to identify "the twenty-seven key seats" which he believed would provide the basis for victory in 1983.  Some had to be won from the government while others were Labor seats that needed to be defended.  Labor swept to office on a swing of 3.6 per cent, picking up twenty-four seats and giving the new prime minister, Bob Hawke, a majority of twenty-five. 

Once in government, McMullan and Labor set about applying their successful campaign insights to the task of re-election.  There was a nearly disastrous misfire in the early election of 1984. " I think that was the worst campaign I ever ran," McMullan recalled. " We thought we would win two elections at once.  We thought we could win it by so much that they couldn't catch us the next time.  We bloody nearly lost."  In an expanded Parliament, Hawke's majority fell back to just six.  In 1987, however, Labor mounted a state-of-the-art incumbency campaign that combined political and organisational strengths: Gary Gray, who later became national secretary, recalled 1987 as "a victory of... a prodigiously capable cabinet and a political machine that matched it."  Hawke had made a critical contribution to the election victory two years earlier, in July 1985, when he decided not to proceed with a consumption tax promoted energetically by his treasurer, Paul Keating; Rod Cameron's market research made clear that the new tax, even if compensated for, would be fatal for the government.  In the campaign itself, disciplined and vigorous performances by Hawke, Keating and other senior ministers were supported by a head office armed with Cameron's research.  It was Labor's "most researched and... best researched election campaign... ever," according to McMullan's post-campaign report.  Research informed an acute advertising campaign by the newly appointed John Singleton Agency on the classic incumbent theme, "Don't change horses in mid-stream."  At the same time, head office directed resources at key local campaigns with new levels of precision thanks to two innovations: a new unit was set up specifically to manage marginal seat campaigning, and the head of that unit, Gary Gray, established the first direct mail capabilities (a development that will be discussed in chapter ten).  Labor was re-elected to a third term with a reduced primary vote (down 1.8 per cent to 45.8 per cent) but more seats (up four to eighty-six, giving Labor a majority of fourteen).  Careful to acknowledge the efforts of Hawke and Keating, McMullan also asserted that "in terms of the role of the campaign director getting a difficult set of circumstances and turning it into a good campaign... I don't say I was the architect, but I think we did our bit really well in that election." 

Like Tony Eggleton had for Malcolm Fraser, Bob McMullan directed two victorious incumbent campaigns for Bob Hawke.  But he then took a different career course from Eggleton, quitting head office while the party was still in government and following Mick Young's path into Parliament.  He was appointed to a vacancy in the Senate for the Australian Capital Territory in 1988 and, in 1996, won preselection for the House of Representatives.  Over more than two decades he held several ministerial and shadow spokesman portfolios before retiring at the 2010 election. 

In 1990, after Hogg had replaced McMullan as national secretary, Labor produced another powerful incumbency campaign.  Hogg came to Labor's head office with more direct experience in national government than any of his predecessors.  He had begun his extraordinary personal journey in the Labor Party as a left-winger in the "impotent but pure" Victorian branch.  He was of Mick Young's generation but came to the national head office two decades after Young, in 1988, at the age of fifty-one.  Born in Melbourne, Hogg worked as a project engineer in the food industry.  He joined the ALP in 1962, campaigned actively against capital punishment and against the war in Vietnam, and in 1967 contested a safe Liberal seat in the state election.  In 1968, abandoning his well-paid technical career, he secured appointment as Labor's state organiser.  The left-dominated Victorian executive was already deeply engaged in battle with the Whitlam-led moderates at the national level and an emerging "Independent" bloc of reformers in the Victorian branch.  When the state branch was abolished under federal intervention, Hogg joined the outcasts and was dismissed.  He returned to technical work, this time in the printing industry, while working as an unpaid organiser for the socialist-left faction, and played little part in Whitlam's successful 1972 campaign. 

But while some on the left, notably the state secretary, Bill Hartley, remained isolationist, Hogg began reaching out to the Independents.  In 1976 he secured broad support to win election as state secretary.  Hogg worked at "convincing the contending factions of the necessity for co-existence," and helped to secure the election of John Cain as Victorian party leader in 1981 and premier in 1982 – state Labor's first win in nearly three decades.  Hogg's preparedness to transcend factional and state boundaries in the interests of electoral success was dramatically exemplified at the 1982 national conference, where he defied his Left colleagues to move a compromise resolution on the party's anti-uranium policy.  More prosaically, perhaps, he formed an unlikely but effective pairing with the NSW right-winger Graham Richardson.  Representing the two largest states in the secretaries' forum convened by national secretary David Combe, they proposed sharing assets and pooling resources across the nation to support states such as Tasmania and Queensland, where Labor needed to pick up seats. " We started to broaden the aspirations of the organisation," Hogg recalled. " We broke down that statism."  Within Victoria, he took a similar approach, pairing safe inner-city seats with needy marginal seats in the outer suburbs and provincial cities: funds raised in the safe seats paid for full-time organisers in the marginals.  He also gained experience – rare for any Labor official – inside government, both with Premier Cain and then as a political adviser to Prime Minister Hawke. 

Hogg's candidacy for national secretary in 1988 faced protracted factional manoeuvring.  He had the qualified support of the Left, while the Right, including the prime minister, wanted Hawke's former press secretary, Geoff Walsh, to return from his posting with the International Labor Organisation to take the position.  The Centre Left initially supported Hogg but, prompted by Mick Young and Bill Hayden, then backed the assistant national secretary, Ian Henderson.  After a confrontational meeting with the factional leaders, Hogg boldly informed the Melbourne Herald that he had received their support and was confident they would not go back on their word.  When the executive voted, Hogg was the only candidate.  He recalled wryly, "It was unanimous, by the time I finished." 

After three terms of Labor government, Labor's heartland voters were becoming increasingly alienated by economic reform.  The campaign Hogg directed in 1990 was not about trying to win marginal seats so much as defending core seats.  Hogg broadened the definition of "marginal" seats to include not just the outer-suburban seats but also Labor's formerly safe inner-city strongholds.  He insisted that MPs from Labor's heartland in the NSW Hunter Valley attend meetings for marginal seat MPs.  He believed they had not been working hard enough to retain their seats:

They couldn't believe it.  I [asked them] how much they spent on their previous campaign.  They said, "Two hundred dollars."  I said, "That'd be right.  You don't talk to your electorate, you don't service them, and they're beginning to wake up to it, they're getting the shits, and unless you pull your finger out you could get 30 per cent of the people voting for the Greens or Independents or Democrats, and anything could happen."  So we broadened the targets to prevent damage occurring. 

With the ALP's primary vote declining, "devising a strategy wasn't all that difficult," according to Graham Richardson, now federal environment minister. 

The environment had risen from twelfth to second place in surveys of issues of public importance... We had to talk about the economy as little as possible, focus attention on [opposition leader Andrew] Peacock as much as we could, and use the environment preference strategy to help push us over the line. 

* * *

Labor's national secretary Bob Hogg hung up his gloves after masterminding Labor's unexpected election win in 1993.  Paul Keating claimed all the credit, but Hogg delivered the loyalist's rebuke on behalf of the campaign organisation: "You're never on your own, Paul.  We're all there." 

Source: Ward O'Neill personal collection, used with permission

* * *

Here the strategic ploy – or, in Hogg's words, the "crazy decision, which worked" – was not about winning back Labor's core voters but instead appealing for Greens voters to direct their second preferences to Labor.  In the final week of the campaign, Hogg, Rod Cameron and Margaret Gibbs scripted television advertisements in which Hawke personally made this appeal.  Not everyone in the party was convinced.  When a group of Queensland backbenchers questioned the plan, state secretary Wayne Swan organised a teleconference with Hogg, who had to spell out the political facts for them:

You are dealing with [voters] who have never voted anything but Labor in their lives – not the educated Green voter – who don't understand the preferential system, who have followed your how-to-vote card blindfolded for 100 years, but [are] now saying, "I don't want to vote Labor."  We've got to make them say, "I don't want to vote Labor, but I don't want [the] Liberals to win."  I convinced them. 

Supported by fewer than 50 per cent of the voters, Labor still won the election with a reduced majority of eight seats – another apparent triumph of targeted, disciplined campaigning and adroit harvesting of preferences. 

Victory in 1990 came at a significant financial cost, however.  Bob Hogg recalled: "After the '90 election, we were quite broke."  With a campaign debt of some $5 million and facing rising interest rates, one of Hogg's deputies, Gary Gray, observed, "We had to find basically $20,000 a week just to stop the debt getting out of control."  The budget for the 1993 campaign was limited, Hogg recalled:

I had to run a very lean campaign.  That was part of the problem, we couldn't put as much money into qualitative research as I would have liked.  But I remember coming to [advertising agent John] Singleton and saying, "We need a very hard-hitting ad campaign but there's no money for production.  Think of simple ways of doing it... We couldn't afford lavish production." 

Hogg's efforts to manage the party's debt, secure its revenues and fund its campaigns underline just how involved party officials had become in the complex tasks of fundraising and financial management.  Incumbency opened up powerful new opportunities for party officials to shape campaign finances – but also carried new risks. 

Hogg focussed on three fronts: private enterprise, property and Parliament.  First, he sought to remedy Labor's historically poor record in attracting donations from private enterprise.  As an entrenched governing party, it was now in a better position to argue that it deserved corporate support.  Gary Gray, Labor's assistant national secretary, asked for and was given responsibility for fundraising, with a brief to tap business donors.  When visiting boardrooms and corporate headquarters, he argued that "moderate, even-handed donations [by business] to both sides of politics guarantees the strength and integrity of our party system." 

Hogg also restructured Labor's property portfolio.  Combe's legacy, John Curtin House, was partly sold to the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and a new property in Canberra was developed to accommodate the head office and to generate rental income.  Hogg's building was to be owned by John Curtin House Ltd and, in 1991, the party's centenary year, was named Centenary House.  As in Combe's time, Labor could acquire land in Canberra so long as any tenants were other national associations or government agencies.  But the project became controversial when details emerged of the apparently generous rental agreements that had been arranged with two Commonwealth agencies.  Hogg was called before not one but two Royal Commissions into the transaction, first for the Keating government and then for the Howard government. " I was cross-examined in public for many hours," he recalled.  But "there was nothing wrong [because] I structured it totally at arm's length from the government."  Commissioner Hunt did find that the terms of the agreements were "excessively favourable" to the ALP.  But both he and Commissioner Morling were satisfied with Hogg's probity, with Hunt stating that no criticism should be levelled at him, the ALP, or John Curtin House Ltd.

Labor also turned to Parliament to explore solutions to the spiralling costs of campaign spending.  The Hawke government legislated to ban paid broadcast advertising during election campaigns, proposing instead to supply parties with free airtime.  The Political Broadcasts and Political Disclosures Act 1991 also expanded disclosure requirements by parties of their income and expenditure.  Labor's stated intention was to "tackle the corruptive influence of the corporate dollar on the electoral process."  But the practical effect of the new legislation would have been to alleviate parties of their biggest campaign cost.  Challenged in the High Court by a group of television networks, the legislation was struck down as a breach of an implied constitutional freedom of political communication. 

Labor's greatest fundraising success came under Hogg's successor as national secretary, Gary Gray, who negotiated an agreement with his Liberal counterpart, Andrew Robb, to increase the parties' public funding.  By 1993, inflation adjustment had lifted the payout for each House of Representatives primary vote to $1.0787, and for each Senate vote to 50.393 cents.  But both parties needed more.  Hogg had told a parliamentary inquiry into the broadcast ban that public funding now only covered around a quarter of Labor's total campaign spending – down from a third when the funding system had been introduced.  Gray and Robb arranged with their respective parliamentary colleagues to lift the payment rate to $1.50 for both House and Senate votes.  This had the dramatic effect of more than doubling the amounts paid to the parties after the 1996 election to more than $32 million.  By 1998, according to the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), the major parties had been able to retire debt and restore their profitability.  The new legislation also dropped the requirement for parties to document their spending claims with invoices; the reimbursement principle – whereby parties only received the amount they had actually spent – was replaced by a principle of entitlement: parties would get their payments, regardless of what they had spent. 

*

McMullan urged Labor to develop a "philosophy of power" – to recognise that sustained policy reform was possible only with repeated electoral success.  Such a philosophy required parties to shift from being insurgents, running campaigns of destabilisation against the government, to being incumbents, emphasising stability and continuity, defending their record of achievement, making further promises for the future and credibly attacking the opposition.  Where professionalisation had in the past been driven by insurgent parties, who used their time in opposition to rebuild their campaign structures and refine their campaign techniques, now it was propelled by incumbents.  The party officials had become central players in government. 

This does not mean, of course, that the party officials were actually seeking to govern.  They typically did not have strong preferences on specific policy issues.  They acknowledged the authority of the parliamentarians.  Some of them went on to enter Parliament but most were satisfied with the campaign focus of the head office.  Their priority remained electoral success and this motivation – to promote the interests of their client, the party, by securing its electoral success – remained a central element of their professional status and identity. 

And yet their client, the party, was undergoing a profound change.  On both sides of politics, the members were abandoning ship.  Branches were shutting down.  Grassroots activities were withering.  This emergence of "parties without partisans" posed an existential challenge to political parties, not least to the party officials within them, as it weakened their vital historical links with the civil society in which they operate. 

Labor had emerged in 1891 from the decision by the Australian trade union movement to create a political party that would pursue its demands on behalf of the rural and industrial working classes.  With its structure of branches and conferences, its habits of deliberation and participation, its programmatic clarity, socialist orientation and subscription-based funding model, Labor emerged as the quintessential Australian "mass-membership" party, expressing and aggregating the political demands of a large and homogenous group.  The formation in 1920 of the Country (later, National) Party by representatives of farming organisations, and Menzies' assembly in 1944 of the Liberal Party as the self-appointed advocate of the "forgotten people" of the broad middle class, represented efforts on the conservative side of Australian politics to create similar "mass" party organisations.  In fact, while the Liberal Party sought to build a broad membership base, the Liberal membership was never as socially distinctive as Labor's and, in any event, the Liberals continued to emphasise the strength of their parliamentary leadership ahead of any representative accountability to members.  Even so, the post-war years were a "golden age" for Australian mass parties, a thirty-year period of high party membership and strong party identification at the ballot box.  Deep roots in civil society provided these mass-membership parties with a strong practical as well as normative rationale to play a central role in the government of the nation. 

By the late 1960s, however, the long cycle of post-war economic prosperity had ameliorated social conditions; nineteenth-century patterns of social and industrial organisation that had shaped party loyalties were eroding.  Television provided new forms of social engagement and new avenues emerged for political engagement through social movements such as feminism, environmentalism, nuclear disarmament and the Vietnam War.  Party membership began a steady steep decline.  Membership numbers are not released by the parties, so it is hard to be precise.  But figures cited by the political scientist Dean Jaensch in 2006 have Liberal membership falling from perhaps 220,000 in the early 1950s to around 100,000 in 1984, while Labor's membership fell from around 370,000 in 1939 to 56,000 in 1973; Labor's union-affiliated members also fell as union membership declined.  These falls continued into the 1990s and beyond.  Rodney Cavalier, a former minister in the Wran and Unsworth Labor governments in New South Wales, estimated in 2010 that more than 100 branches in Labor's once-powerful NSW branch had folded in the previous decade.  His damning judgement was written with Labor in mind but it applies with equal force to both sides of politics: "Ordinary Australians wanting to be politically active – and not seeking a material reward – cannot be bothered with an organisation which they have no prospect of influencing in any worthwhile way."  At the same time, voter loyalties weakened: fewer voters were "rusted on" to one party for life.  More and more were unaffiliated, open to persuasion or seduction and no longer to be taken for granted. 

These changes have not heralded the end of parties.  But they've required them to redefine their relationship with civil society and to find new sources of electoral support.  To this end, they have had to shed ideological baggage and transform themselves, in the memorable phrase of political scientist Otto Kirchheimer, into "catch-all" parties, pitching general appeals to the electorate as a whole.  Enter the party officials.  Lacking direct contact with an informed and articulate party base, catch-all parties needed to probe public opinion through market research.  Lacking party channels of communications, they needed to exploit news media and TV advertising.  Lacking ideology or policy, they harnessed emotions, especially hope and fear.  Lacking a group, they focussed on the character of individual leaders.  This approach may have further disillusioned the diminishing band of party members and stalwarts.  But for a professional campaign manager, it makes perfect sense. 

Since Young and Eggleton, the title of national campaign director was routinely conferred on all national secretaries and federal directors.  The two jobs went hand in hand.  As the officials commented, why would anyone go through the grind of running the party if he or she were denied the challenge and stimulation of directing the campaign?  Their authority to set the overall strategy, to run the national campaign and to own the party's market research was now established.  But this did not mean that their internal party troubles were over.  The national centre still needed the active engagement of those in the states and on the ground – and there remained plenty of opportunities for squabbling, resistance and backsliding, as we shall see.  And a big further question remained to be tested: to what extent would their authority be accepted by the parliamentary leaders? 

# 8

# CONTESTED TERRAIN

In the earliest days of the Liberal Party, Don Cleland had engineered support for Menzies' leadership against his party doubters.  In the long years of Menzies' supremacy, Bob Willoughby was a deferential loyalist who routinely took Menzies' side ahead of "activist presidents and unruly executive members."  On the Labor side, when Whitlam's leadership bluff was called by Jim Cairns, Cyril Wyndham was drafted to assist the defence and became one of the leader's closest collaborators.  Thus in late 1974, when the Liberals' federal director, Timothy Pascoe, learned there was to be a challenge against the opposition leader, Bill Snedden, precedent suggested he should have rallied around the leader. 

Instead he flew to Melbourne, where he met with the challenger, Malcolm Fraser, and provided a confidential briefing about head office.  Pascoe did not promise to help or even to take sides; in fact he insisted head office "can't be seen to do anything."  But Pascoe did, unseen, provide tangible assistance to the challenger, by ensuring that Snedden could not employ his prized recruit, Tony Eggleton, in defence of his leadership.  Eggleton was at the time still attached to Snedden's office, where he was in charge of communications.  As per his agreement with Pascoe, however, he was due to take over as federal director in a matter of months; Pascoe was halfway through his clean-out of the head office, and was concerned that if Eggleton got caught up in Snedden's defence, he would be compromised and tarnished before he was able to take over the directorship.  In agreement with party president Bob Southey, Pascoe "arranged for Tony to be out of town so that he couldn't get caught in the middle" of the leadership struggle.  Eggleton recalled:

We had this strategy that whenever there seemed to be a problem arising in Parliament to do with leadership, they'd suddenly find me a reason to be in Ballarat or Townsville or somewhere to keep me from being drawn into it, so that I could be a cleanskin when the time came. 

As insubordination goes, this was a modest sort of ruse.  Snedden was a weak opposition leader in a party which had never had such a thing and he was vulnerable to this kind of treatment.  But it did represent a new kind of thinking in the Liberal head office, a tactical manoeuvre to protect its plans for orderly succession from the volatility of a leadership challenge in the parliamentary party.  Head office was acquiring a capacity to direct its own destiny, a sense that it was more than an instrument of the parliamentary party.  This emerging sense of institutional autonomy represented another step forward, albeit in this case a small step, in the professionalisation of Australian politics.  The role of national campaign director gave head office the opportunity and the incentive to bring the parliamentary party within the discipline of the overall campaign structure.  In the following decades there would be much more significant interventions by party head offices in the affairs of the parliamentary party

This is of course contested terrain.  Both parties operate their national head offices in the Canberra suburb of Barton, only a short walk down the hill from Parliament House.  Yet the ground that separates these offices and the suites of Parliament is, politically speaking, a minefield, and the relationship between the party officials on the one hand and the staffers, backbenchers, ministers and, above all, the parliamentary leaders is potentially explosive.  Along with the struggle between national and state branches, the playing out of this relationship represents a key aspect of the process of professionalisation.  When the relationship works well, electoral success can follow; but when the inherent tensions lead to dispute and dysfunction, as we shall see in this chapter, victory is all but impossible. 

*

In normal times, all party officials recognise the importance of a respectful and trusting relationship with the parliamentary leadership.  The preferred default position is one of unity and cooperation between the two faces of the party; they should be "seen as one team" and cultivate a "mutually respectful relationship."  Although party officials might sometimes speak "brutal" words behind the scenes, they should support the leader, however "tricky" this might be to negotiate.  They should not get involved in "caucus politics," as David Combe recalled:

I always used to think that the role of the national secretary is fairly clearly defined as the organisational wing of the party.  My job was to say, "Long live the Leader," and support whoever that leader was, and endeavour to ensure that the leader was always seen to be victorious in the executive meetings. 

Tony Eggleton offered an almost identical view of his role in the Liberal Party:

My job as I saw it was to have good relations with the parliamentary leader, no matter who he was... If ever any member of my staff showed any tendency to take a position on a politician, I came down on them like a tonne of bricks.  It wasn't our job. 

In opposition this was no easy task, he conceded.  Andrew Peacock was at "daggers drawn" with the party president, John Valder, whom he saw as a supporter of his rival John Howard; later, Howard as leader had a "difficult relationship" with president John Elliott.  Eggleton recalled:

I was the meat in the sandwich in those things.  It made our task at the Secretariat tricky, trying to get on with our work, which we were determined to do, when we had tension between the organisation and the parliamentary leadership. 

For Robb, the goal was "having my office and the leader's office almost as one"; anything less than that was "dysfunctional – especially in opposition."  Crosby echoes the sentiment: "You have to have a good working relationship with the leader, and if you didn't have the leader's confidence you wouldn't be in the job." 

These routine expressions of respect and neutrality recognise the reality of electoral politics and professional campaign management.  On one hand, the party leader possesses democratic legitimacy, is the ultimate authority for statements about party policy and campaign promises, and becomes the focus of media attention and of campaign advertising.  On the other, the campaign director is responsible for coordinating the whole party – not least, the party leader – with an integrated and disciplined campaign strategy.  The parliamentary leader cannot practically dispense with the expertise and organisational support of the head office, while the campaign manager must accommodate the multiple public demands of democratic leadership.  For incumbent and insurgents alike, electoral success requires the most disciplined coordination between head office, the parliamentary leader and the parliamentary party.  Journalist David O'Reilly was surely correct in emphasising that in electorally successful parties, such as the ALP of the 1980s and the British "new Labour" Party under Tony Blair, skilful campaigning complements policy innovation: "Party management, government tactical positioning, electoral judgement, market research, policy development and promotion and media management are all integrally interwoven." 

However, this ideal synergy requires the delicate balancing of strong egos and competing institutional interests.  Effective campaigning needs strategic consistency and coordination of all aspects of the campaign, under the overall direction of the national campaign director.  Inevitably, this imposes constraints on the parliamentary leadership.  The movements of party leaders, for instance – which electorates they visit, when, and for how long – require extensive pre-planning and are strictly controlled.  What leaders say, and to whom, is the subject of close supervision.  Wyndham's complaint about Evatt being shuttled around the country by competing state branches has been decisively resolved: campaign management now involves tightly organising where political leaders are and what they say.  As early as 1974, Pascoe saw the need for a campaign "war room" to centralise the Liberals' campaign logistics and communications:

I set up the war room in Bill Snedden's offices in Westfield Towers on William Street [in Sydney], and was there day and night sort of thing.  Coordinating.  We had a big board – we didn't have computers in those days; we didn't have most things we have now – and we had the names of all the shadow ministers and where they were every day, a matrix across the board, just in handwriting.  And if Bill wanted to contact somebody, where are they?  Or if something needed to go out, we could shoot something out.  All unbelievably low tech, but it seemed to be rocket science compared to anything that had ever been done before. 

Combe used telegrams and the telephone to advise Labor candidates during the 1977 campaign.  By the 1980s, McMullan recalled:

the technology was making it more possible to communicate to candidates.  We didn't have computers but you had – you know – telexes and faxes that started to enable you to [let] the candidate in the most remote part of Australia know what the leader was saying that day... We imposed more of a national pattern because we could.  The technology made it possible, and we applied what is now terribly primitive technology.  But as it evolved [we were] doing old things in new ways. 

Labor's communications director under McMullan, Geoff Walsh (who himself went on to be national secretary), reflected on the same process:

So when you've got the capacity to send text messages by phone – or go back further, and when people first started carrying mobile phones and you could ring up and leave a message, so when the shadow minister got off the plane in Cairns and... got a message saying, "Don't say anything to anyone about anything, until you've rung Fred at the Head Office"... Gradually that evolved to the point where, instead of getting a message telling him not to say anything, there was a text message saying: "This is the approved line."  So suddenly, magically, there were thirty shadow ministers in thirty parts of the country saying word for word the same thing. 

Whether "Fred" is using telegrams or text messages, and whether he is issuing no-comments or a lengthy official line, he is receiving these instructions not from the leader's office or the state branch, but from the national headquarters. 

Likewise, party officials got involved in how the campaign manages the "free" media – the coverage of the campaign by newspapers, television and radio, including the daily onslaught of talkback radio.  During campaigns, early morning telephone conferences between head office and the leader's travelling party are preoccupied with tactics of media management: how will the campaign respond to media questions or exploit opportunities, who will appear on which TV and radio outlets to deliver the campaign's "lines," what are the leader's media activities, and so on.  Key media setpieces, such as the prime minister's announcement of the election date, the leaders' debates and the policy speeches, are also subject to close input from head office – although the hands-on execution of the media plans for these events, including the briefing of the media, tends to be the responsibility of the media secretaries attached to the leader's office. 

With this new capacity to achieve consistency of communications on one's own side came its counterpart: a capacity to exploit inconsistency in one's opponent.  Labor had been caught out in the 1980 campaign, when loose comments about a possible wealth tax were picked up by the Liberals and ruthlessly exploited in TV advertising.  In another demonstration of how competition between the parties drives the cycle of professionalisation, Labor subsequently emulated its rival and developed its own media monitoring tools to keep track of Liberal MPs.  Media monitoring expanded and became increasingly high-tech; both parties were soon monitoring radio and television broadcasts around the nation, including talkback, scanning them for potential inconsistencies or signs of division and circulating transcripts of these "gaffes" to journalists.  Gary Gray explained to David O'Reilly how this new campaign technique worked:

[We were] able not only to respond to what the opposition was doing but picking up some insignificant comment that might have been made by a backbencher... I mean we would pick up a National Party MP comment about petrol prices in Gympie and make it an issue in Sydney. 

Crosby agreed: "You can't say something in Cairns and think you'll never be found out.  It's taped.  It's broadcast."  Media monitoring thus further restricted the capacity of party leaders, and politicians generally, to debate policy, generate new ideas, challenge accepted wisdom and spruik to special interest groups.  The increased scrutiny required new disciplines that could only be ignored at a cost. 

Strong parliamentary leaders will of course still seek to impose their own priorities and preferences on the organisation.  As Combe recalled of his experience with Whitlam:

It's not always easy to stand up to leaders who think that they're the best campaign directors, and often bad blood is created between leaders and campaign directors. 

Likewise Malcolm Fraser, facing defeat in the final week of the 1983 election campaign, directed the organisation to produce a last advertising blitz.  Tony Eggleton was reluctant – "in my heart I knew it was highly unlikely to save our bacon" – but acquiesced and instructed the agency accordingly.  Two elections later, Bob Hawke "insisted" on the appointment of his friend John Singleton to manage Labor's account.  McMullan objected, wanting to stick with the experienced Malcolm Macfie, but was overruled.  The dispute left a bitter taste and was one of the reasons McMullan quit his organisational role after the election. 

But if strong parliamentary leaders can trespass on the turf of central office, then the corollary is also true.  Weak parliamentary leaders become vulnerable to the practised professionals.  If head office is inclined to help, it can deploy its campaign skills to hide the blemishes and shortcomings of a weak parliamentary leader – Labor's 1980 campaign advertising, for example, strengthened the image of Bill Hayden by presenting him as part of a "troika" with the more popular Bob Hawke and Neville Wran.  Weak leadership, however, can also elicit less supportive behaviour from head office. 

When the parliamentary leadership is in dispute, the decision of party officials either to sit on the sidelines or to intervene can become an important factor in the outcome.  At these times, access to market research gives party officials potential power over the parliamentary leader.  Head office is the recipient of a regular feed of data – sometimes positive and sometimes damning – about the standing of MPs.  A leader who polls badly, or who cannot use the media to the satisfaction of the campaign practitioners, or who fails to attract sufficient private donations to fund the campaign, may well be in jeopardy.  Thus parliamentary leadership itself has become more vulnerable, and more liable to challenge, in turn forcing head office to decide whether to maintain or withdraw support for a weak leader.  McMullan, informed by Cameron's market research about the relative weaknesses of Bill Hayden in the lead-up to the 1983 election, supported the challenge by Bob Hawke:

I'd seen Bill [run] an excellent 1980 campaign.  But I certainly supported the fact that we needed to change the leadership and I'm pleased we did... It was my view that it was my professional responsibility to say this is a change we need to make. 

More directly, Andrew Robb's head office helped to dig the political grave of the failed opposition leader John Hewson after the Liberals' 1993 election defeat.  Market research commissioned by Robb showing Hewson's poor public standing was leaked to the media.  Hewson was badly caught out when the ABC TV interviewer Kerry O'Brien quizzed him in detail about the research: O'Brien had got a copy before Hewson.  His replacement, Alexander Downer, lasted only eight months as leader before he resigned in favour of John Howard; again, market research was complicit; Robb personally communicated its findings to Downer and others within the party.  Robb had spent "nearly three months... getting ready" for Howard's return, he later told the journalist Paul Kelly.  This was a more assertive manoeuvre than Pascoe's modest intervention in the Snedden–Fraser dispute when the Liberals had last been in opposition.  More dramatically still, because the party was in government rather than opposition, Bob Hogg used the authority of head office to intervene in the caucus struggle between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in 1991.  As Hawke recalled:

Hogg came to my office on 24th May 1991.  His main pitch to me was that the Keating forces would not give up and that I should be prepared to step aside because, if I did not, these forces would damage the party by their continuing thrust for the leadership.  I rejected this thinking. 

Hawke's rejection of Hogg was not enough to save his prime ministership, which was finally ended with Keating's successful party room challenge in December 1991. 

*

The contested and asymmetrical relationship between party leader and head office plays out in a constant arm wrestle during election campaigns.  These tensions were exemplified in two consecutive campaigns in the 1990s.  In 1993, John Hewson mounted his extraordinary "Fightback!"  campaign for tax reform; the Labor government was re-elected on the back of a great incumbency campaign.  In 1996, Prime Minister Paul Keating campaigned on his record and his personal credentials, and the Liberals won under John Howard after a strong insurgency campaign.  These two very different elections were similar in an important regard.  Both Hewson and Keating rejected – for different reasons – the authority of the national campaign director and shook off the centralised discipline of their respective head offices.  They tried to direct their own campaign strategy.  Both rebellions led to humiliating electoral defeat; both leaders lost their jobs.  For professionals in both parties, these campaigns have become templates for how not to run an election campaign. 

In 1993, Hewson represented a new generation of parliamentarians; he was supported by an equally inexperienced campaign manager in Andrew Robb.  The two men did not know each other well.  Each took up his job with a strong belief in his own obligation and capacity to bring about change.  After the endless recycling of the Peacock–Howard years, Hewson represented a new beginning for the party; he seized the opportunity to upend the status quo with a big-bang package of radically neoliberal reforms.  Robb, similarly, felt that he had been appointed, after Tony Eggleton's long service, to bring "a new perspective" to the party's campaign practices:

There was a view that we needed to make a leap in the use of sophisticated techniques and data bases and all of that, so I took it that a lot of my charter was to take the organisation, the campaign side of it, to another level.  We were given more resources than Tony had had in the past, and we did take it to another level. 

Individually, Eggleton and Robb were very different.  Where Eggleton was the suave communicator, experienced with the media, Andrew Robb was a political lobbyist, more interested in the hard data than the polished script.  Where Eggleton seemed drawn to politics, Robb at first avoided it. " I had a sort of an odd route through to my political involvement," he recalled.  Born in 1951 as one of nine children in a dairy-farming family in Epping, Victoria, Robb was educated by the Christian Brothers and completed a Diploma of Agricultural Science at Dookie Agricultural College.  Through the 1970s he worked as an animal health officer and economist with the Victorian Department of Agriculture, while also completing an economics degree part-time at La Trobe University.  An academic career beckoned.  But instead of doctoral studies in the US, Robb opted for the National Farmers' Federation (NFF), where his technical knowledge of agricultural economics met the realities of rural politics.  Taking an increasingly vocal free-market position on issues of tariffs, industrial relations and the environment, Robb was appointed executive director of the Cattle Council of Australia and returned to the NFF in 1985 as executive director.  Having been identified by John Elliott as a potential party official, Robb was appointed Eggleton's deputy in the lead-up to the 1990 campaign.  He had not until then been a member of the party. " Running a lobby group, I didn't think it was appropriate to be a member of any political party," he explained. 

He spent the 1990 campaign travelling the country with the opposition leader, Andrew Peacock. 

The "bubble" that they talk about – I'd spend all day in the hotel, on the phone, dealing with the other half of the team, briefing the leader, he'd be out doing things, then you'd be on a plane and away you'd go again.  It was surreal, a most artificial environment, but it gave me a very clear idea of what the requirements were. 

Robb was well placed to succeed Eggleton after 1990, but another highly regarded party official was also eyeing the role.  Nick Minchin had worked in the federal secretariat under Eggleton from 1977, before becoming federal deputy in 1983 and South Australian state director in 1985.  Robb acknowledges that Minchin "could justifiably have felt he was more qualified" for the role of federal director.  Eggleton, too, regarded him as his "logical successor."  Minchin's desire to return to Canberra caused "a fair bit of argy-bargy" in the organisation.  The dispute was tangled up with the leadership instability in the parliamentary wing, where Peacock and Howard continued to compete for supremacy and where Elliott himself was considering a run; Minchin was seen as a Howard supporter and an opponent of Elliott.  The dispute also centred on the rival attractions of Minchin, the experienced insider, and Robb, the outsider with fresh skills.  Elliott made the final call: Minchin did not run and Robb was appointed unopposed. 

The centrepiece of Hewson's 1993 "Fightback!"  package was a 15 per cent Goods and Services Tax (GST), offset by deep cuts in income tax and business taxes.  It also included the partial dismantling of Medicare, a voucher system for tertiary education, the phasing out of unemployment benefits, and the almost complete deregulation of industrial relations and award wages.  It was pitched as an appeal to rugged individualism and a rejection of what was presented as Labor's recession-inducing economic management.  This was programmatic change on a Whitlamesque scale, although it was designed to curtail government services rather than expand them.  It was also launched in a much shorter time frame: Hewson announced "Fightback!"  in late 1991, just eighteen months after becoming leader and a year out from the next election.  The package was entirely the product of the party's parliamentary wing; it had been developed in secret by a small group of staffers and an external economic consultant, under Hewson's direction.  There is no evidence that Robb or the head office had an input into the policy development or that market research was used at any stage to explore public responses to the package. 

Hewson enjoyed initial success in the polls, driving the final nails in the coffin of Hawke's prime ministership.  But over time, "Fightback!"  flagged.  Facing his first election as prime minister (although it was Labor's fourth as an incumbent government), Keating opted not to campaign on his record but to use every opportunity Hewson handed him to flay the "Fightback!"  package in all its detailed riskiness.  As Bob Hogg told the National Press Club after the campaign:

Our major strategy in the campaign was to make the GST, and all that related to it, the main issue, and at the same time [to] negate the wishful thinking that the GST would create one new job. 

"To win this election," Hogg recalled, "we had to turn the rules on their head.  We essentially ran on their policies." 

By the end of 1992, "Fightback!"  was under severe pressure – from Keating, from within the Liberal Party and from key social agencies, including the churches.  Hewson was forced to agree, apparently reluctantly, to soften the package. " Fightback Mark II", which he released in late 1992, included big exclusions from the proposed GST. 

In designing an election campaign strategy to sell "Fightback!,"  Robb found it impossible to explain the GST using TV advertising.  Over several months, the Liberals' advertising agency, George Patterson, developed various treatments, and Robb tried alternatives that had been suggested by others.  But when Mark Textor tested these in focus groups, "We found no thirty-second solution which didn't raise more questions, and make people more vulnerable to Labor's scare campaign."  Robb instead devoted TV advertising to the simpler task of attacking Keating and Labor, while the job of explaining "Fightback!"  was left to direct mail and other publications.  Robb dispatched twelve million pieces of literature, of which half went into the twenty-five most marginal seats.  Hewson himself was tasked with explaining the "Fightback!"  message through the news media.  But by the time of the campaign proper, his repertoire of announcements was exhausted.  When questioned by the media, he floundered at critical moments to explain details of his policy package.  Robb, meanwhile, organised mass rallies, designed to show the public's yearning to "fight back" against Keating; these were effectively derailed by Labor Party hecklers into demonstrations against the package.  Hewson himself remained resilient: at one rally in central Brisbane, I witnessed him holding a megaphone held in one hand while in his other hand catching – it seemed effortlessly – an egg tossed at him from the crowd. 

This had been billed as the Liberals' "unlosable" election against an exhausted government and an unpopular prime minister.  But Hewson's package sent the Coalition backwards; Keating secured a 1.5 per cent swing and an eighty to sixty-five majority with two independents.  Defeat was hard to swallow, but Robb learned his lessons.  At the tactical level, he accepted that by announcing the rally dates in advance, he had allowed Labor to disrupt them; in future, there would be less public information about the leader's itinerary. ( In fact, this built on a practice of the Hawke media office in the 1990 campaign; Hawke's office had restricted announcements about campaign events in order to hinder protests by striking airline pilots.)  Hewson's lack of news coverage during the campaign would be rectified by detailed forward planning of daily media announcements.  By launching their policy proposals very early in the electoral cycle, the Liberals had become sitting ducks; by subsequently succumbing to pressure to rework their package, they may have saved votes but they had also tarnished Hewson's credibility.  The failure of their advertising campaign prompted Robb to replace the George Patterson agency with his own "cherry-picked" team of specialists drawn from various agencies, who would be assembled on a contract basis for the duration of the next campaign.  Robb recalled:

I saved $600,000 and got a team that was tailor-made, rather than getting an agency that has got a good creative guy but the rest of them don't know anything about politics... It made a huge difference. 

Behind these tactical issues lay a deeper problem of inexperience and poor judgement.  Robb ruefully acknowledges that in 1993 he was "quite green," and that both Hewson and his deputy, Peter Reith, were inexperienced.  Robb's previous work in policy and lobbying had not prepared him for a national election campaign:

I had been involved at the NFF, but there are quite different dynamics to running a political campaign: the totality of a political campaign versus trying to run an issue and influence decision makers. 

He started out with a lot of what he called the "science" of campaigning, or the "technical side."  But "on the politics, the judgement side, that's when I learned a whole lot of things that didn't work."  In short – though he does not express it this way – head office learned the hard way that blind obedience to the parliamentary leadership can have disastrous electoral consequences. 

The Liberals' 1993 campaign defeat provides an object lesson in what can go wrong when the parliamentary wing drives electoral strategy.  It is certainly a lesson that was learned and absorbed by the Labor Party.  Discussing campaign strategies, Tim Gartrell, who served as Labor's national secretary in 2004 and 2007, was well aware of the 1993 campaign.  He observed that campaign directors draw on their knowledge of certain "prototypes" or "basic strategies":

There are some basic prototypes: opposition versus government; long-term government versus short-term; state and federal... What is your opposition like?  Is your opposition a risk?  Popular?  Or not known at all?  And there are some basic strategies around that.  But the rest is circumstances. 

So you do often... talk about previous campaigns, campaign history, when you're approaching a problem.  You never fully replicate something that's been done before.  But you certainly know where the disasters lie.  Like the "Fightback!" [ strategy] is one of the ones that everyone goes, "Shit, we don't want to do that," still to this day. 

Robb believes "Fightback!"  failed because of its long exposure to Keating's forensic pressure. " If we'd put the same [policy] out three months before the election, I've got no doubt that we would have won quite comfortably," he claims – with perhaps a touch of exaggeration.  But as he and John Howard approached the 1996 campaign, the lesson was clear.  Policies would be withheld until as late as possible in the electoral cycle; the aim was to win the election, not to persuade the electorate of the virtues of radical reform.  Howard delivered a series of so-called "headland" speeches, full of "values" but devoid of policy specifics; he became a "small target," difficult for Keating to attack.  Towards the end of 1995, with an election around the corner, the demands from the government and the media for more policy detail became intense. " But I had the experience" to resist these calls, Robb recalled. " I really had to be strong with people and put up with a lot of abuse."  There would be no details until the campaign proper, at which time they would come like a torrent, in a carefully timed flow that would keep the media busy and the government on the defensive.  Howard's itinerary would not be provided in advance, even to the media, so as to foil what Robb would describe as "un-Australian" attempts by ALP supporters to gatecrash Liberal events.  Robb carefully distinguished between the long-term process of developing a campaign strategy and the short-run tactics necessary to implement it: "A campaign is not a time for much original thought – it is a time for tactical manoeuvring and carrying out plans and procedures developed in an earlier, more normal climate." 

*

It is a fact of election campaigns that parliamentary leaders tend to claim responsibility for victory, while losses are attributed to anonymous party professionals.  Claiming victory on election night, Keating described it as "the sweetest victory of them all... a victory for the true believers," and proceeded to thank only his own staff.  A couple of days later, he described himself in heroic terms as "the boy alone on the burning deck."  On neither occasion did he thank – or even mention – Bob Hogg.  Delivering his farewell speech from head office a week later, Hogg delivered a loyalist's rebuke: "You're never on your own, Paul.  We're all there... in a campaign.  We all do our jobs... with one objective.  And that is to maintain government so we can do something to improve the quality of life in this country." 

In preparing for its next meeting with the voters in 1996, the government seemed set to show that it had not learned – indeed, had forgotten – the lessons of successful incumbency campaigning.  Like Hewson in 1993, Keating in 1996 intervened excessively in the management of the campaign – not because he had a huge policy package to sell, but through what seemed a wilful refusal to accept the disciplines of a centrally managed campaign.  He had already shown this tendency in his disregard for Hogg in 1993.  Hogg had now left head office; he joined John Singleton's advertising agency as deputy chairman and later wrote a newspaper column for the Fairfax press.  His replacement as national secretary was 35-year-old Gary Gray. 

Yorkshire-born, Gray migrated at the age of eight with his family to Whyalla, South Australia, where his father worked with BHP.  He was one of five Britons to occupy the head office of a major Australian political party (with Willoughby, Chamberlain, Wyndham and Eggleton) and one of six with strong South Australian connections (with Willoughby, Young, Pascoe, Combe and Crosby).  He joined the Whyalla branch of the ALP at the age of sixteen, and later described himself as an "active" member: "A person who attends your branch meetings, a person who can be relied upon in election campaigns, and a person who can be relied upon to support the community activities of the party."  He moved to Canberra in 1979 to complete an economics degree at ANU, and recalls visiting Parliament House to watch Question Time as a guest of his "local" – that is, South Australian – member, Laurie Wallis.  Hearing in 1982 that a job was available with the Northern Territory opposition leader, Bob Collins, Gray got in his car and drove 3000 kilometres to Darwin in three days.  He ran Collins' unsuccessful campaign for the Territory Assembly in 1983 and the campaign of the local federal member in 1984.  On a private visit to the UK in 1985, he worked for the British Labour Party, meeting future Blair election campaigners Peter Mandelson, Phillip Gould and others, before travelling on his own initiative to inspect the campaign capabilities of social democratic parties in France, Austria and Sweden.  On a "campaign train trip in northern Sweden" he met Prime Minister Olof Palme. 

He returned to Australia in 1986 when McMullan, rebuilding the party after the scare of the 1984 election, advertised for two assistant national secretaries.  From a field of more than twenty candidates, Gray was elected to one of the posts and given responsibility for campaigning; Ian Henderson was the other, responsible for policy.  Gray worked as national organiser, and later assistant federal secretary, on the successful 1987 and 1990 campaigns.  He opted not to pursue a parliamentary career, despite his local seat becoming vacant, and when Hogg announced his retirement in 1993, Gray threw himself into the contest for his job.  Henderson, who had been passed over at the time of Hogg's election, was the other candidate.  Gray recalled:

"Hendo" and I immediately announced that we would contest the position, and we both resigned from our positions and we went out and campaigned.  I drove around the countryside, literally talking to all members of the national executive.  It was a highly contested ballot until Ian's own faction split, and two thirds of the Centre Left determined they would back me, which gave me an overwhelming majority, because I had already got half the Left plus the Right.  Ian withdrew from the ballot around about Anzac Day [1993] and the ballot was due on the 30th April.  Although I had not been endorsed by Keating I was elected unopposed. 

The contest between Gray and Henderson embodied the ascendancy of the national office.  Both candidates were creatures of the national office, and Gray, who became the Labor Party's eleventh national secretary in nearly eighty years, was the first never to have been secretary of a state branch.  The national head office had become the primary locus of relevant campaign expertise, and the national secretary had become a genuinely autonomous position that did not need the power base provided by a state branch – or even the support of the prime minister.  Under Gray, the national head office would reach a high point in its centralising influence. 

Building on the work of his predecessors, Gray increased the national organisation's financial and human resources, and strengthened its influence over the state branches.  Thanks to the success of fundraising efforts during more than a decade in government, Gray could underwrite fiscally weaker state branches by supporting their state campaigns – reversing the historical flow of campaign funding – and by capital investment.  Gray purchased new offices for the Tasmanian branch and effectively took over its management; he then proposed doing the same in South Australia and Western Australia. 

I saw [the role] as being about the protection and the expansion of the national capability, to enhance and protect the reputation of the national organisation and to support wherever I could the ambitions and aspirations of the state organisations... Being able to project the national secretariat, to project Labor's footprint wherever you wanted to be, were critically important to us. 

This aspiration was not without its financial risks.  In late 1994, the "financially distressed" NSW branch planned a commercial property development.  The plan called for the consolidation of two sites in Sydney, one owned by the AWU and the other by the ALP, on which would be developed a single high-rise block.  The national party, through John Curtin House Ltd, provided a $1.7 million guarantee; when the development soured, that sum was forfeited. 

Gray also promoted an expanded national conference, new affirmative-action provisions and a more formal approach to fundraising.  At his first national conference in 1994, Labor's platform document announced in its opening pages that such changes "mark the transformation of the ALP into a genuinely national party" – an ambitious claim for a federally structured party and one which, as it turned out, proved illusory.  The platform also introduced a code of conduct for fundraising, which identified the national secretary as the "National Director of Fundraising" and forbade the party from accepting funds intended to obtain Labor support for specific actions, attitudes or public statements. 

Gray saw his qualifications as national campaign director as two-fold:

First was a demonstrated capacity to fundraise.  The second was, I was literally undisputed as the campaign organisational person... [I'm] not the campaign guru... As I would put it, "I'm not the person who would think up the key lines or the creative framework, but in order to allow the creative process to work you need to know the trains will run on time.  You need to know that when we have determined the message for local consumption, I've got a system to deliver that.  You need to know that I am a general who runs an army."  I am a logistician, not a strategic leader. 

Perhaps the seeds of Gray's troubles with Keating lie here.  Keating may have wanted a creative guru – and may not have recognised the need to have trains running on time.  In any event, as the journalist Pamela Williams has documented, Keating's poor relationship with head office before 1993 deteriorated further after Gray took over from Hogg, and by the time of the 1996 campaign was terminal.  Keating and his staff unpredictably second-guessed head office decisions, demanding flexible itineraries and rejecting research-driven campaign advice.  Exasperated, Gray and his team came to refer to the prime minister as "Captain Wacky." 

The clash came to a head in the final week of the campaign when, like Eggleton in 1983, Gray was pressured by the prime minister to increase TV advertising spending.  Keating wanted ads that attacked Howard for a blunder he had made in a radio interview.  Unlike Eggleton, Gray did not acquiesce to what he later described as Keating's desire for "more blood in the water"; he believed the time when Labor could credibly launch negative attack ads was well past and "the more we attacked Howard, the more it hurt us"; besides, money was tight.  Keating replied with a scorching letter to Gray, insisting on the party leader's right to impose his "intuition" or "instinct" on the campaign plan:

There must be intuitive play here.  We cannot be dominated by the lowest common denominator in a focus group.  We are politicians and as a political party we have to follow our instincts... I cannot have a position where my instincts as party leader run for three years but not the last week of the election campaign; to be held back by an ad agency or focus group advice.  Ad agencies help, they can be incisive but they will never be decisive.  That's for us to be. 

Keating was defeated in a landslide, losing thirty-two seats and ending thirteen years of Labor rule with an anti-Labor swing of 5 per cent.  He resigned from the party leadership and from Parliament.  Gray remained in head office and steered Labor's near-miss 1998 campaign under Kim Beazley.  He quit head office in 2000 to take up a corporate advisory role with the resources giant Woodside Energy.  He was elected to the House of Representatives in 2007 for Beazley's former seat of Brand and served in various frontbench portfolios in the Rudd and Gillard governments, including as special minister for state with responsibility for electoral reform. 

*

Like the Hewson–Robb debacle of 1993, the struggle between Keating and Gray for control of Labor's 1996 campaign encapsulated the tensions inherent in political parties.  Gray was rediscovering an old truth: as Combe said of his dealings with Whitlam twenty years earlier, it is not easy to stand up to a leader who thinks he is the best campaign director.  Keating and Gray were united by many shared partisan commitments; but they nevertheless stood on opposite sides of a chasm.  This was not merely a personality clash; these were institutional and cultural differences.  On one side was the politician yearning to exercise his political instincts; on the other was the party official, dispassionately determined to listen to the research, stick to the strategy and target the party's finite resources at what worked.  Passion met calculation.  The politician wanted to control the advertising content top-down; the party official recognised that effective advertising is designed bottom-up, around what voters want to hear.  The politician held out hope for one last victory; but the national campaign director knew they were heading for defeat.  And of course, the party leader's whole future is on the line with every election, while the party official will still be employed after election day.  Prime ministerships end, but the party itself must survive to fight another election. 

*

The roots of this troubled relationship between head office and Parliament House lie with the institutional autonomy of the party organisation.  This is a characteristic of both the Labor and the Liberal parties.  It is not typical of political parties in the US, Canada or Britain.  In those countries, head office – and campaign management generally – is much more under the thumb of whoever is the party leader or presidential candidate. 

This point was made in 1996 by Keating's chief of staff, Don Russell.  Appointed by Keating as Australian ambassador to Washington, Russell had returned to Canberra to join the re-election effort.  In defending Keating's letter to Gray, Russell explained to journalist Pamela Williams that the problem lay in Australia's "weird system."  Unlike in the US, he said, where "the president appoints the campaign manager," in Australia "the party secretary, who gets the job by some process known only to the party, runs the campaign for five weeks."  Keating's letter was a legitimate complaint about the prime minister's inability to "control the actual format or style" of an election campaign: "At the end of the day the leader doesn't have an advertising campaign that backs up what he wants to say."  Gray, Russell claimed, was merely determined to "protect the system" that gave him authority to sign the cheques, order the ads and generally control the campaign. 

Russell has a point.  Australian parties are distinctive, if not "weird."  The source of this distinctive character lies in the fact that in both the Australian parties, the organisational side, not the parliamentary side, is responsible for selecting and employing the party officials.  As Russell noted, the party's method of selection – "some process known only to the party" – is significant.  The Labor and Liberal parties operate on rules that specify different methods of selecting the party officials: in the ALP the national secretary must be elected, while in the Liberal Party the federal director is to be appointed.  These rules date to 1915 and 1946 respectively, and remain in force.  These contrasting traditions, of internal democracy and managerial authority, strongly shaped the kinds of individuals who have been selected and the way they have lasted in the job.  Labor's preference for contest was deep-seated; since Arch Stewart in 1915, six of his ten successors through to Gary Gray in 1993 had to win contested elections to become federal secretary.  As a result, head office was led by a series of savvy political operators and seasoned campaign managers, capable of assembling the required majority on the national executive.  Until Gray, all of them had emerged from the state branches, and knew how to operate within the party's shifting landscape of factions and rivalries.  But this is likely also to have created greater instability and higher turnover in Labor's head office.  By contrast, the Liberal Party's appointment process has produced an eclectic set of outsiders, less experienced in campaign management; until Crosby in 1997, none of them came from a state division.  Yet with the support of the federal president, playing the role of the chairman of a corporate board leading the search for a new CEO, they have tended to be selected without overt dispute, and to last longer in the job. 

* * *

Gary Gray and Paul Keating were on opposite sides of an institutional chasm or, as Ward O'Neill suggests, Gray's ballast acted as a counterweight to Keating's elevated vision. 

Source: Ward O'Neill personal collection, used with permission

* * *

But whether these officials are elected, as in the Labor Party, or appointed, as in the Liberals, the decision remains in the hands of the organisation.  Parliamentary leaders are consulted, but their support does not appear to be decisive.  Hewson and Robb hardly knew each other.  In several of the ballots, the Labor leader was either not consulted or actually supported another candidate: as prime minister, Hawke supported Geoff Walsh over Bob Hogg; Keating inherited Hogg and, when Hogg retired, did not support the election of Gray.  As a result, federal directors and national secretaries are accountable not to the party leader but to the party itself, and thus have an autonomy within the party which their international counterparts lack. 

They express their sense of service to the long-term interests of their party through seeking to win elections for it.  To this end, officials on both sides shared a similar determination to overcome the fragmentation of their federal structures, to centralise campaign management and modernise their campaign practices, to acquire the financial resources to do so.  They had taken different paths to head office, arrived with different skill sets, and were selected by different methods into the role of national campaign director.  But they were similarly empowered to contest the terrain of their relationship with the party leader.  These similarities as campaign professionals trumped their differences as elected or appointed officials in either the Labor or Liberal Party. 

# 9

# A LIBERAL ASCENDANCY

While still a new federal director, Andrew Robb was invited to speak at a "regional campaign weekend" in north Queensland.  One of the other speakers was "this young bloke who was working out of the chief minister's office in the Northern Territory."  The son of a Darwin policeman, Mark Textor had taken an economics degree from ANU and found employment as a public servant with the Australian Bureau of Statistics.  Returning to Darwin, he picked up research skills while working for the NT Country Liberal leader, Marshall Perron.  Robb was impressed and offered him a job in Canberra as the national organisation's in-house pollster.  The economist Robb and the statistician Textor made a good combination in head office.  As federal director, Robb wanted – and got from Textor – the same kind of interpretive guidance Mick Young had so admired in Labor's pollster Rod Cameron.  As Robb explained it:

It's one thing to have the research.  It's another thing to get across the results of it, in a way that's persuasive and can influence strategically how people respond. [ Textor] seemed to have a strategic insight.  A lot of the researchers 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 brought innovative survey skills and a vernacular style to the Liberals' research, which had become stale.  Robb recalled his frustration when leafing through "hundreds of pages" of quantitative market research which the Liberals had commissioned from Roy Morgan: there was a lot of data, but he could not pinpoint just why particular opinions had shifted. 

It used to really annoy the hell out of me.  You'd have research which you'd spent a lot of money on, but it was done every month – if that – maybe every two months or three months... You'd go through it, and you'd say, "Well, we've slipped back two points in the polls." [ But] you couldn't really tie [this back to any underlying event]. 

Robb was looking for smoking guns, and the retrospective snapshots provided by quantitative surveys were not revealing them.  Mark Textor developed a method of combining the rigour of quantitative polling with the insights of focus groups – a process Robb described as "quantifying the qualitative."  In the lead-up to the 1996 election, Textor devised a set of twenty-two descriptors from focus-group discussions, expressed in "the vernacular of the qualitative research."  They compared Keating and Howard on performance ("Who's the best to make the hospitals work?")  and on character ("Who's the most arrogant?  Who's the most out of touch?").  Then, in weekly quantitative surveys, Textor measured the changing public responses to each of these descriptors.  Thus when Keating made a major speech promoting an Australian republic, the Liberals were unconcerned; thanks to their research, they were confident that his arrogant and out-of-touch metrics "went through the roof," Robb said. 

The familiar cycle of competition and catch-up between the parties continued: Robb felt that in "quantifying the qualitative" in this way, Textor had developed something that Labor, for all its research experience, did not have:

The Labor Party wasn't doing this.  They were doing quite a lot of research, but not as consistently and they hadn't quantified the qualitative, which was something that Mark Textor really developed.  It was innovative and highly productive for us. 

The centrepiece of the Liberals' 1996 campaign was two hypothetical voters, "Phil" and "Jenny," who were created by Textor from his accumulation of attitudinal data.  Phil and Jenny were typical swinging voters from "middle Australia": double income earners with one child, they were worried about the cost of living, their mortgage and the economy, and unimpressed by the political choices on offer.  They lived in a contested marginal or regional seat.  By presenting his research in such a "psychograph" a year before the election campaign, Textor enabled Robb to focus on the voters the Liberals needed for victory.  Robb would ask Liberal candidates: "Have you spoken to Phil and Jenny lately?"  According to Pamela Williams, Phil and Jenny became "the subjects of endless discussion in party meetings, the template family every Liberal candidate needed to know about, [and] a code for the entire campaign."  Descendants of the swinging voters Cameron had unflatteringly described in the 1970s, they were the so-called "Howard battlers" whose support would be critical to the Howard throughout his term in office. 

With the election of the Howard government in 1996, Robb did not stay on in head office as Eggleton and McMullan had done.  He took his campaign skills abroad, first to the UK, where he and Textor advised the British Conservative Party, and later into Thailand, where he advised the businessman and populist politician Thaksin Shinawatra.  Textor went on to work in the US, where he set up a business with former Reagan strategist Richard Wirthlin.  Robb joined a direct marketing company, Acxiom Australia, a joint venture between Kerry Packer's Publishing and Broadcasting empire and an American firm, and chaired the direct marketing industry association.  He eventually decided to follow the path of another national party official, Mick Young, into the House of Representatives.  Elected to the safe Melbourne seat of Goldstein in 2004, Robb served in a series of frontbench roles in the last years of the Howard government and in opposition, and was appointed minister for trade and investment in the Abbott government.  He was replaced as federal director by his deputy, Lynton Crosby – another smoothly executed internal promotion. 

Crosby brought to head office more direct campaign experience than any of his predecessors.  He also brought a lifetime of Liberal Party membership and activism.  This combination made him a formidable and enthusiastic campaign manager: "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."  Born in 1956 in rural South Australia, Crosby graduated with an economics degree from the University of Adelaide and joined the Liberal Party at eighteen.  He was a member of the Adelaide University Liberal Club but, as most of them were "wankers," he reserved his activism for the Young Liberals, and rose to become state president.  His political working life began in 1978 as a staffer for the Liberal senator Baden Teague and for two frontbenchers in the state party.  He stood for Norwood, the former premier Don Dunstan's seat, in the 1982 state election – but it was a safe Labor seat and besides, according to Liberal Party lore, he had committed the error of signing his letters to voters "Lynton Crosby, B. Ec." 

Tony Eggleton approached him to join the federal secretariat in 1987, but Crosby turned him down so that his wife could take up a job with the stock exchange in Adelaide.  Crosby worked for the resource major Santos and John Elliott's brewing giant Elders until 1991, when he was lured back into politics – this time as state director of the Liberals' Queensland division. " I'm a party member and activist who happened to get into the professional wing," he said.  In Brisbane he directed the Liberals' campaigns in the 1992 state elections and the 1993 federal elections.  During the campaign for Brisbane City Council in 1994, he put to air an advertisement attacking the Labor administration's urban infill policies.  The ad showed a woman opening a sardine can.  It made no claim to improve the level of electoral discourse, but it did have that all-important "cut-through" quality: it was noticed and talked about.  Later that year, Andrew Robb invited Crosby to join the federal secretariat as deputy director; this time he accepted, and moved to Canberra.  After visiting the US to inspect Republican Party campaign techniques in 1994, he ran the Liberals' marginal seats unit during the 1996 campaign. 

Crosby's first campaign as federal director in 1998 was a triumph of incumbency campaigning.  As director, his style conformed to the bureaucratic traditions of the Liberal head office.  He recalled:

We had a strategy committee chaired by the prime minister, which I as director... supported and basically drove, in terms of organising meetings, organising the agenda, and having different items of business to be discussed. 

But it was always clear who was responsible for the campaign's overall strategy:

What I always try to do is write... a document that sets out where we are now, where we want to be, and what we've got to change, basically, and work through it.  It is not more scientific than that basically. 

Ever since Mick Young became the first national campaign director, the task of setting the campaign strategy has been accepted as the distinctive and primary job of the party official.  Twenty years on, Crosby brought to this task a new clarity and focus.  For Crosby, strategy involves answering a series of electoral questions:

Who will decide the outcome of this election?  Where are they?  What matters to them?  How do you communicate with them?  That is the starting point. 

The end point is clear: "The overriding objective is to win more seats than your opponent." 

Once these questions have been considered, the resulting strategy should inform everything the party does during a campaign.  Ensuring that this takes place is the job of the campaign director, Crosby explained:

You spend the twelve months beforehand understanding what voters are thinking, why they're thinking it, helping put your party in a position to be able to compete... in the campaign.  That involves writing a campaign, constantly monitoring its implementation, working with the... advertising team... [designing a] direct mail campaign, the various component campaigns, communicating to all the participants in the campaign, the state directors, bringing them in regularly, workshopping what needs to be done. 

Underpinning this comprehensive view of strategy is a complete reliance on market research.  If, as Crosby suggests, strategy begins with a series of questions, market research illuminates the answers.  Like other national campaign directors, Crosby used market research to discover "not just what people think, but how they think":

You are dealing with people.  They have hopes and aspirations, and you need to influence the way they behave, taking into account those hopes and aspirations, to achieve the objective you want – which is to get them to support you, or not support the other mob. 

Market research provides "a navigational tool," revealing the landscape ahead; the campaign strategy then maps out a path between the here-and-now and the desired goal of electoral success. 

Crosby built an effective and enduring relationship with Mark Textor, whose Phil and Jenny remained central to the Liberals' campaign: they were still the voters whom the Liberals believed would decide the outcome of the election.  Textor's research located them, divined what mattered to them, and suggested ways of communicating with them.  Focus-group research in particular was useful not only in identifying which issues were of concern for these voters, but also in understanding how they understood and talked about those issues; focus groups provided the words and phrases with which the politicians and advertisers could speak back to Phil and Jenny.  Crosby also retained Robb's 1996 innovation of a hand-picked advertising "team" in Toby Ralph, John King, Ted Horton and Mark Pearson. 

Crosby's first campaign as federal director in 1998 was a triumph for the Liberal version of the incumbency style.  Howard, having promised to introduce a broad-based GST, nearly lost the election.  That a brand-new tax was unpopular came as no surprise.  Howard's proposal conjured up all the same political risks that had deterred Hawke from supporting Keating's Option C in 1986, and that had destroyed Hewson in 1993.  As Crosby recalled:

If you believed in focus groups you would not have introduced a GST. " OK, all those who want to pay an extra 10 per cent put their hand up."  No one would. 

Focus-group research, however, provided the Liberals with a counterargument: the tax was so unpopular, surely Howard must think it was good for the economy.  Crosby found himself fighting the classic defensive campaign of an unpopular incumbent government.  Labor led in the polls but the path to victory lay in the marginal seats. " In the end, we found enough seats to firewall," Crosby later told Paul Kelly.  Even so, as late as election eve Crosby told Howard that exit polls were pointing to a defeat.  Labor under Kim Beazley won more primary votes (40.1 per cent to the Coalition's 39.5), but the Coalition won a majority of seats (eighty to sixty-seven, with one independent).  Crosby boasted to the National Press Club after the election:

In Labor's top ten safest seats going into the election, they recorded a swing to them of around 4 per cent.  In the Coalition's top ten safest seats, Labor recorded a swing to them of 6.2 per cent.  All of these results stand in contrast to the Coalition's top ten marginal seats, where the swing to the ALP was only 2.5 per cent – half the nationwide swing. 

An effective incumbent campaign had limited what was, given the GST, an inevitable swing against the government – essentially the same result Labor had achieved in 1987. 

The 1998 campaign also saw Crosby take another leaf from Labor's incumbency book in developing his response to the rise of the One Nation Party led by Pauline Hanson.  Just as Bob Hawke had directly appealed for the second preferences of Labor-leaning Green voters in 1990, so Howard made a pitch, in the last days of the campaign, for the second preferences of One Nation voters.  The Liberals' advertising reinforced the message.  Labor's Gary Gray condemned the move as "rotten."  Labor had already declared that it would put One Nation candidates last on its own how-to-vote cards: this was both a principled stance and an effective wedge, which forced the Liberals into a costly choice between conservative voters who sympathised with Hanson and moderates who were appalled by her. 

* * *

When parties are lost in the wilderness, it is the party official who needs to work out where they are and how to get to their destination.  This strategic function is acutely captured by Ward O'Neill: federal director Lynton Crosby studies a map spread out on the bonnet of the banged-up Liberal sedan.  As Crosby said, strategy requires working out "where we are now, where we want to be, and what we've got to change." 

Source: National Library of Australia, Ward O'Neill collection, used with permission. 

* * *

Crosby believed Labor's tactic cost the government seats, and he regarded its criticism of Howard as cynical.  Speaking to the National Press Club after the campaign, Crosby defended Howard's appeal as "a necessary and calculated strategy which took account of our fully preferential voting system."  His argument in effect is that campaign managers can only deal with the electoral rules as they currently stand:

Under our system, the party which governs is the party which secures a majority of seats in the House of Representatives.  That is the requirement – to win the most lower house seats – and that is what our campaign was geared towards. 

Different rules would generate different campaign strategies:

That is the key point.  If the requirement was a majority of the two-party preferred vote, or if it was a first-past-the-post race, then you would run a completely different campaign. 

Crosby's dispassionately strategic approach was exemplified in the 2001 campaign.  Compared to the purely defensive strategy of 1998, he said, the government in 2001 needed to counterattack as well as defend; that is, it needed to win seats from Labor if it was to withstand the typical swing against incumbent governments.  Labor was polling strongly, and had already taken one seat off the government with a by-election win in the Brisbane seat of Ryan.  The 2001 election looked set to be decided on domestic economic management.  However, two unconnected events – the rescue of a boatload of asylum seekers by a Norwegian cargo ship, the MV Tampa, in late August, followed by the September 11 terrorist attacks – were seamlessly conflated by the government into a single threat to Australian national security: Australia was "losing control" of its borders.  Howard refused permission for Tampa to unload its human cargo at Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean, and introduced into Parliament the harsh Border Protection Bill on 29 August.  On 5 October he called an election; the following day, another sinking boatload of asylum seekers was rescued by the navy amid government claims that they had thrown their children overboard.  Shortly after, the US launched its retaliatory attacks against Afghanistan.  Security became the watchword of the campaign. 

There's little doubt that this policy turnaround was driven by Howard and his senior ministers.  But head office provided the market research that confirmed the remarkable recovery in the government's standing with the electorate.  It organised the blanket advertising of the prime minister's declaration, delivered at the party's policy launch on 28 October, that "We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come."  Strategically, it was a brilliant wedge and a pay-back for Labor's response to Hanson in 1998.  Howard forced Beazley to follow his own hard-line or else appear negligent of national security.  Labor, meanwhile, paid the price for adopting a "small target" strategy: having avoided making policy commitments of its own, it was vulnerable to just this kind of attack and could not easily change the subject of debate.  While Howard ruthlessly exploited the advantages of incumbency, Labor opted not to pursue an aggressive insurgency.  Howard won with a swing of more than 2 per cent – an even more extraordinary performance for an incumbent than Keating's 1.5 per cent in 1993 – and entered his third term with a majority of eighty-two to sixty-five (with three independents).  Reviewing the result, Labor's campaign manager Geoff Walsh described the arrival of the Tampa as the "critical electoral event" of Howard's second term: "When Howard's boat came in, Labor's chances were effectively sunk." 

Walsh, who had replaced Gary Gray as national secretary in 2000, exemplified a new style of Labor national secretary, skilled in media management and campaign strategy.  Like Gray, he had not worked as a state secretary and was a creature of the national party: this was his second stint in head office, he had previously worked under McMullan as national communications director from 1981.  Like Tony Eggleton and Andrew Robb, he was not a lifelong party member, having allowed his membership to lapse when it seemed incompatible with his professional activities.  Sydney-born but educated in Melbourne, Walsh took an arts degree from La Trobe University and pursued a career as a newspaper journalist in Albury, the Canberra press gallery and Melbourne.  His later career alternated between appointments within the ALP apparatus and postings with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.  Following Labor's election in 1983, Walsh joined Prime Minister Hawke's staff as press secretary; in 1986 he moved to Geneva with the International Labour Organisation, where he considered seeking the national secretaryship after McMullan's departure.  He returned to Hawke's office as political adviser in the lead-up to the 1990 election, and then headed Prime Minister Keating's office in 1994.  Walsh became national secretary in 2000 with the support of both Gray and the party leader, Kim Beazley.  This was the first in a new approach to Labor selections: unlike Gray, who had to win a ballot, Walsh was elected by consensus. 

* * *

Geoff Walsh, Labor national secretary in the "security" election of 2001, told the National Press Club after Labor's defeat: "When Howard's boat came in, Labor's chances were effectively sunk." 

Source: Ward O'Neill personal collection, used with permission

* * *

In 2002, Crosby's strategic mindset was again displayed in the Liberals' decision not to run a candidate in the by-election for the apparently safe Labor seat of Cunningham in New South Wales.  With traditional Labor voters questioning their loyalties, with Labor's leader, Simon Crean, struggling for traction, and with a dispute over preselection, Cunningham was ripe for a revolt from the left.  It was "almost mission impossible, a basket case" recalled Karl Bitar, then an organiser with the NSW Labor Party.  Labor's vote disastrously split and the Greens candidate won on preferences – the first time the Greens had won a seat in the House of Representatives.  Crosby claimed the result as a win for the Liberal government's strategy, explaining that his job was to damage Labor. " You seek to achieve legitimate damage to your opponent and benefit to yourself," he told journalist Phillip Hudson. " We were never going to win the seat.  If you want the focus to be on your opponent, don't put yourself in the frame."  The loss placed Simon Crean under pressure and by the end of 2003 he had been replaced as leader by Mark Latham.  Geoff Walsh too stood down; he went on to work with the public affairs consultancy Gavin Anderson, the Victorian Labor premier Steve Bracks and, from 2007, with BHP Billiton.  His term as national secretary was the briefest since Joe Chamberlain in the early 1960s. 

*

The Liberals' campaign ascendancy, built by Lynton Crosby on the foundations put in place by Andrew Robb, put unprecedented strain on the party's fundraising abilities.  The 1990s was a period of financial stress for both parties.  Corporate funding for the Liberals dried up under Alexander Downer's unsuccessful leadership; having lost the unlosable election in 1993, the party faced a debt of around $5 million.  Corporate donors were also responding to Labor's direct appeals, led by Gary Gray; this was no longer an area of unrivalled superiority for the Liberals, as Robb acknowledged:

Gary Gray... went around a lot of the board rooms around the country and basically said, "I see you've given $140,000 to the Liberal Party and you gave us 20 [thousand dollars].  We're not asking for any more, we just think you should be giving the same."  That put the fear of God into a lot of companies who progressively started to give the same.  They might [still] give 160 [in total], but they'd give 80 each instead of 140 and 20. 

Both parties, at the state and national levels, have become ever more sophisticated and elaborate in wooing corporate donations.  Company representatives are invited to party conferences, where they are able to meet senior parliamentarians in specially designated "business centres," or to attend private dinners, breakfasts or cocktail parties which serve as fundraising events.  Many of these meetings are managed by fundraising arms such as (at state level) the Liberal Party's Millennium Forum and the ALP's Progressive Business entity.  The parties have also found ways to sidestep the disclosure of donations required by the public funding law: large slabs of revenues were "disclosed" as coming from third parties, such as the Liberal-friendly Greenfields, Cormack and Free Enterprise Foundations and the ALP's John Curtin House Ltd and Labor Victory Fund; the underlying financial supporters of those entities, however, remain cloaked. 

Labor also had its traditional stream of funding from affiliated trade unions.  Labor officials regularly deny that any great disparity exists, but it has long been a point of faith for Liberal officials that Labor's financial position is unfairly propped up by the unions.  Robb described a significant funding advantage to Labor:

The unions give on average $5 million a year to the Labor Party, so in any three-year term the Labor Party would have a $15 million advantage over us before we went to business. 

By the mid-1990s, the federal Liberal Party was, according to Crosby, "pretty skint" and had to get a $4.75 million line of credit from the National Australia Bank (NAB).  But the bank, in the imposing person of its managing director, Don Argus, pressed for security in the form of a mortgage over the newly refurbished Menzies House.  As the party's constitution forbade this, the party treasurer, Ron Walker, opted to give Argus a personal guarantee.  Despite victory in 1996, however, the party could only find $300,000 to repay to the bank.  Walker's guarantee was called in.  In circumstances later scrutinised by the AEC, Walker, a Melbourne businessman, paid out the debt.  He later denied having received donations from any third party in order to do so.  He then assigned the debt to a charitable trust, the Greenfields Foundation, which insisted that it was not associated with the party and therefore had no disclosure obligations.  Quizzed by a parliamentary committee, Crosby defended the arrangement as legal:

He [Walker] met his obligation as a guarantor by paying out the remaining indebtedness of the Liberal Party to the National Australia Bank.  It was not a gift to the Liberal Party: he responded to his obligations under law.  It was not a loan to the Liberal Party, because it was an indebtedness which he subsequently assigned to the Greenfields Foundation. 

The AEC later expressed concern about the potential of transactions such as this to circumvent the disclosure provisions of the public funding legislation.  The commission also noted that Greenfields treated its debtor, the Liberal Party, "in an uncommonly favourable manner," not charging interest and insisting on modest annual repayments. 

The Liberal national office was also far less efficient than Labor's at capturing the proceeds of the new public funding secured as a result of the 1994 agreement between Robb and Bob Hogg.  Labor branches in the states and territories began to lodge "redirection agreements" with the AEC after each election from 1996.  These essentially instructed the commission to redirect their funding entitlements to the national office.  The commission was happy to oblige and in 1998, Labor's entire public funding receipts were paid in a single cheque for $12.8 million to Labor's designated agent, Gary Gray. ( The commission subsequently decided to make payments to parties, rather than individuals; as a spokesman told one reporter, a party agent could "still walk into their local bank and get it bunged into their own personal account.  You never know, $12 million is going to make even an honest person think twice.") 

For the Liberal Party, however, the new funding stream led to a revival of squabbling between the federal and state divisions.  At a time when the imperative to centralise campaign management in the federal office was growing stronger, Robb and Crosby wanted more direct say in the states' campaign activities.  In 1996, 1998 and 2001, however, the state and territory divisions claimed and received the entire Liberal entitlement.  The national officials found themselves engaged, after each election, in "tortuous" negotiations with each state to get the money back, or to earmark it for central campaign purposes, especially the big-ticket item of TV advertising. " The public funding money was seen by a lot of the states as an income source to protect their position, and they'd try to make a profit out of it," Crosby recalled.  The federal office was "on the back foot" and "mendicant."  Some states were "pocketing" funds that should have gone to the federal party, Robb noted, conceding that the Liberals had not managed this "as effectively as the Labor Party":

[It] still took up a huge amount of time.  You'd get one state that says, "I'm holding on to a million.  Come and get it" – which happened.  Six months later, it was still negotiating. 

Victoria appears to have been a particular culprit, with the state director, Petro Georgiou, rejecting any and all federal incursions.  But Crosby conceded that, in his own time as state director in Queensland, he too had withheld public funds from the federal office:

Because we were broke, and so the state executive and the president in particular, Paul Everingham, said, "We're not going to give it to the feds when we're broke.  It came to us and we'll keep it, thanks very much." 

In Canberra, however, Crosby had a different perspective, and initiated what he called "one of the most significant changes" in the party's handling of public funds.  Leading up to the 2001 election, Prime Minister Howard got fed up with the "rear-guard action by some of the states," Crosby recalled, and moved to amend the public funding legislation in Parliament.  The Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Act 2002 directed that the Liberal Party's public funding entitlements would be paid to its federal secretariat rather than its state divisions.  The principle was simple, as the government explained in the House of Representatives: "As the federal secretariat of the Liberal Party is responsible for federal election campaigns, it is appropriate that all or part of the public funding be paid to the agent of the federal secretariat."  Earlier Liberal promises to repeal the public funding legislation had apparently been set aside.  These new arrangements gave the federal head office effective control of the funds.  The achievement came at the expense of exposing the party's internal squabbling to the taunting of their opponents, however: the Labor senator John Faulkner, a wily campaign veteran, suggested that the bill be retitled the Liberal Party Central Office Dash for Cash Bill. 

In both parties, financial necessity became the father of invention.  Andrew Robb saw an opportunity to use a centralised database to generate new sources of revenue from individuals.  Robb believed this would have "turbo-charged" Liberal Party fundraising, as he had seen happen in the US Republican Party.  The idea turned traditional fundraising on its head: instead of asking small numbers of well-off people for a few large donations, the party would ask many thousands of ordinary people for small donations.  It was high-volume, low-value fundraising.  Robb's plan required the states to provide head office with data about people who had donated to state campaigns in the past.  This data would have been fed into the federal secretariat's existing database and used for nationwide fundraising campaigns by telephone and mail. 

Despite "several attempts" to get the plan off the ground, however, he failed.  The obstacle, characteristically for the Liberal Party, was that the state divisions refused to hand over their donor lists: "There was never a level of sufficient trust.  Everyone always thought that their data would be given to the feds to misuse, that their data would be taken, or whatever."  The states jealously protected their data, resisting all Robb's inducements.  He offered to pay all the fundraising costs, and to return 90 per cent of funds raised to the states.  No deal.  He paid for trials to demonstrate to the sceptical states that his idea would work; one trial involved writing to voters who lived within a two-kilometre radius of polling booths where the Liberal candidate had received more than 60 per cent of the vote at the last election; voters in these areas, the logic went, were likely to be strong Liberal supporters.  The trial paid for itself in the first mailing, but the state officials were unimpressed:

[They] said, "Yeah, good."  But they didn't understand it at all.  I still didn't get it off the ground.  I put a lot of effort into it.  So that's a huge political opportunity that's still out there for both sides. 

Robb's initiative was nevertheless an important landmark, as it looked both backward and forward: backward to the Liberal traditions of federalised distrust and noncooperation, and forward to a future of database-driven fundraising, individual engagement, and bottom-up campaigning. 

*

Lynton Crosby resigned after the 2001 election; he and Mark Textor founded a political and business consultancy.  The firm Crosby Textor describes itself as a specialist in opinion research, strategic communications and campaigns, with offices in London and Sydney and a blue-chip client list of conservative politicians.  Crosby was campaign director for the British Conservative Party in the 2005 general elections, where he was predictably described in the British press as "the Wizard of Oz" and, less positively, as a "maestro of the dark arts" who introduced "dog-whistle politics" into the UK.  He then managed Boris Johnson's two successful campaigns for lord mayor of London in 2008 and 2012.  Johnson's handwritten letter of exuberant praise for Crosby – whom he called "simply the best campaign manager and political strategist I have ever encountered or even heard of" – is displayed on the firm's website.  Having been reappointed to manage the Conservative Party's re-election campaign in 2015, Crosby has become embroiled in controversy over reportedly using his political connections to advance the interests of his firm's corporate clients.  Crosby Textor has also consulted to the New Zealand National Party in 2005 and the Canadian Conservatives under Stephen Harper, all the while continuing to provide research and advice to Crosby's successor in the Liberal head office, Brian Loughnane. 

Lynton Crosby is the only Australian party official to have become an exporter of professional campaigning to the international marketplace.  Plenty of Australian officials have brought back insights and tactics from Washington and London, and plenty of international experts have been imported by Australian political parties to advise on all manner of subjects.  But Crosby's and Textor's capacity to operate internationally confirms the supremacy of the Liberal Party's campaign professionalism by the early 2000s.  Whether operating in Australia or abroad, however, they have not – consistent with the professional commitments of the party officials – crossed the boundaries of partisan affiliation.  

# 10

# A GROUND WAR

When Gary Gray first arrived in Labor's national head office in 1986, he was given a new job by the national secretary: "McMullan made me the organiser responsible for marginal seats."  Gray was the first national party official to have this responsibility.  His job was to sandbag Labor's two dozen marginal seats against any incoming Coalition tide in the 1987 election. 

He set about the task by spending around a quarter of a million dollars on a fleet of microcomputers and laser printers.  These early computers, with an 8086 chip, were big enough to hold a database containing the names and addresses of some 70,000 voters – the size of a single federal electorate.  Gray deployed eleven of these units into the most marginal seats – this was all he could afford – and they started to crank out a regular feed of direct mail from the local members to their constituents.  Gray recalled:

The laser printers printed at four pages a minute, so it took you five days, day and night, of laser printing to print an electorate-wide mailing.  Then you had to get it folded and stuffed, which was a whole other story. 

The new technology might have been slow by today's standards, but it transformed campaigning, Gray felt, into "a very different beast."  One marginal seat in Western Australia suggested how.  The seat of Stirling – covering a tight block of suburbia in northern Perth, from Balcatta through to the beach at Scarborough – was held for Labor on a 2.5 per cent margin by an energetic backbencher named Ron Edwards.  Stirling had been a Liberal seat for years until swinging hard to Labor in 1983; holding it for Labor was Edwards' full-time job.  When Gray delivered a microcomputer to his electorate office, Edwards put it straight to work; he not only held his seat in 1987 but increased his margin.  Another marginal seat in Sydney told the same story: the electorate of Barton, covering the southern bayside suburbs of Kogarah and Rockdale, was held by Labor's Gary Punch by an even thinner margin of 1.2 per cent.  He too used direct mailouts, assisted by the NSW state branch, and held his seat against a Liberal swing.  This was not the first time a political party had used direct mail; the NSW division of the Liberal Party had won an industry award in 1984 for its impressive fundraising campaign using personalised mail.  But Gray's effort in 1987 was a turning point at the national level, applying the mechanics of direct mail to the logic of a marginal seat campaign. 

The trick to direct mail is that it looks and feels like a real letter from the MP to the individual voter.  There was no impersonal "Dear Voter": these letters were addressed to named individuals.  More importantly, they talked about local issues – the suburban concerns that affected the daily lives of each voter, not the national issues that the prime minister was talking about during the campaign.  This was made possible by Gray's database – first named Polfile, then Electrac – which initially consisted of fairly simple lists but which was progressively expanded to contain ever more detailed and localised information about each electorate.  Over time Labor purchased public information such as the electoral roll, voting results, telephone lists and census data, and integrated them into a single database.  Gray also progressively added Labor's own data, derived from market research, telephone canvassing, doorknocking and other grassroots face-to-face contacts, producing a detailed demographic and political portrait of each marginal seat.  This data-intensive and location-specific information enabled the party to target personalised messages to individual voters, reflecting what it understood to be their interests and preferences. 

After 1987, Gray continued to build on his database with updated information from more sources about a larger number of voters; by 1990, it covered all the targets seats.  The Labor government also managed to secure a new source of funding for direct mail, by increasing the postal allowance for members of Parliament from $9000 a year to $30,000.  It presented this as an issue of representative integrity – the increase would allow MPs to communicate more easily with all their constituents – but the Liberal opposition condemned it as a "$3.2 million theft of public money... the latest in a long tawdry sordid but systematic campaign to transfer the costs of its election campaigns from its own coffers to the public purse."  The opposition challenged the legality of the new funding in the High Court, and swore not to take advantage of the cash in the meantime – a promise the ALP "greatly appreciated," Gray recalled with pleasure.  After Labor won the 1990 election, the High Court ruled the postage increase illegal, but the money already distributed (most of it to Labor candidates) was irrecoverable. ( The Liberals were, however, embarrassed when it was revealed that their Coalition partners had enthusiastically used the allowance for mail-outs in support of National Party candidates in rural New South Wales and Queensland.) 

By 1993, Gray had "massively expanded" the database again, and deployed it against Hewson's "Fightback!"  package.  This was a two-phase project.  Recognising the challenges of incumbency, Gray said: "It is at the core of the strategy to rebuild community confidence in politicians.  Directing efforts towards rebuilding our position in the community should come before we mount massive local attacks on the Coalition's policy."  Labor MPs were consequently encouraged to use Polfile to provide "information kits" on non-partisan, even non-political subjects such as fire safety, home security, energy efficiency, skin cancer and food additives, with a view to strengthening their credentials as helpful members of the community.  This kind of "community campaigning," Gray told MPs, would be "central to our political recovery."  Labor followed up this community campaigning with direct mailouts attacking the proposed GST, cutting through with powerful and emotive language and imaginative presentation: at the start of the school year, parents were sent a pamphlet shaped like an apple, pointing out all the extra costs of schooling under a GST.  Later, a hamburger-shaped letter used the anti-GST line, "Don't bite off more than you can chew."  Then there was the "Libcard," designed to resemble a credit-card bill, which highlighted household cost increases under a GST. 

Labor's success prompted the Liberals to increase their capacity to reach voters by mail: once again, competition between the parties accelerated the adoption of new campaigning techniques.  The Liberal Party's catch-up began with the appointment of Andrew Robb as deputy director; like Gray, he was given specific responsibility for campaigning in marginal seats – a first for the Liberals.  Robb faced two main challenges.  First, the Liberal head office had to acquire basic skills in areas where Labor clearly had a significant advantage – database management and market research in particular.  Second, it had to learn how to apply these techniques in a party organisation that was still heavily decentralised.  Up to this point, direct mail in the Liberal Party was driven by the states, using software that was relatively primitive by ALP standards, or by individual members of Parliament.  One NSW backbencher, Dr Bob Woods, a well-known proponent of direct mail, had assembled his own database for his marginal seat of Lowe.  In 1990 he mailed his constituents a scaremongering letter about Japanese immigration into the local community; in 1993 he campaigned against a proposed truck depot at Greenacre. " Let me be totally clear," he wrote. " I will be fighting the truck depot after the election, just as I have up until now.  I will never break ranks with Greenacre." 

Robb's solution was to work with the states to develop a single, national system based on a single database, which could be used for both state and federal electorates.  In tribute to Hewson's "Fightback!"  package, the database was dubbed "Feedback".  Deployed to some 100 candidates, MPs and senators at state and federal level, and road-tested in a state election campaign, "Feedback" was, Robb boasted in 1993, "as good as any in the world." 

Feedback was also increasingly used to drive intensive phone canvassing, which was cheaper and faster than mailouts, although it required skilled telephone operators.  During the 1996 campaign, Robb claimed, the Liberal Party had identified and called 10 per cent of the households in thirty marginal seats.  Robb liked to explain this approach with a homespun comparison: the Rawleigh's travelling salesman, "who used to come to our place at the dairy farm when I was a kid," selling ointment and other products from the back of his truck:

The Rawleigh's man came onto our farm, and he wouldn't offend my mother by offering her something that she couldn't afford, but he knew there were nine kids and he could see our circumstances, and he got to know her preferences and what she liked, and he wouldn't be trying to sell her things she didn't like. 

This was the original "permission-based marketing." 

My mother gave him permission to come onto our place... and if he'd told scuttlebutt down the road about my family, my mother would have withdrawn that permission. 

Just as the Rawleigh's man needed to understand his customers' preferences and circumstances, a political party needs to know its voters.  In a large society, politicians cannot drive up to every farm gate; they need databases to mimic the knowledge acquired by the travelling salesman.  Later, when he was running a direct marketing company, Robb would use the same analogy to justify and reassure customers about the need to acquire huge amounts of data about them: individual Australians could grant or withdraw their permission for such research, he said. 

The rush by both parties to embrace direct mail formed part of a wider revolution in campaigning.  It helped to answer the question that had been nagging at head offices intermittently since the 1950s: how best to focus their efforts on the marginal seats?  Kennelly had understood in 1951 the logic of marginal seat campaigning: he understood that victory did not necessarily require a uniform mood swing across the nation, but could result instead from a series of isolated swings in individual electorates.  Kennelly also understood the power, for Labor candidates, of "personal canvassing" in these key electorates, although he had failed to mobilise the necessary financial support from the party to support it.  Then with the rise of the television campaign in the 1970s, the question was set aside.  Local campaigning seemed redundant as parties focussed on influencing the national mood through nationwide ad campaigns.  In the political circumstances of the time, local contests were won on the back of national campaigns by leaders such as Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke.  As Crosby observed:

[In the] late '60s, '70s and '80s, you get a strong leader and a good national advertising campaign, that would probably do it for you.  People were still very heavily influenced in that way. 

Creating a national mood with broadcast advertising remains an important part of election campaigns to this day.  But these blanket campaigns have gradually declined in effectiveness (although not in cost) as network TV audiences have fragmented and alternative broadcast channels proliferated.  At the same time, the political intelligence provided by market research offered head offices ever more precise information about strategically important voters in marginal seats.  Once again, Kennelly's question resurfaced: how could a national campaign organisation impose its will on so many discrete electorates around the nation?  How could it deliver, by remote control as it were, the focussed campaigns necessary to win marginal seats? 

In the language of warfare so beloved of campaign strategists, the answer was to conduct a "ground war" in marginal seats, complementing the "air war" of television advertising.  Where an air war treats the whole nation as a single electorate and carpet bombs it with a single message, the ground war involves many different local campaigns – "hand-to-hand combat, in individual seats," as the journalist Michelle Grattan described it.  The air war disseminates the national campaign themes, often centred on the party leader, through the national and metropolitan media: "We've spent X billion dollars on improving Australia's schools."  The ground war generates a local message about local issues and concerns: "We've built a new classroom in the local primary school."  The central figure in the ground war is the local candidate – who, whether a sitting member or an opposition challenger, must appear to be part of the local community, not an out-of-touch Canberra politician.  For the organisers of the ground war, the main task is to make the candidate visible in the local community, both through intensive personal contact with individual voters and through reporting in the local media.  So the candidate will doorknock, meet commuters at train stations and bus stops, visit nursing homes and schools, advocate on behalf of local organisations, and promote petitions about local issues.  Where the air war emanates from an advertising agency somewhere in the city, the ground war needs "boots on the ground": the candidate's boots, of course, but also as many volunteers' boots as possible, to help with the doorknocking and other outreach activities, right through to election day and the distribution of how-to-vote cards. 

Voters might be jaded and feel alienated from the national political scene, but the rationale for a ground war is that they will still respond to a personal relationship with their local candidate.  Direct mail exemplifies the ground war approach – a direct, personal approach from the candidate to the voter, articulating their shared concerns as locals about their community, whether in northern Perth or southern Sydney.  Bob Woods' promise to "never break ranks with Greenacre" might have sounded eccentric from the point of view of national politics – but in Greenacre, it looked spot-on. 

Importantly, while direct mail appears to be a local and personal communication, it in fact forms part of a large and centralised campaign apparatus, coordinated and funded from the centre and reliant on a central database.  Direct mail, like all ground-war activities, makes a local contribution to a larger, centrally designed strategy.  Placards in front yards, leaflets stuffed into letterboxes, the bunting that festoons polling booths on election day – they all contribute to a sense of local activity, but with designs, typeface, colours and logo all approved by the centre.  The ground war did not represent a return to an earlier and simpler era of "street corner" campaigning.  Instead, in Robb's apt phrase after the 1996 campaign, it represented an effort to "ensure that our national campaign was locally relevant." 

Running a ground war, then, represented another significant expansion of the role of the national head office.  In directing so many activities in so many diverse areas, the national head office's task was not to replace or eliminate local party actors and volunteers.  But it did want to co-opt them, direct them, instruct them and discipline them.  Bob McMullan practised this approach from the start.  As Labor's campaign director from 1980, he asserted a right to intervene in order to "shore up any deficiencies" in marginal-seat campaigns.  This intervention was sometimes instructive – to "teach the local branches how to run good local campaigns" – but it could also carry a warning:

It was my task in the campaign first of all, to make sure on the ground we were ready.  That is mainly the state secretaries' jobs, [but]... I can remember saying to some candidates, "Well if you don't lift your game you're not going to be the candidate."  The truth is that I had no authority to achieve that, but if I'd demand it I usually got it, and people did lift their game. 

I think we started to get better at marginal seat campaigning.  We started to focus down more on what to do to influence seats literally at the margin. 

Andrew Robb experienced a similar shift in the Liberal Party.  He developed his own method of imposing a unified approach: financial incentives.  Previously, the states had been responsible for "on the ground" campaigning in individual seats, as he explained:

The Secretariat had run the national advertising campaign, and had developed themes and messages and things, but had no capacity to impose those.  And [it] certainly didn't have any direct involvement in the strategies that were adopted in each seat [or] influence over the candidates or anything. 

As head of the National Farmers' Federation, Robb had experienced the challenges of coordinating a fragmented federated organisation.  The NFF was the peak body for some twenty-two separate state and territory commodity councils and farm organisations, each with its own concerns, funding, membership and management structure. " I understood the psychology of working with [states and territories] who were autonomous," he recalled.  Consultation and communication formed part of his approach: Robb scheduled full-day campaign planning meetings with the state directors to coincide with the bi-monthly meetings of the federal executive.  He also understood, however, the importance of appealing to the bottom line: "It was my experience at the NFF, and it was borne out at the Liberal Party, that the best way to get a coordinated program is to buy cooperation."  Noting that the Labor government's national competition policy operated by providing a financial incentive for cooperation between the states, Robb "sought to do the same thing: to buy cooperation." 

Robb convened pre-election meetings for each of thirty federal electorates that had been identified for special attention:

I would sit down with the state directors, and then with the campaign teams, and my campaigners, and we would agree on a strategy for that seat, and a budget, and a program of activities, and the priority groups that would be targeted... and lines of authority... And then I would say, "A $200,000 budget.  I'll put in 100,000, and my 100,000 will be spent last." 

The national office thus prescribed specific campaign activities or, as Lynton Crosby put it later, "minimum standards of performance."  Robb might require, for example, that a campaign spend 60 per cent of its time or its budget on activities targeted at parents aged 29 to 45.  The local campaign would use its own funds to do this – and if it performed satisfactorily, could then spend the additional national money.  This proved a more successful approach to winning state cooperation than Robb's proposal for high-volume, low-value fundraising. 

Robb strengthened these efforts by employing a team of eight "campaign officers" to assist local campaigning in 1993.  These officers, also centrally funded, were dispatched to the traditionally weaker or under-resourced states of Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia, where they were responsible for two or three marginal electorates each.  Robb was not happy with their performance:

They all lived in the seats [during the campaign], and would come occasionally to head office.  In the main they "went native" – you know, they started to get embroiled in the local factional issues.  They started to get the anti-head office view.  It wasn't as cohesive a campaign. 

For the 1996 campaign, Robb raised the stakes.  The staff he sent out to the states had to come back to Canberra every fortnight:

I'd bring them back every second Friday.  They'd have to come in Thursday night [and] spend time as a group together.  So they built an esprit de corps among themselves and with head office.  We would workshop... all day Friday, [looking at] different seats and... at the research, [we] jointly discussed it, how do we get coordination... It worked very well. 

The Liberals also extended their ground-war capacity into television advertising.  When Crosby joined Robb as his deputy, also with a specific responsibility for marginal seat campaigning, they developed a program of local TV ads for Coalition candidates in key Labor-held marginal seats.  This idea emerged from their experience in the 1993 campaign, when Liberal polling in marginal seats had found that many voters said they would vote for the Coalition; they wanted to get rid of Keating and expected him to lose.  Yet when the polling asked a different question – which of the local candidates will you vote for? –  many of these potential Coalition voters named the Labor incumbent.  Crosby explained:

Our campaign [in 1993] failed dismally in getting people to understand that if they wanted to get rid of Keating, if they did really want a change, then to get that change they had to vote against Keating's candidates and for a Coalition candidate at the local level. 

To remedy this in 1996, the Liberals designed ads for local Liberal candidates in marginal seats in New South Wales and Queensland.  This campaign – the market research, the advertising strategy and execution, and the broadcast time – was entirely funded by the national head office.  Crosby recalled:

We ran ads that were very specific about the local candidate... I went with a cameraman out of Canberra and the ad guys, and we went to all these places, and we filmed the local Liberal candidate. 

The ads carried a positive message in that they raised the profile of the Coalition candidates.  But they were principally aimed at attacking the Labor incumbents.  Years later, Crosby could still recite the script:

"At the last election, when you voted for [local member for Capricornia] Marjorie Henzel... do you remember when [Keating] got rid of the L-A-W tax cuts and increased wholesale sales tax?  You didn't vote for increased sales tax, did you?  Yes you did, because Marjorie Henzel did.  You didn't vote for Paul Keating's plan to do this?  Yes you did, because Marjorie Henzel did."... [ They] always finished up with, "Thanks a lot, Marjorie." 

Crosby continued this approach when he became federal director.  From 1998, of course, these were incumbency campaigns for the Liberals and the strategy was reversed: the ads now defended the sitting members and undermined the Labor challengers, reminding voters "what happened last time they voted, directly or through preferences, for a Labor member – how that Labor member voted to increase taxes, and how he or she would do it all again given half a chance." 

As these TV campaigns recognised, a successful ground war needs strong local candidates.  Candidates who live in their electorates and who have served their communities – mayors, policemen, community workers – are likely to have an advantage.  Traditionally, selecting candidates has been the responsibility of local party branches.  But, like so much else, this responsibility has shifted out of local hands, upwards to state or national head offices (or, in a different context, to factional chiefs) to "parachute" their preferred candidates into winnable seats.  There are risks in this approach, as an impressive national profile may not translate into sustainable local appeal; the former ABC chairman David Hill and the former Democrat senator Cheryl Kernot were rejected by voters in Hughes (NSW) in 1998 and Dickson (Queensland) in 2001.  But it also has advantages: difficult local candidates who threaten to derail a campaign can be removed by the party organisation, even if they seem to have local support.  When the endorsed Liberal candidate for the Queensland seat of Ipswich, Pauline Hanson, flouted party discipline by publishing unacceptable comments on race in 1996, Robb successfully pressed the Queensland division of the party to deselect her. 

Both parties also sought to train and instruct local candidates and volunteers in the preferred campaign methods of head office.  The Labor Party has produced a series of campaign manuals: practical written instructions from head office to local candidates about how to conduct their campaigns.  These are practitioners' handbooks, designed to distil the party's accumulated experience and expertise.  The NSW branch produced Labor's first manual in 1972; since the early 1990s, the national head office has produced an updated version for every federal election.  They cover the "nuts and bolts" of campaigning at the local level: how to organise public meetings, deal with the media, doorknock, raise funds and organise postal votes.  The Liberal Party is similarly keen to instil discipline in its local campaigns, although in recent years it has preferred online and face-to-face training to printed manuals. 

*

When it came to developing its ground-war tactics, Labor perhaps had a head start.  Many Labor activists were schooled in community organising along the lines pioneered in the US by the radical activist Saul Alinsky; then there were the mass mobilisations of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the trade union movement.  Directing and coordinating activities on the ground, however, requires effective management and a high degree of organisational discipline, rather than political passion.  Here the Liberal Party, with its managerial mindset and expertise, may have had an advantage.  But it is clear that for both head offices, imposing a single will on a highly decentralised organisation required significant and sustained effort.  As McMullan put it:

You can make whatever decision you like at the central level, but if the people who run the actual operational arms aren't carrying it out, it doesn't happen. 

In the wake of the 1998 campaign, Crosby provided an extended analysis of the shift from what he termed "aerial bombardment" to "guerrilla warfare." " A campaign works on two levels," he told the National Press Club. 

There is the national campaign which the national media see, and then there is the "below-the-line" campaign – the campaign that is implemented at the regional or local level.  The "below-the-line" campaign is especially important because it is the one voters experience directly and come into contact daily.  They may watch the national campaign on the television at night, but the direct contact of the "below-the-line" campaign is often more personally relevant.  It is the "below-the-line" campaign where a significant portion of our resources were directed during the course of this campaign. 

For both parties, the challenge for head office was not only to manage these two levels of campaigning, but to make them work together. " The campaign," Crosby said bluntly, "has to be run top down and bottom up, and completely integrated."  Just as head office had seized responsibility for national campaign management from the states in the 1970s, so its efforts to run the "ground war" alongside the "air war" represented another expansion of the professionals' influence.  

# 11

# A LINE OF SUCCESSION

When the federal Liberal backbencher Peter Nugent suffered a fatal heart attack at his Melbourne home in April 2001, the Victorian state party had to organise the by-election for his marginal eastern suburbs seat of Aston.  The job fell to the state secretary, Brian Loughnane, who assembled a classic ground-war campaign – all about local freeways and hospitals and little about the Howard government, which was trailing in the polls.  Despite a strong swing to Labor, the Liberals surprised many by holding on to the seat.  When John Howard was re-elected a few months later in the Tampa election, he credited Aston with triggering his political revival.  So, twelve months later, when Lynton Crosby announced his intention to resign as federal director, Brian Loughnane was among the frontrunners to replace him. " I had to make a formal application," he recalled. " There was a subcommittee of the federal executive, and they made the appointment."  The subcommittee included the prime minister, who had already publicly praised Loughnane's performance in Victoria.  In December 2002, Loughnane was given the job. 

When it comes to choosing federal directors, Loughnane reflected later, "the lines of succession" in the Liberal Party have usually been clear. " I think [Tony] Eggleton was pretty clear, Andrew [Robb] was pretty clear, Lynton [Crosby] was pretty clear.  I was probably the least clear of those four."  Indeed, Loughnane had not been the only candidate.  But in traditional Liberal Party style, the succession was sorted out behind the scenes, and the party's fourth director in thirty years was selected as smoothly as his predecessors had been.  For decades, even during periods of instability in the parliamentary leadership, the Liberal head office had focussed on expanding its influence and winning elections.  Loughnane inherited a successful and dominant campaign machine, and continued in that vein.  In more than a decade as federal director, he oversaw Howard's last win in 2004 and his decisive loss to Kevin Rudd in 2007; he served through the brief tenures of opposition leaders Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull to direct the 2010 campaign that resulted in a hung Parliament; and he ultimately directed the insurgency campaign that destroyed the Labor government and returned the Liberals to office in 2013 under Tony Abbott. 

Labor's head office told a far more troubled narrative.  Just a week before Nugent's untimely death, the Queensland QC Tom Shepherdson handed to the Queensland Criminal Justice Commission his detailed report into allegations of electoral fraud – otherwise known as branch stacking – in the state branch of the ALP.  Shepherdson's inquiry had already triggered the resignations of the Labor deputy premier and two backbenchers, and his report presented clear evidence that some party members regarded branch stacking as a "legitimate campaign tactic" in ALP preselections.  The task of cleaning up the party's books and procuring the expulsions of those involved was handed to an outsider from Canberra: Tim Gartrell, the assistant national secretary in Geoff Walsh's national head office.  Gartrell's calm efficiency over three months in Brisbane brought him positive reviews.  Two years later, in August 2003, when Walsh announced his resignation, Gartrell found himself the only runner in the race. " There was a freaky moment when no one had the numbers on the national executive," he recalled. " There was no clear factional alignment.  I was lucky to get the support of the Left, and then the [Centre Left] was very supportive.  There was no strong right-wing candidate floating around, and the Right said basically, Tim can have a go."  The position was advertised, but with the federal election just around the corner, time was pressing.  Gartrell was appointed national secretary in September 2003. 

Thus two newcomers to the role of national campaign director faced off against each other in the 2004 Howard–Latham election.  Over the next decade, however, while Loughnane remained federal director, Labor had three national secretaries: Gartrell, Karl Bitar from 2008, and George Wright from 2011.  Loughnane worked with four parliamentary leaders during this period – John Howard, Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott – while Labor cycled through no fewer than seven: opposition leaders Simon Crean, Mark Latham, Kim Beazley (again), prime ministers Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd (again), and finally opposition leader Bill Shorten. 

In the four election campaigns in the decade from 2004, Labor assembled a successful and effective campaign team just once, in 2007.  The ALP learned many new technical skills during this period, such as how to integrate websites, social media and micro-targeting into its campaigns, and it continued to be well served by the pollster John Utting of UMR, whom Gary Gray had hired in 1996.  But it also forgot many of its old skills – skills of strategy, discipline and national centralisation and, in government, how to balance the responsibilities of power with creative and focussed incumbency campaigning.  As a result, its overall performances in 2010 and 2013 went backwards compared with 2007, let alone with the incumbency triumphs of the Hawke and Keating years.  The Liberals, by contrast, proved far better at maintaining strategic focus and campaign discipline, especially in opposition – while appearing to have been more cautious about new technologies and more conservative in structural change.  Loughnane has stuck with essentially the same campaign team Andrew Robb assembled in 1996, with Mark Textor of Crosby Textor providing research and a hand-picked group of advertising agents.  Compared to Labor's wild fluctuations and repeated new starts, the Liberals' steadier trajectory appears to have been more successful. 

The pairing of Loughnane and Gartrell in 2004 also reveals how far the two parties have evolved and diverged in terms of the training and recruitment of party officials.  The personal biographies of the two men were remarkably similar.  They were both from rural backgrounds in provincial towns, Loughnane the son of a livestock buyer in the Geelong hinterland and Gartrell of an orchardist in Orange.  Both studied political science at university – La Trobe and University of New South Wales (UNSW) respectively – and Gartrell also completed a Masters in Communications Studies.  Both became active party members as teenagers, Loughnane in Liberal politics on campus and Gartrell in Young Labor and the anti-apartheid movement, and as a volunteer with the Municipal Officers' Association. 

Entering the workforce, their political trajectories diverged.  Loughnane built a two-track career in private enterprise and party work in Canberra.  He spent a decade with Shell as an industrial relations manager before becoming a ministerial staffer after the election of the Kennett government in Victoria in 1992.  He was plucked from this relative obscurity to work as chief of staff to opposition leader Alexander Downer.  When the ill-fated Downer was replaced by Howard, Loughnane was looked after with a position on Howard's staff, but opted after a few months to return to the energy industry in Melbourne.  With the election of the Howard government, he returned to Canberra as chief of staff to Cabinet minister John Moore; then it was back to Melbourne in 2000 as state director of the Liberal Party.  Alongside the triumph of Aston, Loughnane's record in Victoria also includes the blot of the landslide defeat suffered by the state party in the November 2002 state elections.  A loss, always on the cards, became a certainty when it was revealed during the campaign that the shadow treasurer had failed to enrol as a voter and was thus ineligible to stand for Parliament.  Loughnane was exonerated from the debacle, and was appointed soon after as the Liberal Party's eighth federal director. 

In Sydney, Tim Gartrell worked as a research officer and advocate in the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.  As a member of the Left in the Right-dominated NSW, his opportunities were limited; the state head office was closed to him.  He was able to get political and campaign experience at the electorate level, working for the Left federal ministers Jeanette McHugh and Frank Walker and the backbencher Anthony Albanese.  Gartrell came to the attention of Gary Gray, who – in the face of opposition from the Right – invited him to join Labor's national head office in 1998.  He was a campaign assistant in the marginal seat team during the 1998 campaign, then an organiser, then assistant national secretary in 2000.  He worked closely with Geoff Walsh in the 2001 campaign and, in the party's post-defeat soul-searching, acted as secretary to a review of the ALP's internal procedures; led by Bob Hawke and Neville Wran, this review recommended reforms to democratise the party's structures and practices. 

Gartrell, just thirty-two when he was appointed national secretary in 2003, is half a generation younger than Loughnane, who was forty-five when he entered head office.  Even so, Gartrell's lack of campaign experience is striking.  In the Whitlam, Hawke and Keating eras, Labor's national secretaries David Combe, Bob McMullan and Bob Hogg had had abundant experience managing election campaigns at the state level.  After them, Gary Gray and Geoff Walsh, while not state secretaries, had also become seasoned national campaigners through their time in head office or the leader's office.  Gartrell came to Labor's head office with no experience managing campaigns at the national or state level, no experience working with a party leader, and only limited experience in ministerial offices.  He had been mentored in head office by Gray and Walsh, gaining administrative experience and party knowledge from the top down, but had managed no campaign larger than a local electorate. 

In the Liberal Party, campaign experience had been less highly valued: many federal directors had arrived in head office as relative outsiders and none had been a state director.  That changed with the appointment of Lynton Crosby, who had been state director in Queensland.  The Liberals had learned from Labor the importance of campaign management experience.  Loughnane's appointment confirmed this: he had come up through the Victorian state office and had also worked with ministers and the party leader; his reported rival for the job, Tony Nutt, had even more experience at the state level and in the prime minister's office.  Federal directors, in other words, were now entering the Liberal head office looking more like the seasoned campaign practitioners of the heyday of Labor's era of professionalism. 

Labor's shortage of experience has been compounded by higher turnover.  Mick Young only directed one campaign as national director but was followed by Combe (four campaigns), McMullan (three), Hogg (two) and Gray (two).  Walsh directed just one, Gartrell two, and his successor, Karl Bitar, one.  Compare this with earlier generations: Tony Eggleton was federal director of the Liberal Party for seventeen years, and in that time saw only three ALP national secretaries (Combe, McMullan and Hogg).  By the time Loughnane had been in the Liberals' head office for eight years, he had already seen three national secretaries (Gartrell, Bitar and Wright).  Labor's accelerating turnover gives its opponent an advantage in experience: in Loughnane's four campaigns, he has faced off against three first-time Labor campaign directors. 

Sometime in 2010, Brian Loughnane became the longest-serving campaign director of either party, at either federal or state level, since Tony Eggleton.  His record is likely to stand for some time. " I'm a great believer that experience matters in these jobs," he notes. " There's no other job quite like them and there's no adequate external preparation, really."  To some degree, this accumulated experience will be lost when he decides to call it quits.  Future campaign managers with experience in head office, however, such as Loughnane's deputy, Julian Sheezel, and in the talent pools of the state divisions, will likely provide strategic and structural continuity.  This of course is what the Labor Party used to do.  Moreover – unlike Labor, whose state officials tend to remain anchored in their home state, where their power base is located – the Liberals can rotate their best officials around the country, providing a more varied career path.  According to Loughnane, this mobility also makes it easier to retain staff who might otherwise get sick of the pressures of campaign work:

The demands of the job these days are quite intense.  One of the things we're finding is that people quite often – family reasons or whatever, lifestyle reasons – don't particularly want to do it for six or seven years.  They'll do it for three or four years.  So there tends to be a turnover, and people may say, "OK, look, if I'm going to do another cycle, I'd prefer to do it somewhere else, just to vary the experience." 

The conclusion appears unavoidable.  While the Liberals have been steadily building the campaign experience of their head office, Labor's head office was reinventing the wheel.  The Labor Party as a whole did not lack campaign experience.  But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, this experience was concentrated at the state level; the national head office seemed to have lost its pulling power.  Experienced state secretaries – John della Bosca, Eric Roozendaal and Mark Arbib in New South Wales, David Feeney in Victoria and Mike Kaiser in Queensland – preferred to pursue careers in state or federal Parliament.  The ALP national secretary still enjoyed the title of national campaign director, and Gartrell would not have been able to claim the job if he did not command the necessary respect.  But the authority of his role, and of Labor's head office in general, was in historical decline within the broader party structure. 

In part, this decline represented a reaction to Gary Gray's centralising initiatives.  Gray had set a high-water mark for the influence of the national party.  But some of his aspirations – a national party newspaper, a national database of supporters, and even a national system of membership – had antagonised the states, especially the NSW and Queensland branches, and his time as secretary had ended in acrimony with the states.  Geoff Walsh had worked hard to smooth the state feathers and avoid what he called "doctrinal squabbles at critical moments," and Gartrell also recognised that "having the state secretaries at best on side, at worst neutral, is the goal."  The state secretaries' forum remained the central vehicle for nationwide campaign coordination; but key state secretaries were also players on the national executive itself, which cramped the national secretary's influence.  Naturally consultative and collaborative in his personal style, Gartrell acutely diagnosed the relative power imbalance:

Power lies with the state branches.  I always used to say – and the most important thing for me to get across to you – is that the national secretary is influential, not powerful.  That's what Geoff [Walsh] had said to me when he was mentoring me.  I think that's right.  It's not a powerful position.  It is very influential but not powerful. 

Brian Loughnane, even at this stage and certainly as the decade progressed, was able to speak with greater confidence about national integration in the Liberal camp:

The states are, if you like, an extension of my campaign unit.  We don't run – each state doesn't go and run its own campaign in a federal election.  They're about the implementation of the strategy in their individual states.  If you like they're an extension of my campaign apparatus. 

The Liberal state divisions still raise their own funds, "so the state director is king of their own castle in a way," but when it comes to campaign planning, Loughnane asserted, "everyone accepts you can only have one strategy." 

*

Labor's fragmentation and inexperience set the scene for a woeful performance in 2004.  Labor's strategy was to promise a "ladder of opportunity," based on its traditional strengths in health and education, and to take financial pressure off families.  But key policies (its schools funding package; Medicare Gold; its plan for the Tasmanian forests) were prepared in haste by the Parliamentary leadership and unravelled under scrutiny.  Mark Latham himself was presented as a "young family man from the suburbs," someone who read books to children and listened to voters at community forums – a classic ground-war tactic.  Although Latham was adept at the gladhanding this required, he was more truly a policy wonk; for him, the substitution of "relationship campaigning" for policy discussion represented a new low, one that turned MPs into "a cross between social workers and the Avon lady." 

But it was Latham's relationship with Gartrell's head office that proved the party's real undoing.  Latham read and understood the market research – "That's one of the benefits of this new job [as leader of the opposition], of climbing through the ranks: I get to see some of the expensive research the party pays for," he said – but lacked confidence in the officials' capacity to implement it.  He repeatedly intervened in matters large and small.  In the heat of battle, Mike Kaiser described the leader's constant suggestions and campaign ideas as a "blizzard of shit"; the diplomatic Gartrell went so far as to concede that Latham was "very hands on."  This was Keating versus Gray all over again and – as it turned out – a foretaste of Kevin Rudd's interventions in 2013 campaign planning: more battles about strategic control in the contested terrain between head office and Parliament House.  A year later, when Latham had quit the leadership and left Parliament, he took the trouble to publish, at some length, his critique of head office's performance:

Gartrell is a nice inoffensive guy, but he got lost in the big campaign... The bottom line is, he's not up to it.  That's the crippling paradox of our show.  We have become a machine party, constructed around factions and yes-men, yet our campaign machine is shallow. 

Against all this, Loughnane's Liberals mounted a classic incumbency campaign.  Their strategy was to contrast the Howard government's "focus, discipline, knowledge and experience," especially in managing the economy and protecting national borders, with the risk of a young and inexperienced opposition leader – all the while associating the Coalition with "the mainstream of the Australian community."  Howard hit this message relentlessly, from his first media conference, at which he summarised the whole campaign with the question, "Who do you trust to keep interest rates low?"  The message was reinforced with devastatingly negative advertising – television, print and billboards – portraying a cranky Latham wearing the L-plate of a learner driver. 

Alongside the national campaign, the Liberals mounted their own ground war.  After the election, Loughnane observed:

A federal election comprises 150 local contests occurring all around Australia.  Many of these contests are decided on local issues and personalities and may not capture the attention of the press gallery but can nonetheless be crucial to the final outcome. 

Liberal candidates, he boasted, were selected on the basis of their capacity to represent and advocate for their communities.  The new cohort of Liberal MPs in 2004 included "a teacher, a surgeon, a community worker, two police officers, a member of the RAAF and a retailer."  The Liberals entered their fourth term of government with another swing towards them and governed with a comfortable majority of 87 to 60 (with three independents).  The Coalition's support also translated into an absolute majority in the Senate – unprecedented since Malcolm Fraser's time. 

Within three years, Labor was back in office with Kevin Rudd as prime minister, having picked up twenty-three seats on a swing of more than 5 per cent.  The remarkable turnaround was achieved by a carefully coordinated campaign managed by Tim Gartrell, which included a meticulously crafted policy pitch, an innovative communications strategy across TV and the internet, a powerful parallel campaign by the trade union movement against the government's WorkChoices industrial relations laws ("Your Rights at Work"), and the sheer energy and focus of Rudd himself. 

Rudd replaced Kim Beazley as leader in December 2006, creating what the advertising consultant Neil Lawrence called a "virtuous circle" – a leader and a campaign team eager to "buy in" to the head office strategy.  Along with Lawrence, Gartrell had engaged a new qualitative researcher, Tony Mitchelmore, on the recommendation of the veteran Labor pollster Rod Cameron.  By Australia Day 2007, Rudd was introducing himself to voters in a mini-campaign of TV and internet commercials.  In April, the national conference changed party rules to ensure the national executive could select "candidates of the highest calibre," opening the door for, among others, army officer Mike Kelly, former ACTU leader Greg Combet and former ABC journalist Maxine McKew (in the prime minister's Sydney seat of Bennelong).  Gary Gray was contesting a seat in Perth, while McKew was advised in her campaign by her partner, the former national secretary Bob Hogg.  In August, Labor launched the slogan "Kevin07," a snappy embodiment of a young Labor leadership with "fresh ideas for the future."  This slogan was "fully integrated," in Gartrell's phrase, across both traditional and online media.  The Kevin07 website included embedded videos, online petitions and links to YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.  Visitors to the site were invited to sign up to "KMail," buy a Kevin07 T-shirt (stocks sold out within weeks) and post their own photos and videos – as well as to click through to policy packages on climate change, education, the economy, job security and Iraq.  This was the biggest ever investment in online campaigning by any Australian political party and, like any worthwhile campaign innovation, it gathered positive news coverage and made the Liberals look flatfooted.  Labor sought to play up the freshness and energy of Rudd's approach against the older Howard: one advertisement showed a Howard lookalike asleep, ignoring his bedside alarm clock as it buzzed about the need for action on climate change. 

For the first time since Howard had come to office, Phil and Jenny, those hypothetical battlers, were abandoning the party.  In the campaign wash-up, Brian Loughnane acknowledged the loss of "some key groups in the electorate that had supported us since 1996" including, most importantly, "parents in outer suburban and regional areas, in the 35 to 49 age group."  The ALP claimed growing support among mortgage holders – those voters who had responded to Howard's alarm about interest rates in 2004.  For its part, the Liberal campaign lacked the solid structure of previous campaigns: the original slogan, "Go for Growth," was quietly dropped after the Reserve Bank raised interest rates and Treasurer Peter Costello warned of an approaching economic tsunami.  And in a sign of internal indiscipline, a Crosby Textor research report was leaked to the Labor camp.  Describing Rudd as "like John Howard, but younger," the report said the government's "age and energy" had been thrown into question.  The leak angered and mystified the prime minister, who recalled in his memoirs that it had "been designed to really wound me and the government, and it did." 

In the final days of the campaign, one of Howard's favourite MPs, Jackie Kelly, was embroiled in a local scandal in which her campaign team in the western Sydney electorate of Lindsay distributed fake leaflets, purporting to be from Labor, linking the ALP to Islamic extremism.  The news story ran and ran, crowding out the government's final appeals, including the PM's major speech to the National Press Club. 

Parties are legally required to cease television and radio advertising at midnight on the Wednesday of the final week of a campaign – a "blackout" designed to protect voters from last-minute attacks.  Party officials are increasingly adept at sidestepping the blackout and continuing their campaign right up to polling day to grab the attention of late deciders.  Gartrell noted with pride that in the final days of the campaign, Labor advertisements ran on televisions on display in electrical appliance shops. 

Both parties also continued telephone canvassing through the final week of the campaign.  In 2004, the Liberals had used "robocalls"– automated phone messages – to disseminate a message from Prime Minister Howard on the last Friday before the election in marginal seats; despite anecdotal evidence that these annoy as many voters as they persuade, Labor emulated and improved on the idea in 2007:

We used a last minute robocall about WorkChoices.  We used a WorkChoices victim, a young woman, and we had her dial-in to hundreds of thousands of homes the night before, when the electronic blackout was on. 

After the 2007 victory Gartrell decided, like Mick Young and Andrew Robb before him, that one devastating loss and one vindicating triumph were enough.  He resigned from head office.  Gartrell did not seek to follow Young and Robb into Parliament, instead joining the market research company Auspoll as CEO.  He subsequently headed a number of community campaign organisations, including the indigenous advocacy group Generation One and You Me Unity, which campaigns for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.  He was replaced in October 2008 as national secretary by the NSW state secretary, Karl Bitar. 

For all that Labor was organised on federal lines, it took nearly ninety years for the powerful NSW branch to provide its first national secretaries in Gartrell and Bitar.  Gartrell, from the Left, had been excluded from the state head office in Sussex Street.  But Bitar was a creature of the Right and of Sussex Street, and his advent to the national office represented something of a reverse takeover: now, it was the states that possessed superior campaign experience.  The centralising tide had ebbed away.  Born in Sydney in 1971, Bitar had spent his teenage years in his family's native Lebanon until, amid the worsening civil war and with "bombs landing literally around our house," the family came home to Australia in 1989.  Bitar completed his education at Bankstown TAFE and UNSW, working part-time as a labour market researcher in the Commonwealth public service.  Motivated by opposition to the Liberals' "Fightback!"  program, he joined the Labor Party in 1992.  He quickly became engaged in the factional politics and energetic campaigning of Young Labor, alongside his lifelong friend Mark Arbib.  Bitar rose to senior vice-president on the back of intensive "foot soldier" campaign work throughout the state:

I did a lot of... campaigning in Young Labor.  But mainly foot soldier stuff, mainly letterboxing, a lot of doorknocking... My wife was in Young Labor as well at the same time, and we joke when we go for drives: we doorknocked this street, doorknocked this suburb, we letterboxed this suburb.  So you're familiar with a lot of the state in fact. 

His effort to win preselection for a seat in the NSW Parliament in the mid-1990s was thwarted in a branch-stacking row with the veteran right-winger MP Leo McLeay, but in 1999, with the help of Arbib, now assistant state secretary, he turned the tables on McLeay by winning election as state organiser.  Bitar threw himself into campaigning:

Being state organiser and working in the party office is about the worst job in the world, it is just so full-on, especially at the state level.  It is really tough... I had a good time.  I was single and had no commitments, so I could travel every weekend to a country branch or a [state] or a federal electorate council and I did that for years. 

Around the end of 2000, while holidaying in Europe, Arbib and Bitar both read a book about Lee Atwater, who had managed the successful presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush in 1988.  Atwater, who died in 1991, is best known now for his "down and dirty" style of campaigns based on ruthless personal attacks.  Bitar recalled that, for him and Arbib, Atwater's story was:

all about the professionalism of campaigning in the United States, and how this guy took something that was just an average occupation into being a real profession.  And using strategy instead of just effort, using real political strategy to win over voters. 

It was a "turning point," Bitar recalled and, returning to Australia, he and Arbib established a "campaign training school" in the NSW branch to improve Labor's on-the-ground campaign skills.  The school, Campaign Insight, was initially aimed at professional campaign managers like themselves, but it expanded over a decade to train party members, candidates, local councillors, ministerial staff and others, with a focus on regional campaigns. 

We took it out to the branches, and started educating all the branch units in campaigning.  Branch members who in the past were not involved in politics at all, [had been] taken advantage of, just used as letterboxing fodder.  We brought them into these seminars in country areas.  We said, "Let us explain to you why we do letterboxing, why it's important to put out posters on election morning"– which I think changed campaigning in New South Wales... I think it is the first professional campaign program run by a political party. 

When Arbib became NSW state secretary in 2004, Bitar replaced him as assistant secretary.  When Arbib shifted into the Senate in 2007, Bitar again filled his shoes as NSW state secretary.  The moment Gartrell announced he would leave the national head office, Bitar put his hand up for the job. " I think as soon as I said I was running, it was over, mainly because of my campaign expertise.  I was seen as someone who could do it."  Prime Minister Rudd, however, still needed to be consulted:

I didn't really know Kevin at the time, so I did this walk around [the prime minister's official residence at] Kirribilli having a chat with him, getting to know him, him getting to know me, him asking me a whole heap of questions.  At the end of the walk he said, "Well, mate, congratulations.  You've got my blessing to be the national secretary."  So I said, "Mate, thank you.  I appreciate it." [ Up till then] I was saying I'm not sure if I'm doing it or not, because I wanted to have Kevin's backing first.  That just shows that the organisation does respect the leader. 

In Kevin Rudd's first two years as prime minister, Labor held commanding leads in the published polls.  In mid-October 2009, the ALP led the two-party preferred vote 59-41 in Newspoll and Rudd outscored Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull as preferred prime minister 65-19.  However, Rudd's decision to defer promised legislation to deal with climate change – reportedly because of negative focus group responses to it – fuelled what became a catastrophic decline.  His net satisfaction rating (measuring those "satisfied" with his performance, minus those "dissatisfied") plummeted from plus 43 in September 2009 to minus 19 by mid-June 2010.  On 21 June, in a sudden coup, Rudd was dumped and replaced as prime minister by his deputy, Julia Gillard.  The subsequent election saw Labor suffer the humiliation of becoming the first government since 1931 to be denied a majority after its first term.  Labor's primary vote fell 5.4 per cent to 38 per cent and eleven seats were lost, resulting in a hung Parliament.  After protracted negotiations with Green and independent MPs, Gillard was able to assemble a bare 75-73 majority to govern. 

Bitar's campaign strategy focussed on presenting Julia Gillard as a leader with a forward-looking plan, in contrast to Tony Abbott, who would take Australia backwards.  However, as even Bitar acknowledged, this failed against the Liberals' "small target" strategy.  In his first campaign as opposition leader, Abbott displayed unexpected discipline and focus.  Loughnane targeted the various failures of the Rudd administration, notably with a deft and damaging advertisement that turned recast "Kevin07" as "Kevin O'Lemon": "It looked good, it sounded good, but it's all gone sour... One big disappointment."  Loughnane claimed to have anticipated and "prepared for" the possibility of Rudd's replacement by Gillard; in the event, Gillard's campaign was destabilised by Cabinet leaks widely thought to have originated with her deposed rival. 

Bitar had earlier insisted to Rudd's office that "every policy and announcement must pass the Lindsay test" – that is, it must be relevant to voters in the marginal western Sydney seat of Lindsay.  Labor's campaign did manage to sandbag western Sydney and the NSW central coast against the Liberal flood, but Labor suffered heavy losses, including in Queensland and in the once-heartland seat of Melbourne, lost to the Greens.  In Western Australia, Labor won only three of fifteen seats with a primary vote of just 31.2 per cent.  One defeated candidate in Perth, former state government minister Allanah MacTiernan, publicly criticised the NSW-focussed campaign and claimed she had been prevented from issuing a brochure defending the government's proposed mining tax.  She told ABC radio:

I suspect what happens is that decisions are made in this, almost by a small group of people in headquarters, who are basing it on focus groups that are probably largely conducted in New South Wales. 

I think it is a campaign culture that we really have to change.  I think it would be an interesting experiment for the ALP to say, "Well look, politics in New South Wales isn't always necessarily what resonates with the rest of the community."  It possibly doesn't even resonate with the people in New South Wales. 

According to the former NSW premier Morris Iemma, Bitar had presided over "the most inept campaign in living memory" and should resign immediately: "As far as Karl is concerned... flipping hamburgers at McDonald's is where he should be heading to."  Bitar in fact resigned from the national head office in 2011 and joined Arbib – who had earlier quit the Senate and the Gillard ministry – as a consultant for Crown Casino, part of James Packer's business empire.  For his part, Bitar sees such criticism as inevitable, part of the broader tensions between parliamentarians and party officials.  Blaming party officials for defeat just shows that Labor:

does not value its campaign professionals enough.  Respect them enough.  Pay them well enough.  Treat them well enough.  When you have victories, it is the MPs who get all the glory, and when things go bad the first person who gets blamed is always the party official who, any objective analysis would show, did their very best in difficult circumstances.  This goes for [Labor's campaigns in] '01, '04, '07, 2010 and future election campaigns. [ It] makes you wonder why anyone would want to be a professional party official any more. 

Bitar believed he himself had experienced the finger-pointing syndrome: "You look at the way I was treated after the [2010] federal election campaign.  There were probably about 150 variables in that election campaign. [ But] post the election campaign, a lot of people [just said], 'Well, let's just blame the campaign director.'"  When party officials are criticised, Bitar pointed out, they cannot return fire:

Politicians have public profiles, and they get out and they defend themselves.  The poor party official – it's seen as the right thing to do to just bite your tongue.  How many times have you had a party official coming out and defending themselves, saying, "Well, that's not true"? " The research didn't show that." " Whoever leaked to you, that's not true." " This wasn't the strategy; that was the strategy." 

Our role is to deal with confidential stuff.  We deal with research and we can't tell anyone what the research is.  We deal with strategy, which we can't tell.  We end up copping a bucket of shit, not just from other politicians who don't understand it but also from the media.  And we can't respond. 

*

Labor's roller-coaster campaign performances came at a price – politically and financially.  Despite the injection of tens of millions of dollars of public funding from the mid-1990s, Labor entered a financial crisis in the new millennium.  In 2004, Labor's asset base totalled around $35 million, principally in the form of the Centenary House property developed in Canberra by Bob Hogg.  These assets provided investment income and, more importantly, served as security for bank loans and overdrafts, which, along with donations from unions and business, were the main source of election funding.  The party could only repay these debts once it had received its public funding entitlement after election day – and the amount of this funding would depend on the party's primary vote.  As a financial management strategy, this carried the obvious risk that campaign expenditure might exceed receipts.  In the lead-up to the 2007 campaign, Tim Gartrell moved to sell Centenary House.  Just as John Curtin House had been partly sold to pay the debts of the 1990 campaign, the proceeds of the sale of Centenary House – reportedly more than $30 million – were devoted largely to campaigning.  After the 2007 election, Labor's head office downsized to a smaller Canberra office; both Gartrell and Bitar spent most of their time working out of the rented office space in Sydney where Labor had run its election campaign.  With a skeleton staff in Canberra, Labor's national campaign model had been wound back to the early 1970s. 

In 2007, Labor went into debt to win office: an understandable though unsustainable trade-off.  Bitar estimated he inherited a debt of "about $8 million"; this was after Labor received public funding of $22 million.  Instead of rolling out a national version of his Campaign Insight training school, and promoting grassroots campaigning in marginal seats, Bitar found himself cost-cutting and retrenching. " We had to repay the debt," he recalled. " I spent most of my time fundraising."  Of course, Labor never actually got out of debt, but it was able to repay its creditors and take out new loans to fund the 2010 campaign.  Given the tight political contest in that election, the financial aftermath was surprising: after the 2010 campaign, Bitar had $2 million unspent; he used it to pay down debt. 

Bitar suggested the short terms served by Labor national secretaries contributed to the party's chronic indebtedness:

There is no long-term planning [in the national head office].  Most party secretaries are not there long-term, they are not there for twenty years, they take a very short-term view of... what they need to achieve.  Because they're not around long-term, not many of them think about the budget, either.  A lot of these people want to go into Parliament or want to do something else in politics, so the result that they deliver as party secretary has an impact on the way they're viewed.  So unfortunately what that means is, financially you operate from election to election, and usually at every election the party... goes into debt. 

The issue is not unique to the Labor Party, however.  Officials of both parties respond to the same imperative: to fund the professionalised campaign model.  No party official has ever expressed satisfaction with the level of available campaign funds.  Bitar described the consequences of this constant struggle to make ends meet:

Financially you're cash strapped, which puts a lot of stress and pressure on the party organisation.  How do you run an organisation, how do you employ officials, how do you run training programs, how do you develop pamphlets, brochures, how do you train people in campaign techniques, how do you develop a professional organisation when you've got no money?  I think that's one of the biggest challenges organisations have.  You are trying to run a professional organisation with no money whatsoever. 

Nationally you've got no union affiliation fees, you've got no party membership fees, so pretty much you're relying on the returns on your assets, if the party has any assets, and you're relying on donations from unions and corporates.  So it is real Struggle Street. 

Loughnane likewise acknowledged that:

one of the key jobs of a director – state director, but particularly federal director – is the allocation of scarce resources.  You've got no shortage of ideas and demands but conserving resources and allocating resources is a very important question. 

Loughnane, who was himself attacked after the 2010 campaign for "overruns in campaign expenditure" by the Liberal Party's outgoing treasurer, Michael Yabsley, sardonically observed:

There's nothing wrong with the operations of any political party that another three or four million dollars wouldn't solve, in my view, to be very frank. 

From the officials' perspective, the parties rarely have "enough" to meet their campaign needs.  For a national campaign director, another wave of research or a final advertising blitz will nearly always look attractive.  But the demand for spending invariably outstrips the availability of resources, and debt always looks preferable to defeat.  In the professional campaign model, parties must live beyond their means – so for the party officials, campaign management is as much about the banks, private donors and taxpayer funding as it is about the voters.  

# 12

# MICRO-TARGETING

Karl Bitar's departure presented the Labor Party with yet another dilemma: who would become their fourth national secretary in a decade?  Who wanted to lead the campaign for the unlikely re-election of a destabilised minority Labor government?  In the circumstances, there was a surprisingly crowded field of candidates.  The best candidate within the national head office was the assistant national secretary, Nick Martin.  His Left affiliations had pushed the dominant Right faction to support Queensland state secretary Anthony Chisholm.  But when Chisholm pulled out of the race, citing the forthcoming Queensland state election, the NSW Right backed Amanda Lampe, Prime Minister Julia Gillard's recently departed chief of staff.  Lampe, who earlier had served as press secretary to NSW Premier Bob Carr, would have been a breakthrough appointment, the first woman to work as national campaign director.  But she lacked campaign management experience, and moreover encountered implacable opposition from another right-wing powerbroker, Joe De Bruyn, who pushed forward his own candidate, South Australian state secretary Michael Brown.  With the dominant Right split, neither Martin, Lampe nor Brown would have a majority.  It was getting messy. 

Sitting in his office in the Melbourne headquarters of the NAB, George Wright was reading a newspaper report about the impasse in May 2011.  He sent a text message to the influential unionist Paul Howes, national secretary of the AWU, asking if the party would be interested in a compromise candidate. " Are you serious?"  came the reply. " I think so," Wright responded.  That night he got a call from the prime minister herself: if he wanted the job, she needed an answer by 8 a.m. Wright was doing well at NAB; he liked the work and was well paid, his family was settled in Melbourne – and the bruises still ached from his previous Canberra experience, when he had spent a torrid six months as a media secretary with Prime Minister Rudd.  Overnight, he decided to stay in Melbourne; in the morning, he first told his boss, NAB CEO Cameron Clyne, and then called the prime minister and declined. 

"Then they really started to put the weights on me," he recalled.  Treasurer Wayne Swan was enlisted to secure his acceptance.  Wright agonised, bound by his word to Clyne: "I wasn't going to walk back in there and say I've changed my mind."  Wright suggested to Swan that he, as treasurer, would be best placed to tell the banker that the ALP would not take no for an answer.  Days later, Wright was appointed unanimously by the national executive.  The national conference later that year elected him to a six-year term. 

In terms of background, Wright was unlike any previous national campaign director, Labor or Liberal.  He had a pure pedigree in campaigning, and arrived in head office with strong practical expertise in all the key disciplines: market research, advertising, media management and community development.  Yet his experience had been gained entirely outside a political party and largely outside election campaigns. " I've never been a member of a faction," he recalled. " Never actually been active in the party in any way."  The apparent paradox is explained by the emergence of campaigning as a form of political activity practised by a wide range of non-party groups – trade unions, community groups, online networks, business organisations and others – seeking to mobilise support for issues outside the parliamentary election cycle.  Wright had been involved in community mobilisation since his university days. 

George Wright was raised in the suburbs of Melbourne in a "Whitlamite Labor" household originally from rural Queensland.  He joined the ALP as a teenager.  Studying history at the University of Melbourne, he researched an honours thesis on a protest movement in the old working-class community of Port Melbourne.  He was accepted into a training program targeting academic high achievers, run by the Australian Council of Trade Unions, in the mid-1990s.  On the eve of the defeat of the Keating government and against a rapidly changing industrial relations scene, the program formed part of the ACTU's efforts to ensure its continuing relevance. 

Wright was employed first as an organiser with the Liquor Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers' Union (now called United Voice), before joining the Finance Services Union (FSU) as a national industrial officer.  In the much larger FSU, Wright recalled, "it was very hard to get good information about what people were thinking," so he began conducting opinion polls of members, first running his own surveys and then engaging professional polling organisations.  When he inherited responsibility for the FSU's campaign against proposed changes to the regulation of bank ownership in Australia, he gained deeper campaigning experience. " I started to use professional polling organisations, started to aggressively use free media management techniques," he recalled. " That's how I came to campaigns." 

Employed from 2000 as the ACTU's media communication officer, he engaged Mark Textor to address a conference of union communications managers – "Yes, he's the enemy," he explained to sceptical colleagues, "but if you want to learn something, he's really good."  Wright worked on ACTU campaigns relating to the closure of Ansett, the James Hardie asbestos scandal, and, from 2005, the Howard government's WorkChoices laws. 

The ACTU's campaign, "Your Rights at Work," which ran parallel to and complemented the Labor Party's election campaign, made a critical contribution to Kevin Rudd's victory in 2007. " Your Rights at Work" – the slogan itself was extensively pre-tested with focus groups – consisted of a powerful and long-running series of television and radio advertisements that appealed not just to workers whose entitlements were at risk but to the families and communities who would also be hurt.  It carried a broad message of social change: parents worried about child-care arrangements and grandparents expressing concern about the working lives of their grandchildren.  The Liberals' Brian Loughnane later estimated that the union movement spent more than $14 million on television alone.  Critically, the ACTU's electronic media campaign was supported by far-reaching online campaigning and intensive grassroots campaigning in workplaces and communities – especially, as the election approached, in marginal seats.  Wright recalled it as "one of the most successful campaigns we've seen outside federal election campaigns, and I think a campaign that changed the way non-political parties campaign." 

His central role in the campaign, however, did not translate into career advancement within the ACTU.  But Wright had become close to the ACTU secretary, Greg Combet, who, elected to Parliament in 2007, urged him to accompany him to Canberra.  Wright agreed, but was soon lured away to work for the finance minister, Lindsay Tanner, and then, in early 2008, for Prime Minister Rudd himself.  Wright lasted six months in what he recalled as a difficult working environment, and quit.  Back in Melbourne, he joined NAB as head of public affairs.  With a mandate from Clyne to "shake up" the bank's communications, Wright embarked on what became NAB's high-profile "Break Up" campaign.  The campaign, in which NAB distanced itself from the three other retail banks, involved a major marketing drive using both television and social media. 

Wright thus arrived at Labor's head office never having managed an election campaign.  He had worked alongside the Labor Party in 2007, and he had experienced life in the prime minister's office, but had never worked for a political party.  Yet he had worked with some of the country's leading marketing professionals and was equipped with a complete toolbox of contemporary campaign skills.  He felt ready to do the main job of the national secretary:

I thought the main job is to run the campaign... to finance, develop and execute a campaign.  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... I didn't want to be the secretary where the joint keels over. 

Like Bitar before him, Wright found that instead of embarking on campaign work, his first priority was to restore the party's finances.  With significant debt and depleted assets, the party was seriously underwater.  Wright was told by the party's bank that further lending, critical to funding previous campaigns on the promise of repayment from public funding receipts, would no longer be extended – "unless I fixed the joint up." 

For a long time, and I'm not saying I wouldn't have done this, the party [had been] in a position where it could spend more than it was bringing in, but it was borrowing against and running down its assets.  But I wasn't in a position to do it.  The bank wouldn't let me.  There was nothing to spend. 

Wright's wholesale restructuring included staff cuts, new financial controls, three-year budgets and a renewed focus on fundraising from both business and individuals.  Federal executive set up a finance subcommittee, and executive members were reminded of their personal liability for the party finances.  The party's small office in the national capital, which had been purchased with part of the proceeds of the Centenary House sale, was itself sold – "undesirable, but it needed to be done," Wright recalled – and Labor became a tenant once more. 

Wright also took on the tortuous process of negotiating a new deal on public funding.  Tim Gartrell and Karl Bitar had spoken intermittently with Brian Loughnane after the 2007 campaign about a deal to deliver more public funding to the parties.  The parties were looking for financial support for their administrative costs, to supplement the existing public reimbursement of their campaign spending; where campaign funding is reimbursed only after elections, the administrative funding was to be paid each quarter throughout the electoral cycle.  Similar state-based schemes had been introduced by Labor governments in New South Wales and Queensland.  Wright and Loughnane agreed on a package of $20 million, to be shared among the parties.  This new entitlement would be based, like the campaign funding, on the level of each party's electoral support, at the rate of $1 for each vote a party received in the House and the Senate.  They also agreed on $300,000 in annual "compliance" funding, while also facing stiffer requirements around the disclosure of their corporate donations. 

For Loughnane, the new funding would have recompensed the parties for the compliance burden imposed on them by "audit requirements" of the AEC and the Department of Finance.  The proposed new disclosure requirements would have forced the party to "put extra people on," he said. 

One of the big changes over the last ten years has been the absolute exponential growth of the compliance obligations on the parties.  I would say for a third of the year we would have auditors in this building from different government departments and agencies. 

Wright got the approval of his national executive for the proposal.  In Parliament House, special minister of state Gary Gray and his Liberal counterpart Bronwyn Bishop agreed to a legislative timetable that would see the bill pass in the dying weeks of the hung Parliament.  Needing assurance that it would not be left out to dry, Labor insisted that Tony Abbott provide a signed letter indicating his support for the bill.  But when the proposal was put to Labor's caucus, it quickly unravelled.  Senator John Faulkner exposed it as "very bad politics and even worse policy."  Cynically, neither party had bothered to provide any sort of public interest justification for the increase; secrecy was deemed essential.  Faulkner's accusation led to a short but ferocious media firestorm, Abbott backed away, and the proposal was dumped.  In the event, Wright ensured that spending on the 2013 election campaign did not exceed receipts, and delivered a balanced budget.  By the beginning of 2014, he was able to declare that the debt he had inherited had been reduced to a manageable level. 

No amount of financial acumen, however, would have remedied the strategic uncertainty facing head office in the lead-up to the 2013 campaign.  It arose from the continuing political warfare between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.  Wright inherited a head office that had, in his words, "become very involved" in the leadership battle, and a party that was fractured into two camps, within which there were numerous factional splinters.  Just as Tony Eggleton had been determined to "get on with our work" during the Howard–Peacock war in the 1980s, so Wright emphasised the neutrality of his head office in the Rudd–Gillard war.  He explained later:

I wanted to professionally execute our responsibilities, and for everyone to have confidence that we would do that.  That meant we weren't playing any of those games... I certainly wasn't, and the institution was not seen to be.  I thought whatever the outcome of that was, there would be one bit of the show that was stable, unchanged, and would allow whatever needed to happen to happen.  They had to be able to trust you. 

More simply, as he told journalist Michelle Grattan:

There were people who were Julia people and people who were Kevin people.  It was very important that we who were in the secretariat were party people. 

Thus during Rudd's first leadership challenge against Gillard in February 2012, Wright told the prime minister that the "right thing" was that head office did not "get involved."  Yet Gillard's comfortable victory in the party room ballot did not buy unity.  The media continued to focus on leadership instability.  Rudd remained a potent challenger, assisted by a group of parliamentary and Cabinet supporters, and by a veteran Labor campaign consultant, Bruce Hawker.  A former Bob Carr staffer and co-founder of a well-connected lobbying firm, Hawker Britton, Hawker had been a regular contributor to Labor's campaign efforts at state and federal levels, although in several cases his interventionist style was more tolerated by head office than welcomed.  Wright proceeded to develop a campaign strategy built around Gillard, but – like Loughnane was doing in the Liberals' head office – he had to prepare a Plan B in case of a Rudd resurrection. 

Rudd returned to the prime ministership in late June 2013, in the final week of the hung Parliament.  It was a move of such indecision and desperation by the parliamentary party that it invested the resurrected leader, paradoxically, with unparalleled authority – over the MPs themselves, who promptly surrendered their power to hire and fire the leader, and over head office and its campaign strategy.  The leadership change was a mixed blessing for the campaign structure.  Wright was able to replace his defensive strategy with a more aggressive approach in which Labor "had some chance" of victory.  But with Rudd's return, dozens of party staffers either lost their jobs or walked out the door; of 150 campaign staff who had taken part in a dry run in May, just forty remained by the time the campaign began in August.  Rudd, accompanied by Hawker, brought a characteristically hands-on approach to the campaign.  On the first day of the new Rudd prime ministership, Hawker met with Wright and his assistant national secretary, Nick Martin. " I took [them] through everything I wanted, including being given the polling directly by the pollster," Hawker said – a clear assertion of authority over the campaign, as well as a telling reminder of the perceived importance of market research. 

Despite encouraging polls, Rudd did not call an immediate election but opted first to "fix" perceived negatives about Labor, such as its policies on carbon pricing and on asylum seekers, its record of economic management and its political disunity.  According to Wright, Labor saw a slim chance of victory if Rudd could be presented as the "change in politics that people wanted" – the change, that is, not only from Gillard but also from Abbott.  Rudd indeed opened the campaign by talking about putting an end to the negativity.  But the Liberal campaign swiftly retaliated, with negative advertisements portraying Rudd not as part of the change but as part of the old problem. " Six days in, we were tanking," Wright recalled.  Rudd's many pre-campaign announcements had left the new prime minister with little to announce during the campaign proper; he gave no sense of having an agenda for a third term in office beyond a series of off-the-cuff announcements.  Labor had no recourse but to embark on a negative message.  Wright had developed an anti-Abbott TV advertisement – "If he wins, you lose" – months earlier as part of the Gillard government's campaign against proposed cuts in government programs under a Coalition government.  Now, Wright urged Rudd to make this a key message:

I went to Darwin.  I chased [Rudd] up to Darwin and said, "We've got to get into this.  We've got to have a message, our message is going to be [spending] cuts and how they're going to impact people."  And we just rammed that home. 

On one hand, Rudd as party leader was a powerful interventionist supported by an aggressive entourage.  Hawker issued instructions to Wright about staff appointments and advertising scripts; in one evening, he drafted scripts for no fewer than fourteen advertisements and demanded that head office test them overnight in focus groups.  He blamed Wright's head office for not being ready to campaign and for having a poor field operation.  He accused head office staff of treacherously leaking against Rudd to the media.  Hawker rather than Wright briefed Rudd and senior ministers, including the Cabinet Expenditure Review Committee, on the party's polling.  He commissioned his own polling direct from the party pollster, John Utting of UMR. 

On the other hand, Wright as national campaign director also had a strategy and an agenda: "We had a whole bunch of things in place that we wanted to do and thought needed to be done."  Getting them done, for the sake of the campaign, required compromise and resilience by head office:

To be honest, Rudd and the Rudd entourage and the whole Rudd thing were essentially things that had to be managed, to allow us to do the things that really needed to be done... People say, "You should stand [up to] him"... It is just not how it works. 

We had to have him performing as best as we possibly could.  I had to create an environment that would allow our campaign to perform as best as it possibly could in the circumstances.  That meant making a lot of compromises: basically accommodating a lot of shit, complete and utter bullshit [and] just trying to stay on our feet and survive it. 

Labor's 2013 campaign thus became a classic example of dysfunction and disunity.  Following in the footsteps of Paul Keating in 1996 and Mark Latham in 2004, Kevin Rudd in 2013 sought to seize the wheel of campaign management from head office, with electorally disastrous results.  In 1996, the catalyst had been a dispute about negative advertising in the final weeks of the campaign: Keating wanted more, while Gary Gray believed it would be a waste of money.  In 2013, the divisions reached further, and were manifested both before and during the campaign.  Hawker's role in particular challenged the authority of head office.  To have this authority challenged by a prime minister is one thing; to have it hijacked by a campaign consultant is another.  Labor proved again the oldest lessons in the campaign handbook: disunity is fatal; there can only be one strategy.  In the 2013 election, Labor lost seventeen seats – far fewer than the thirty or more in its worst projections, but still a heavy loss, and one based on a primary vote of just 33 per cent. 

*

Despite his troubled relationship with Rudd and Hawker, Wright was able to organise a massive ground-war campaign in marginal seats, using the emerging tactic of "micro-targeting."  Micro-targeting is the contemporary descendant of the database revolution of the 1980s; where parties once collected demographic and other data about voters in marginal seats, new technology can and does identify specific individuals.  And instead of sending these voters an occasional piece of direct mail by post, micro-targeting reaches them repeatedly and through multiple channels: email, phone calls, SMS, social media, as well as doorknocking and other forms of face-to-face contact.  This kind of campaigning allows parties not just to talk to voters but to engage them in conversations.  Micro-targeting, however, requires "mega" data – large databases of voter information, regularly updated and readily accessible.  It also requires teams of trained volunteers, deployed in call centres and on the streets – and these volunteers are themselves recruited and mobilised through social media.  Unlike earlier campaign innovations imported from the world of commercial marketing – especially television advertising and market research – micro-targeting has its roots deep in politics and campaigning, relying as it does on the spirit of voluntarism, the electoral logic of marginal seats, and the importance of community organising.  Barack Obama's two presidential campaigns in the US, in 2008 and 2012, made extensive use of micro-targeting.  Both of these campaigns were closely observed by the Australian parties and motivated them to adapt this new campaign tool to the Australian electoral environment.  George Wright was ideally placed to do so: the "Your Rights at Work" campaign in 2007, in which he had been intimately involved, had provided an early demonstration of its capacity. 

Like national campaign directors before him, Wright's ambition was to create a national structure in which the state branches were well-integrated components.  First, he spent heavily on a substantial upgrade of Labor's database.  Next, he assembled a "national organising team" to organise ground-war campaigns in the key marginals.  From mid-2012 he negotiated with unions to provide full-time organisers in each of thirty – later, forty – marginal seats that Labor had to hold or, in a handful of cases, win from the Coalition.  From the end of 2012, twelve months before the election was due, these organisers were recruiting and managing teams of volunteers to campaign by phone or in person.  Wright brought the forty organisers to Canberra for three training sessions during 2013, which built cohesion and shared skills. 

It is impossible to recruit a small army of new volunteers without letting lots of people know about it.  So, Wright found himself staring into a camera lens, with the bustle of a call centre behind him, issuing regular YouTube updates about the progress of Labor's micro-targeting efforts.  This role of spruiker-in-chief is a new twist in the evolution of the national campaign director, who had previously remained behind the scenes.  In August 2013, Wright announced "a new facility on our website" to engage volunteers for the final weeks of the campaign.  In a video posted to the party website, he urged: "Now is the time to stand up.  I want you to stand up, I want you to step up, and I want you to sign up."  Wright insisted he needed "five takes" to make each such video, but that the effort was worthwhile because:

experience in the US is that people want insider information, and want to be involved.  If they are involved they will contribute more, both potentially as volunteers or [with] donations.  It's not my idea – I don't have a grand philosophical bent to it – I'm acting under the advice of that team and I take their advice because they've delivered. 

By the end of the campaign, Wright reported to Labor's national executive that the field campaign had made 1.2 million phone calls (compared to just 100,000 in the 2010 campaign) and achieved 250,000 "registered volunteer doorknocks."  The digital campaign, led by Skye Laris, had collected a quarter of a million email addresses and sent 3.5 million emails.  On social media, the campaign had attracted 160,000 Facebook likes and 50,000 Twitter followers.  Five thousand volunteer "tele-campaigners" had registered, and some 10,000 volunteers registered online – far more than the national campaign could deploy in call centres; they were redirected to help local candidates.  Online fundraising had raised more than $800,000, up from just $75,000 in the previous campaign.  Small online donors, Wright told the National Press Club, together contributed to the national campaign more than twice the funds of any single union or corporate donor.  Wright claimed that these efforts had helped Labor to retain key marginal seats such as Parramatta, where MP Julie Owens had knocked on more than 10,000 doors; Greenway, where MP Michelle Rowland called 50,000 households; and McEwen, where MP Rob Mitchell made 7000 phone calls in the last five days and held his seat by 380 votes. 

The Liberals watched Labor's micro-targeting efforts closely.  Brian Loughnane directed money into marginal seats, investing in "experienced on the ground campaigners, improved systems and technology, including social media and micro-targeting."  He claimed to have bettered Labor's social media campaign, with more Facebook likes and more viewers of the Liberals' dedicated YouTube channel.  The Liberals' US-based social media campaign consultants, Republican Party-affiliated IMGE, later won the "best overall internet campaign" award of the American Association for Political Consultants for its 2013 campaign in Australia.  But the Liberals do not appear to have matched the intensity of Labor's on-the-ground efforts.  Loughnane conceded that they made fewer targeted phone calls than Labor.  Part of the reason appears to be scepticism, or at least caution, about the cost benefit of the new approach.  In an era of increasing social mobility, with more people moving house more frequently, databases can age rapidly; regular investment is required to update and extend them, and to improve usability.  At the same time, the combined barrage of volunteer calls and robocalls from both parties must at some point yield diminishing returns. " People are getting sick of it," Wright conceded.  More generally, Loughnane points out that predictions about the revolutionary impact of the new technologies have yet to be fulfilled:

After Obama in '08 there was huge pressure to devote very significant resources into social media.  We devoted significant resources in 2010.  But there were a lot of people who basically said, "TV is dead."  It wasn't dead, and it's not dead now, in terms of what persuades voters... Television is still, I think for both parties, the biggest chunk [of campaign spending]. 

The scepticism is perhaps emblematic of Loughnane's steady-as-she-goes approach.  Indeed, in 2013, the Liberals did not need dramatic new technology or mass mobilisation of volunteers; it had succeeded at the political level in undermining an already exhausted and divided government.  The Liberals' aspiration remained as it has been in every campaign since 1996: to win over the Howard battlers and to establish a broad cross-section of support, pushing Labor out of the contested territory and back into its shrinking heartland.  Tony Abbott, while never popular, was portrayed as serious and stable and, in response to Gillard's accusations of misogynism, as warmly surrounded by his wife and daughters.  The launch, at the start of 2013, of his "Real Solutions" plan was supported by extensive TV and internet advertising throughout the first half of the year – a solid counterpoint to Labor's faltering messages and leadership tensions.  From Wright's point of view, Loughnane was successfully "able to manage his leader... to the needs of his party's strategy":

The crucial thing that Brian and his team had in spades and ruthlessly drove home their advantage with, was the biggest thing Labor's team lacked: discipline.  I'm not sure if history will remember Brian's campaign as brilliant, but it should be remembered as brilliantly disciplined. 

As a considered assessment, "brilliantly disciplined" is less extravagant than Abbott's own election-night wrap-up of the campaign as "our most professional campaign ever."  But Wright's judgement is more precise and, coming from a rival, perhaps more interesting.  By "disciplined," Wright meant that Abbott had been subject to the campaign discipline of his head office.  The capacity of a national campaign director to bring an entire party, including the parliamentary leader, under the discipline of head office is critical to the success of a campaign and the hallmark of professionalism.  In praising Loughnane's achievement, Wright was also acknowledging his own failure; it was precisely this discipline that had been lacking from Labor's effort in 2013. 

*

In a report to members posted on the ALP website after the election, Wright praised a different aspect of Labor's micro-targeting campaign: not the managerial effectiveness of top-down centralisation but the normative value of bottom-up participation.  By inviting people to donate, volunteer, sign petitions, share content and tell their stories in what he described as the "million-person campaign," Wright claimed this "new approach to campaigning" was strengthening and democratising the party. " Many expected a much worse result this election, but you are the reason that didn't happen," he told members.  For Wright, two-way conversations between the party and individuals, enabled by technology, were not just helping to retain marginal seats but also revitalising the party's roots:

It's pushing political power into the hands of the people who stand to lose or gain from the outcomes of elections just like this one.  And it is reforming the party from the grassroots up. 

In his speech to the National Press Club, Wright likewise spoke of his ambition to alleviate Labor's "democratic deficit," which had frustrated members and weakened the party's links with the community.  Micro-targeting stood as a potential remedy but it would only work if Labor was "truly willing to invite our supporters into our party and our campaigns." 

This type of campaigning requires widely accessible resources and many thousands of volunteers, but has a target audience of one. 

This optimistic and empowering analysis of the game-shifting potential of social media is far from universally shared by party officials.  Indeed, in 2013 both parties felt the sting of well-organised grassroots campaigns directed against them.  Wright was unable to win back the two former heartland seats Labor had lost in 2007: Denison in Tasmania (lost to an independent, Andrew Wilkie) and Melbourne (lost to the Greens' Adam Bandt); both Wilkie and Bandt had a strong presence in the community and online.  Loughnane, meanwhile, despite winning the national campaign, was blindsided by a rural independent, Cathy McGowan, who won the Victorian seat of Indi on the back of a skilful and innovative social media campaign, while the Queensland seat of Fairfax was lost to a big-spending businessman, Clive Palmer.  Loughnane speaks of the more complex "architecture" of modern campaign management, a complexity created in part by the advent of social media, which has changed the way campaigns are organised and the skills necessary to run them:

I think what people mean when they say that [social media is] empowering the community... [is that] issues can emerge from nowhere and can skyrocket, and can need to be dealt with.  They can derail a campaign... Even in so-called safe seats, one way or the other, things happen that suddenly aren't just reported in a local newspaper but it could become very big national stories overnight because of social media.  That is a very big thing. 

At a time when fewer voters are identifying with the major parties, minor parties and independents have captured more parliamentary seats than ever before: fifteen House contests in the four elections from 2004 to 2013.  The head offices of major parties are increasingly forced to fight complex two-sided battles: in the marginals against each other, and in vulnerable heartland seats against populist insurgents.  In this environment, the centralising logic of professionalisation requires the major parties to harness the disruptive technologies of social media, to bring them within the managerial sway of the party organisation in order to exploit their potential.  Micro-targeting thus represents another adaptive response by the parties to the challenge of technological change. 

On election night in 2013, in his lengthy concession speech, Rudd thanked a legion of parliamentary colleagues, staffers, party members, unions, electorate staff and his own family.  He thanked "campaign veteran" Bruce Hawker and national secretary George Wright (in that order).  He resigned as party leader that night, and in November resigned from Parliament.  In the February 2014 by-election, Labor's Terri Butler held on to his Griffith seat – thanks in part to 35,000 volunteer phone calls over the last fortnight of the campaign. 

Wright has made clear he will stay on in head office for one more campaign "at least."  He understood the temptation to quit:

It can be a pretty shit job.  An election campaign is just so exhausting.  It's unbelievable.  I'd never experienced anything like it.  It was more exhausting than working for Rudd. 

But he also believed the party needed stability in head office; it had paid a high price for instability.  Head office positions should not be seen as a factional spoil to be shared around, or as a stepping stone on the way to Parliament, but as important in their own right.  Like generations of party officials before him, he expressed confidence that head office can make a distinctive and professional contribution to the party:

I think it's the way you understand your role and your job as well.  Is it my job to set policy for the Labor Party?  Is it my job to be a passionate advocate for blah?  No.  My job is to run the best election campaigns that we run, to give us the best chance of winning elections – and to run the organisation to those same objectives, and to support the parliamentary party to those same objectives.  

#

# CONCLUSION

We are a long way from that dimly lit street corner in east Sydney in 1946, where a lone candidate addressed a handful of small boys and a few adults through a loudspeaker.  In that campaign, Labor prime minister Ben Chifley and opposition leader Bob Menzies addressed public meetings in suburbs and towns around the nation.  Parties got their message out with leaflets, handbills, "snipes" and newspaper advertising – although the visiting American political scientist Louise Overacker was told that radio was really coming into its own.  Seventy years on, the same two parties are campaigning with YouTube videos and Facebook likes, tele-campaigners and robocalls.  How are we to explain this transformation? 

Part of the explanation of course lies in the relentless technological revolutions of television, information processing and the internet.  There are so many more ways to reach voters today: political parties can infiltrate their televisions, home telephones, letterboxes, computers and mobile phones.  They have acquired new tools to measure voters' opinions and attitudes, and to gather and store personal information about them.  These changes, far reaching as they are, form just part of a much broader social transformation.  Globalisation, urbanisation, improved education and health, increased social mobility, changing patterns of work and leisure, the intensification of media – the whole panoply of modernisation– have revolutionised Australian society and the Australian electorate.  Voters, for their part, have many more opportunities for political engagement and collaboration, not least through social media.  They have become less fixed in their political allegiances, and party membership has lost its allure. 

For some scholars, these developments, especially the advent of television, are sufficient to explain the whole transformation of election campaigns.  But technological determinism provides only a very partial explanation for what is a much more complex phenomenon.  The arrival of television certainly enabled parties to advertise and to attract news coverage in new ways.  But these methods did not emerge overnight and did not affect every party in the same way.  Television reached Australia in 1956 but it was not until 1972 that Labor's "It's Time" campaign exploited the transformative potential of a national television campaign.  Likewise, Labor's "Kevin07" campaign broke new ground in online campaigning – several years after such a campaign was technically possible.  Alongside these technological advances, other factors were at play, shaping how the new technologies were adopted. 

Some of these factors can be located at the institutional level – that is, within the structures and behaviour of the political parties themselves.  Australia's two-party system is resilient and deeply entrenched.  The Labor Party and the Liberal Party, the latter in a virtually permanent coalition with the National Party, have shared the spoils of every national election in seventy years, beginning with the 1946 contest between Chifley and Menzies.  So they are fierce competitors – in campaigns, in Parliament, in the electorate, in the media, in fundraising and in spending.  Each election is a winner-take-all contest, so when one party forms government the other goes into opposition.  As a result, they have every incentive to adopt new campaign techniques that they think will give them an edge on the other party.  And when one party does get ahead, the other must catch up.  This was true in the 1940s: Labor's national campaign approach inspired the Liberals to catch up by establishing a national head office; the Liberals' decision to employ a paid official in that secretariat inspired Labor to follow suit, if belatedly.  Later cycles of competitive emulation drove the adoption of qualitative market research, direct mail, marginal seat campaigning and online campaigning – all fuelling an arms race of fundraising and spending.  Often, it was the party in opposition that found it easier to adopt such new campaign methods; later, parties also learned to use the new campaign skills to assist in government, combining policy reform with campaign smarts.  The relationship between the parties, however, is more complex still.  They are rivals and shameless copycats, but they are also capable of collusion, using secret, tacit cooperation to advance their shared interests – most notably, to produce and expand the system of public funding .  This complex pattern of competition, emulation and collusion has done much to drive campaign change in Australia. 

Alongside this relationship between the parties, campaign changes have been profoundly shaped by factors operating within the parties.  Both parties, as we have seen, contain a world of competing interests.  Down in the grassroots, there are the party members, volunteers and loyal supporters, attending branch meetings, buying raffle tickets, promoting the party in the broader community, and handing out how-to-vote cards on election day.  In the corridors of power, there are the elected members of Parliament, dealing with legislation, organising the business of government and servicing their electorates assisted by their growing army of staffers.  Together, these two groups present the parties in a mostly positive, democratic light: parties link citizens with the state via chains of participation, representation and accountability.  This is certainly how the parties would like to be seen, and a third set of actors is therefore often overlooked or disparaged: the party officials in head office.  Compared to the volunteer grassroots and the democratically empowered parliamentarians, party officials have tended to get bad press, from scholars and commentators alike, using descriptions such as "machine men," "bureaucrats," "elites" and "faceless men."  But if we are interested in why parties and campaign practices in Australia have changed, we need to look more closely at these party officials. 

Certainly, considering the functions of a political party, the party officials appear as legitimate and as distinctive as the other groups.  They don't participate in conferences, caucuses or cabinets, branch meetings or parliamentary sittings.  They don't carry the same obligations of representation and accountability as the "party in public office."  They are neither volunteers (as the rank-and-file members are) nor public servants (as members of Parliament are) but employees of the party itself.  They are party members, but questions of ideology and policy that may motivate other members are often incidental to their own work.  Instead, they perform specialised tasks requiring skills and experience that no one else in the party possesses; they earn their salary by concentrating on running the party's election campaigns.  In Max Weber's terms, they are living from politics as income earners, while also living for politics as committed partisans. 

Political parties then contain three distinct sets of actors, who share a complex internal relationship.  Political scientists Richard Katz and Peter Mair expressed it this way: parties present three different "faces" to society (the "party on the ground," the "party in public office" and the "party in central office"); these groups are heavily reliant on one another but they also compete for control of the party's resources and authority; this competition provides the key to how and why parties change over time.  This is a useful scholarly framework for understanding change in the two major Australian parties.  Both the Labor and Liberal parties present their three faces to the Australian community, with members, parliamentarians and party officials performing different functions in different places.  At the same time, both parties are riven with internal struggles, as members and parliamentarians compete with the officials in head office for influence and control over the party and its resources.  In Australia, the framework is more complicated: because Australian parties are federal in structure, this internal competition takes place not just at the national level but between the national and state levels as well. 

The research presented in this book shows how this internal contest has played out: the national party officials co-opted the state branches, saw off the party membership and sought to harness the parliamentary party.  They introduced new campaign techniques and a new strategic focus, shifting authority to head office, reassigning campaign roles, replacing political intuition with research-driven science and consuming party resources.  Where there has been technological change, it has not been imposed on the parties but rather adapted and adopted by the party officials.  Where new marketing initiatives have emerged, the party officials have been alert to their potential.  When money was needed, the party officials searched for it.  Where the party has competed, copied or colluded with its rival, the party officials have led the way.  This change was disruptive and contested.  The officials encountered resistance from the other "faces" of the party, whose traditional authority was being challenged and usurped.  But the electorate rewards parties who mount coordinated and disciplined campaigns, and so, eventually, the party officials largely prevailed. 

The Australian experience then richly confirms Katz and Mair's prediction of internal conflict between the three faces of political parties.  Yet it is harder to agree with their conclusions, that the internal battle for supremacy is being won by the party in public office, and that the central office is being eclipsed.  That conclusion was based on parties in Western Europe; the Australian experience suggests any obituary of head office is premature.  As we have seen, the terrain between the parliamentarians and the party officials remains highly contested.  Indeed, as the principal drivers of campaign professionalisation, the party officials have acquired resources – especially, market research and public funding – which give them great influence within the party, control over campaign strategy and continued leverage over the parliamentary party.  During periods of leadership instability in the parliamentary party, market research empowers party officials to play a potentially decisive role. 

In driving these changes, the party officials were driving the process of professionalisation.  At the very least, professionalisation involves a change of personnel: new generations of campaign professionals replaced the party's traditional bureaucratic hierarchy.  More deeply, it is a process of institutional change.  Professionalism came to permeate not just the campaign apparatus but the party as a whole.  Any behaviour that did not contribute to the party's campaign effectiveness had to be stopped, redirected or allowed to wither away.  Thus the party officials set about steadily, purposively, imposing this discipline upon the party.  In doing so they drew from no training school or textbook, and while professionalism was pervading political parties everywhere, they had no model or precedent for how professionalism could be introduced into the specific circumstances of the Australian electoral landscape.  Professionalism was devised by the party officials themselves through improvisation and experimentation in ever-changing political, technological and demographic circumstances – and all the while under fire from their equally driven professional counterparts in the other party. 

The party officials succeeded by pursuing three main paths.  First, they centralised: they seized control of campaign management and imposed a national approach, strengthened their national head offices, co-opted their state colleagues, hired and fired specialist marketing agencies and delivered nationally consistent campaign messages.  Second, they promoted the importance of campaign strategy, and created a distinctive role for themselves in formulating and executing that strategy.  They prescribed the strategic goal (electoral success) and took responsibility for achieving it.  To meet these twin goals of centralisation and strategy, party officials took on a third task: fundraising.  They moved to free the national party of its mendicant dependency on the states; they chased donors in boardrooms and union offices, cocktail functions and sausage sizzles; they built revenue streams through property portfolios, tenancy agreements and mortgages; they solicited funds through direct mail and donor databases and, more recently, phone banks and Facebook – and they negotiated access to public funds.  As campaign managers, they also became the party's financial managers, allocating funding across an increasingly wide list of campaign activities and negotiating multimillion dollar media buys.  Thus money – raising it, spending it, managing it and accounting for it – became a major preoccupation of the campaign professionals in both parties, further empowering them at the centre of an increasingly centralised campaign structure. 

*

This was of course neither a rapid nor a simple process.  National party officials have operated within Australian political parties for nearly 100 years.  In this book, professionalisation is described around twelve turning points or critical moments, in which the party officials pushed the professional changes forward.  These twelve incidents can be reassembled into a broader narrative of Australian party politics, in which four distinct phases of professionalisation can be discerned.  In a pre-professional era (1915–1945), the Labor Party's federal secretaries served as honorary part-time clerks, keeping the minutes and handling correspondence.  Being federal secretary was not a full-time job, and the party had no actual national head office.  The federal secretary played no particular role in the conduct of federal elections, which was the responsibility of the state branches and the members of Parliament.  Much the same was true on the conservative side of politics: officials were based in the state capital cities, running their own election campaigns and raising their own funds.  Australian party organisation scarcely existed. 

The second phase (1945–1972) saw the emergence of professionalism.  The appointment in 1945 of Don Cleland as the first federal director of the Liberal Party started the procession of full-time paid national party officials that continues to this day.  After defeat in the 1946 election, the Liberals in 1949 won government with an intensive, protracted and expensive campaign of radio advertising.  This began twenty-three years of Liberal electoral supremacy.  Cleland and his successor Bob Willoughby set up enduring mechanisms such as the Staff Planning Committee, and worked within a well-resourced head office that was based permanently in Canberra from 1965.  But national authority was contested by powerful state divisions, which continued to manage campaigning, external advertising agencies and much of the fundraising. 

The ALP lagged far behind.  Having lost office in 1949, its efforts to emulate the Liberal initiative of a full-time paid official were repeatedly thwarted by lack of resources and by jealous state control of campaign management.  The Split destroyed national campaign effectiveness, and the breakthrough appointment of Cyril Wyndham in 1963 came to grief in 1969.  Campaign advertising was essentially outsourced to a skilled but conflicted agent-cum-fundraiser.  Yet from the narrow election of Mick Young as federal secretary in 1969, Labor rapidly professionalised and soon surpassed the flagging Liberals.  Young placed a high priority on electoral success, and acquired the campaign skills required to achieve it, particularly the emerging marketing techniques of opinion polling and television advertising.  As the first national campaign director, he also put in place a management structure to coordinate Labor's campaign efforts, which in 1972 delivered the first recognisably modern professional election campaign. 

The next quarter-century (1973–2000) saw a third phase of intensification, during which both parties advanced on many fronts.  Both national head offices consolidated their authority, and the once-dominant state divisions were progressively co-opted into a national campaign structure.  Both parties also enjoyed lengthy periods in office, meaning party officials such as Bob McMullan, Bob Hogg, Gary Gray and, in the Liberal Party, Lynton Crosby, became key players in government, not just in opposition.  There were waves of technological and marketing innovations during this period; a critical development was the qualitative market research conducted by Rod Cameron for the ALP and Mark Textor for the Liberals.  This research allowed governing parties to coordinate their campaign strategies and their policy development, and to defend their marginally held seats more effectively.  National television campaigns were supplemented by localised ground-war tactics.  As national campaign directors, party officials also exerted managerial control over external marketing consultants, and themselves became increasingly conversant with the new marketing techniques.  In line with the logic of centralisation, party officials sought to control and limit political expression by candidates and party members; the latter were, perhaps not coincidentally, exiting the parties in their droves.  Head offices likewise sought to discipline their parliamentary leaders, although some leaders – John Hewson and Paul Keating – bucked these attempts, with disastrous electoral consequences. 

Behind the scenes, the costs of campaigning continued to spiral.  Parties competed for corporate donations, experimented with property investments and explored direct-mail fundraising; they also introduced (1984) and expanded (1995) a system of public funding.  Some scholars see in this the emergence of a cartel, in which ostensible rivals collude and collaborate in order to achieve shared benefits.  The concept of the "cartel party" was originally devised to explain power sharing in European multiparty systems, where, thanks to the decline in party membership, political parties have essentially lost their roots in civil society.  In place of individual activism and ideological commitment, cartel parties become something more akin to agents of the state; their constant need for funds ensures their continuing dependence on the state.  The major Australian parties do not share power in Parliament, and their links with civil society have perhaps been preserved by compulsory voting.  Yet Australia's public funding system does suggest a compelling case of cartel-like behaviour: the Labor and Liberal parties compete with each other for votes, but work together to capture the resources of the state and redirect them to their own coffers.  It is not a perfectly exclusive cartel: minor parties are eligible to share the taxpayer bounty when their first preference vote exceeds 4 per cent.  Even so, the lion's share of the funding goes to the two major parties and they remain the dominant players as a result: public funding allows them to engage the largest teams of professionals and to mount the most expensive professional campaigns, thereby retaining their parliamentary majorities and remaining the principal cartel members. 

Around the start of the current century, a fourth phase of professionalisation commenced.  Although it is still playing out, it can be described as a phase of diversification and deadlock.  The head offices of both parties continue to drive campaigns.  Market research remains central.  Inevitably, initiatives by one party are copied by the other, and so do not deliver any decisive or lasting advantage.  Campaigns have therefore become increasingly similar in strategy and style.  At the same time, delivery channels have diversified with the fragmentation of television audiences and the rise of the internet and social media, facilitating even more highly targeted, localised and personalised "conversations" with voters in marginal seats, which remain the key electoral battlefields.  Campaign management is thus more complex and the campaign space is shared with a larger number of actors: independents and minor parties are making inroads into once-safe Labor and Coalition seats, and engaging in calculated preference swaps to enter the Senate, while articulate and well-equipped interest groups – trade unions, industry groups and activist networks – are participating in election campaigns to mobilise and promote their own causes.  Yet campaign spending, which Mick Young declared was "out of control" in 1974, remains out of control, and despite taxpayer support, the parties continue to live beyond their means, operating on debt, credit and private donations.  Both parties proffer their begging bowls to corporate rent-seekers, while stepping around the puny disclosure laws or plotting further secret raids on the public purse. 

In this phase, hollowed-out parties with depopulated branches and disempowered members are presided over by an elite of party managers and factional warlords.  This poses an existential crisis for the membership-based party model, a crisis vividly captured in the reviews conducted by both parties following the 2010 election.  Reviewing the Liberal Party, former Howard government minister Peter Reith found that Brian Loughnane's federal secretariat had for many years been "something of a fiefdom" and the national party as a whole had "become principally a campaign unit."  Party membership had been "declining for decades," leading to a "lack of volunteers on the ground" to assist in basic electioneering tasks.  Labor's review, by party elders Steve Bracks, Bob Carr and John Faulkner, identified similar problems: "Modern campaign techniques introduced over the last thirty years, have diminished and degraded the role members once played in political campaigning"; for the first time in living memory, important polling booths had been unstaffed or understaffed.  The elders declared the ALP faced "a crisis in membership," with membership declining both in numbers and participation levels, while the party's focus on campaigning had often come at the expense of other party-building activities. 

The 2013 campaign provided, perhaps, the glimmer of an emergent new phase of professionalisation.  If parties continue to conduct intensive micro-targeted campaigns, they will need not just capital but also labour – not just the expensive networks of computer terminals and phone banks but also the small armies of volunteers to operate them; not just the paid organisers but also the field workers covering the suburban streets and provincial towns, canvassing voters on their own doorstops and initiating genuine conversations.  If this represents the future, party membership may well lose any remnant deliberative or participative function, while being wholly repurposed as a trained volunteer campaign army.  This may not represent the democratic ideal of a party actively engaged in deliberation, and may fail to achieve the optimistic hopes of internet-driven popular empowerment.  It is unlikely to reduce the influence of the party professionals who will continue to manage the operation from the centre.  But it may provide a new and, arguably, worthwhile avenue for citizen engagement in short-term, focussed campaigning. 

In this drawn-out process of professionalisation, the two parties took somewhat different paths, reaching different levels of professionalisation at different times.  This was not because of any ideological or policy difference between them, but emerged as a matter of practical adaptation to their individual political and organisational circumstances combined with the dynamics of competitive emulation. 

In general, the Labor Party has been the party of technological innovation, while the Liberals have been the party of managerial stability.  Labor was the first to exploit the potential of national television advertising, to use qualitative market research to defend the marginal seats of an incumbent government, and to pioneer the use of direct mail and, later, online campaigning.  Yet for all these great leaps forward, Labor's professionalisation suffered from backsliding and forgetfulness.  The disciplines attained during the Hawke–Keating era were forgotten, and were not relearned, during the Rudd and Gillard governments.  Despite public funding – another Labor innovation – the party's finances have lurched from crisis to crisis.  Having achieved genuine party-wide authority between the 1970s and the 1990s, the national head office then shrank back, ceding power to the various states, factions and unions, and to the parliamentary leadership.  Since the mid-1990s, Labor has indulged in four election campaigns – 1996, 2004, 2010 and 2013 – so lacking in strategic unity and discipline that no amount of technological wizardry could save them from epic electoral humiliation. 

The Liberals' path to professionalism was less traumatic and more deliberate.  They were the first to pay their national party officials (1945) and first to accommodate them in national headquarters in Canberra (1965).  Their federal directors have served longer terms than their Labor counterparts; except for the bloodletting of the early 1970s, the Liberal head office has enjoyed a steady line of succession.  They have emulated Labor's campaign innovations and adopted new technologies, but their own innovations have tended to be managerial: requiring Tony Eggleton as national campaign director to travel with the prime minister, or cherry-picking a team of advertising specialists from different agencies.  Yet they struggled to overcome deep-seated rivalries between the national and state head offices.  They pocketed their share of public funding without scruple, but squabbled endlessly about how to share the bounty; an innovative proposal for "high volume, low value" fundraising likewise foundered on the federal divide.  Liberal campaigns suffered from leadership struggles in the parliamentary party, especially during the Howard–Peacock years, and endured a never-to-be-repeated experiment in the 1993 "Fightback!"  campaign.  On the whole, however, head office has generally managed to harness the political leadership and the campaign organisation into a productive relationship.  Certainly their campaigns of this century have been models of discipline. 

For all these reasons, Labor, it appears, was the more professional party in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and again through the 1980s into the 1990s, and again in 2007.  At other times, including most of the 2000s, the Liberals have had the upper hand.  But such differences should not be overstated.  Party officials on both sides have been pursuing the same goals along the same paths, encountering similar challenges and copying each other's innovations.  In this current phase of diversification and deadlock, both parties have successfully employed the same version of the professional campaign model, and have reached broadly the same impasse. 

*

Australia remains a healthy democracy with deeply entrenched norms of free speech, political participation and electoral fairness.  Yet it would be naïve to suppose that the changes documented here have not had some malign consequences.  By imposing their strategic imperative on their political parties, the campaign professionals have altered the broader political environment.  Consider the impact of market research, that most important element of the professional campaign model.  Originally marketed by Gallup and other early practitioners as a plebiscitary tool for popular empowerment, market research in the hands of the party officials has had almost the opposite effect.  The party officials themselves routinely insist that market research does not and should not determine party policies.  Policymaking is the responsibility of the parliamentary party, they say; research only suggests how to package and communicate these policies.  Thus Mick Young acknowledged the use of "slick marketing techniques" to sell Whitlam in 1972, but added that Labor was "only able to do that because there was something to be presented to the electorate.  The policies had been hammered out over a number of years both in public and in the party." 

Tony Eggleton likewise denied that focus groups had been used to "tell [Malcolm Fraser] what to think"; instead, he said, they had helped to decide how "to pitch the advertising in order to sell this particular [policy] product."  For Bob McMullan, likewise:

The purpose of conducting major market research campaigns is to gain the maximum information on the issues influencing the likely election outcome and on the most effective presentation of the policies that the party has decided to adopt. 

And Lynton Crosby asserted that research was used to help sell John Howard's proposed Goods and Services Tax, not to determine the policy itself:

Knowing that John Howard wanted to implement a GST, how do we need to communicate it to get people to support it?  That's what you use [market research] for.  It's a navigational tool.  It doesn't tell you your destination.  It assists you in getting there.  If you're using a focus group to tell you what your destination is, you should not be in politics because you do not believe in anything. 

Despite such protestations, however, research has played a significant role in the policy debate.  The Hawke government's abandonment of the Option C tax reform in 1985, the Hewson opposition's modifications to "Fightback!"  in 1993 and the Rudd government's abandonment of its carbon pricing scheme in 2010 are examples of policy reforms stymied or chilled because they failed the popularity test of market research.  And even if market research were used only as the party officials claim – as a "navigational tool" – it has still had a profound impact on the policy debate.  Drawing attention to superficially attractive but minor aspects of policy, while downplaying unpopular aspects, is hardly likely to promote informed voter choice.  Indeed, in the competitive context of two-party electoral contests, market research may well have made parties less willing to advocate policy of any sort, on the grounds that a policy not adopted is a policy that cannot be attacked; equally, research encourages parties to seek the middle ground, minimising policy differences and adopting "me-too" policies.  In this sense market research has dumbed-down the policy debate and de-risked the political contest. 

Parties are unlikely ever again to offer comprehensive and detailed policy platforms on the scale of Whitlam or Hewson.  Instead, the political debate is more likely to deal with non-specific commitments, emotive slogans or discussion of amorphous "values."  Labor, for example, associates itself with the values of public education, health and welfare spending, while the Liberals promote themselves as the party of fiscal rectitude and border protection: but precise policies are few.  Like ships in the night, these value-laden parties pass each other on parallel paths, avoiding the direct contact of potentially risky policy debates.  As Ian Marsh has argued, the electoral contest has become disconnected from policy deliberation and has lost its capacity to explore ideas and provide genuine choice.  In the interests of unity and campaign discipline, political leaders are deterred from unscheduled departures from their centrally planned scripts and itineraries; diverse voices of deliberation and dissent within the parties are silenced.  In this deliberative void, elections have become presidential-style contests between individual leaders; while airbrushing the portraits of their own leader, parties ferociously attack the credentials and values of their rivals. 

The party officials are not the sole or even primary drivers of this complex, multifaceted change, which indeed is not limited to Australia.  Party officials would say, accurately, that they are doing the job they are paid to do and doing it to the best of their ability.  They are capable, well intentioned and, as this book has argued, professional servants of their parties.  They operate within an electoral system not of their making, responding to its incentives and trying to use it to their partisan advantage – hardly a crime against democracy.  Yet this approach, strategically effective in a short-run partisan sense, must be corrosively negative from a systemic, longer-term perspective. 

Is it possible to imagine reforms of the electoral system that would change this situation?  Scholars and commentators have recommended various reforms, which stand ready for implementation.  These include legislated caps on campaign spending, legislated caps on private campaign donations, faster and more comprehensive disclosure of private donations, and independent management of televised leader debates.  New South Wales and Queensland have already put in place caps on spending and donations.  But at the national level the agenda is stalled, held hostage by the major parties which appraise systemic reform through the lens of self-interest. 

No doubt the cooperation of the parties in a reform initiative could be purchased by increasing their public funding grants.  If this trade-off is to be made, however, it seems reasonable for the public to require some sort of earmarking or performance measurement so that parties can be rewarded not just for skilful campaigning but for improving their deliberative content.  Currently for example, parties use public funding to underwrite their television advertising, which remains their single biggest campaign cost.  This means taxpayers' dollars are ending up on the balance sheets of the licensed network operators – not exactly a good deal for the taxpayer.  Perhaps parties could be required as a condition of receiving their funding to perform some form of community service and to build social capital – for example, by educating voters and new citizens, offering campaign expertise to non-government organisations and local communities, or promoting democratic practice in Asia, the Pacific and Africa.  Public funding for a genuinely independent commission to manage leaders' debates would also substantially improve the deliberative content of election campaigns. 

Within the parties, cultural change holds the key.  More democratic methods of selecting local candidates have been trialled and should be fostered – which may in turn encourage candidates to speak out on policy issues of importance to their communities, even in defiance of head office.  Ultimately, parties might play a constructive role in fostering new forums for policy debate beyond the campaign trail: in summits and community conferences; in the emerging practice of deliberative democracy; and in the expansion and transformation of the Australian community through the "Closing the Gap" initiatives arising from the apology to the Stolen Generations and through the foreshadowed debate about constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians.  Finally, parties could select a greater diversity of people for their head offices.  While the culture of professionalism transcends party boundaries – Labor professionals look and sound much like Liberal professionals – it has not transcended the gender barrier.  Backroom boys have grown up to become faceless men, and it is a remarkable anomaly that neither party has ever selected a woman as its national campaign director. 

In the meantime, "parties are, if nothing else, survivors."  Their longevity and continued relevance in Australia is a triumph of adaptive response in an environment of change and competition.  This triumph was driven by the party officials in the national head offices.  So long as the parties pursue electoral success, the role of the campaign professionals is unlikely to diminish.  Indeed, they are already planning the next election campaign. 

#

# ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My greatest debt is to the party officials themselves: David Combe, Timothy Pascoe, Tony Eggleton, Bob McMullan, Bob Hogg, Andrew Robb, Gary Gray, Lynton Crosby, Geoff Walsh, Brian Loughnane, Tim Gartrell, Karl Bitar and George Wright.  Their willingness to be interviewed made this book possible, and I gratefully acknowledge their generosity in granting me their time, their considered attention, and their trust.  I hope I have repaid them adequately with this book.  I particularly acknowledge Cyril Wyndham who at the age of 81 agreed to be interviewed in his home in Newcastle.  In his heyday in the 1960s, Cyril was rightly regarded as a "professional among amateurs."  His death in July 2012 marked the passing of a pioneer. 

This project really began thirty years ago, when, thanks to a Harkness Fellowship, I was able to attend the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and to study first-hand the 1984 US Presidential election.  I have always been fascinated with elections, that most important feature of democracy, and in the US I saw how campaigning and the reporting of campaigns were being transformed, especially by opinion polling and TV advertising.  Back in Australia I wrote a book, The New Machine Men, which described how these same developments were starting to transform Australian elections.  Working as a newspaper journalist, then as a speechwriter with Prime Minister Bob Hawke, and then as a corporate public affairs manager, I continued to observe how the Australian political parties applied and adapted the new tools of campaigning.  In particular, I became interested in the critical role played by the party officials – the Labor national secretaries and the Liberal federal directors.  Finally, in a conversation one day in 2007, Professor Rod Tiffen pointed out to me, casually it seemed, that these party officials had never been comprehensively studied.  The idea turned into a PhD thesis, and the thesis into this book. 

Rod Tiffen has been a tireless, patient and insightful mentor throughout this project.  I could not have imagined a more constructive relationship, and I am deeply grateful to him.  I also benefited from the advice, assistance and friendship of many others in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, including Ariadne Vromen, Louise Chappell (now at UNSW), Rodney Smith, Anika Gauja, Peter Chen, Judy Betts, Trevor Cook, Naser Ghobadzadeh, Stewart Jackson, Ben Moffitt and Chris Neff.  I am fortunate to have found a highly congenial second "home" on campus at the Graduate School of Government, where director Geoff Gallop and colleagues Gaby Ramia, Joanne Kelly, Leanne Howie, Richard Prekodravac, Kristy Ward and that paragon of research methods, Zina O'Leary, all provided support and advice in many important ways.  Thanks all. 

Off campus, I was supported by many colleagues and friends.  Ian Marsh, now at the Australian National University, has been an unfailing source of challenge, enthusiasm and insight.  The venerable Malcolm Mackerras kindly provided me a complete set of his electoral pendulums, while Jennifer Lees-Marshment of the University of Auckland also provided encouragement and support.  Elias Hallaj, David Piggott, Vin Plant, Fergus Hunter, Jeff Richardson and Imre Salusinszky all helped when it mattered.  Colin Parks, the master of the three-paragraph feature, read the entire manuscript and saved me from many errors.  Friends and relatives in Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, Queanbeyan, Bawley Point and Tathra listened to my ruminations on the party officials, apparently attentively, interrupting only to offer another glass of inspiration.  Thanks all. 

To Chris Feik and his team at Black Inc., I express my thanks for their confidence in taking on this project and their care in executing it.  Denise O'Dea was an outstanding editor who improved the text in many ways. 

I express my special thanks to Ward O'Neill for his generosity in providing the illustrations that adorn this book. 

Most of all, I have been blessed with the loving support of my wife, Helen O'Neil, and our children, Janet and Christopher.  Their encouragement was vital and their patience, though tested severely, proved to be limitless.  Thank you. 

#

# NOTES ON SOURCES

All quotations from party officials are from my interviews, unless otherwise attributed.  For background and context, I have relied on the Australian Dictionary of Biography (Cook, 1986; Love, 1990; Nelson, 1993; Cross, 2002; Goot, 2002; Groves, 2007; Love, 2007; Oliver, 2007).  For Liberal party officials, I have relied on the organisational histories and other accounts by Ian Hancock and the collection of documents and speeches by Graeme Starr (Starr, 1980; Hancock, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2007).  For the ALP officials, I have relied on the federal executive minutes edited by Pat Weller and Bev Lloyd, and party histories by Fin Crisp, Robert Murray, Ross McMullin and Graham Freudenberg (Crisp, 1955; Murray, 1970; Freudenberg, 1977; Weller & Lloyd, 1978; McMullin, 1991).  The party officials' post-election addresses to the National Press Club are an essential campaign record, collected on the www.australianpolitics.com or the Australian Parliament's ParlInfo sites. 

I have relied on many journalists, cited as follows, but especially acknowledge Paul Kelly's trilogy, The Hawke Ascendancy, The End of Certainty and The March of Patriots, and Pamela Williams' uniquely insightful account of the 1996 campaign, The Victory (Kelly, 1984, 1992, 2009; P. Williams, 1997). 

I am also happy to acknowledge my use of the remarkable archive of Australian electoral statistics on Dr Adam Carr's Psephos website (psephos.adam-carr.net).  To update the values of pre-decimal currencies, I have used the Reserve Bank of Australia's calculator at www.rba.gov.au/calculator/annualPreDecimal.html. 

I have used the term "head office" throughout, although at different times each party has used other terms (including "secretariat" and "party headquarters").  In the Labor Party, state units are called "branches," while in the Liberal Party they are called "divisions."  Labor's "federal secretary" was retitled "national secretary" in the mid-1970s. 

INTRODUCTION

"highly paid, highly skilled team": Whitington, 1961. 

"a professional among amateurs": Sorell, 1968. 

"a more professional, unified approach": M. Young, 1986, p.99. 

"a case study of Labor's superior professionalism": Kelly, 1992, p.591. 

"professionalism of the Liberal Party team": Crosby, 2000, p.117. 

"hacks... young men and women who want to spend": Hyde Page, 2006, p.312. 

"professionals in more traditional fields, such as doctors and lawyers": Of the extensive literature describing and comparing political and other forms of professionalism, see for example Nimmo, 1970; Scammell, 1997; Lilleker & Negrine, 2002; Webb & Fisher, 2003; Marquand, 2004. 

"a new class of party officials, the 'electoral professionals'": This influential description was coined by Angelo Panebianco, 1988. 

CHAPTER ONE

"Rather humourless cove": Martin, 1999, p.33. 

"When I consider" and "We have no": Menzies, quoted in Starr, p.75. 

"a permanent secretariat at Canberra": Starr, p.79. 

"Ambitious from the start": Hancock, 2000, p.56. 

"six separate entities": Starr, pp.89–90. 

"the maximum autonomy": Starr, p.90. 

"'coordinate' the state divisions": Liberal Party of Australia, 1946a, Sections 63, 64. 

"brains trust": Hancock, 2000, pp.7, 93. 

"party battle," "dimly lighted street corner," "a handful," "probably no votes," "leaflets, handbills and snipes," "party managers," "campaign directors": Overacker, 1952, Chapter 10. 

"admittedly extreme": Overacker, p.274; Martin, p.54. 

"Labor candidate Gil Duthie": Duthie, 1984, pp.15–31. 

"every care must be exercised": Liberal Party of Australia, 1946b. 

"as far as Labor was concerned": Crisp, p.50; Weller & Lloyd, p.3. 

"jealous attachment": Crisp, p.49. 

"Yet the rules devised": Australian Political Labor Executive, Rule 5c, in Weller & Lloyd, p.4; Crisp, p.4. 

"During the 1906 federal elections": Robertson, 1974, p.10. 

"in most cases secondary or incidental": Crisp, p.7. 

"severely circumscribed," "little cash": Crisp, p.67. 

"for past services," "the excellent and faithful services": Weller & Lloyd, pp.88–9. 

"of a uniform character," "campaign director," "general survey," "better coordination," "recommend immediately," "in all future elections": Weller & Lloyd, pp.  92, 205, 221, 281, 299, 323. 

"We need to face up to the fact": Menzies quoted in Mills, 1986, p.89. 

"advocate-in-written words": Souter, 1953. 

"the longest and most lavishly funded": Goot, ADB.  On Casey's role, see Hudson. 

The estimate of £800,000 is by Whitington, 1961.  On John Henry Austral, see Mills, 1986, pp.88–94.  The Archive of the University of Melbourne retains some original recordings of the campaign; see Inside Story, 31 May 2012, at www.inside.org.au/dick-casey-forgotten-people. 

"suffered a terrific barrage": Chifley, quoted in Martin, p.126. 

"better coordination," "long discussion," "He recommended": Weller & Lloyd, pp.281, 298; Crisp, p.69.  McNamara's report is contained in the Australian Labor Party, 1945. 

"two conflicting understandings": Hancock, 2000, p.63. 

"deepest vested interest": Freudenberg, p.92. 

CHAPTER TWO

Kennelly's reports, "Points for Forthcoming Federal Elections" and "Causes Leading to the Defeat of Labor in the 1949 Elections," were presented to the Federal Executive meeting in September 1950, see Weller & Lloyd, p.422.  A subsequent "Report of Federal Secretary, Hon P. J. Kennelly MLC" was presented to the federal executive in July 1951, see Weller & Lloyd, p.448.  The reports are contained in the Official Minute Book of ALP Federal Executive, Box 122, Records of the Australian Labor Party Federal Secretariat, MS 4985, National Library of Australia. 

Kennelly's first list of twenty-one seats which he believed were winnable from the Coalition in 1951 was set out in "Points for Forthcoming Federal Elections."  The seats were: Swan (Western Australia); Kingston and Sturt (South Australia); Bass and Denison (Tasmania); Wannon, Corio, Ballarat and McMillan (Victoria); Gwydir, Hume, Lawson, Mitchell, North Sydney, Riverina, Robertson and St George (New South Wales); and Griffith, Capricornia, Bowman and Leichhardt (Queensland).  Labor needed swings ranging from 0.3 to 6.9 per cent to win them, or an average of just under 3 per cent.  Of these, Labor won Hume, Ballarat, Wannon, Leichhardt and Kingston in 1951. 

Kennelly's revised list was set out in the 1951 report and identified winnable seats in 1954.  The seats were: Swan (Western Australia); Sturt (South Australia); Bass, Darwin and Denison (Tasmania); Corio, McMillan, Deakin and Flinders (country Victoria) and Higinbotham and Isaacs (metropolitan Melbourne); Riverina, Lawson, Gwydir, Robertson and Mitchell (country New South Wales) and St George and North Sydney (metropolitan Sydney); and Capricornia (country Queensland) and Griffith and Bowman (metropolitan Brisbane).  These seats ranged from 0.2 to 8 per cent, averaging 3.4 per cent.  Of these, Labor won St George, Griffith, Bass, Sturt and Swan in 1954.  Electoral results for the period are provided in Hughes and Graham (1968). 

"his stutter": Love, ADB. 

"no glittering promises": Chifley's policy speech, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 November 1949. 

"the barometer of marginal seats": Weller & Lloyd, p.507. 

"Research officer Bengtsson": Hancock, 2000, p.90. 

"colossal lottery": Daly, 1977, p.52. 

"Successful Liberal candidates": Martin, p.125. 

"the one federal officer": Weller & Lloyd, p.9. 

"subject to good conduct": Federal Executive Rules, rule 5.  ALP Rules and rules changes are published with each Federal Conference report.  See also Weller & Lloyd, p.6. 

"The attack on Kennelly": Weller & Lloyd, pp.517–8, 538–9; McMullin, p.265; Murray, pp.124–8, 141–2. 

"an inscribed wristlet watch": Weller & Lloyd, p.579. 

CHAPTER THREE

On Cyril Wyndham generally, see his papers in the Mitchell Library, Sydney. 

"A return to the city of his birth": Chamberlain, 1998, pp.128–47. 

"famous hard drinker": Murray, p.142. 

"Just a few days": Murphy, Joyce & Hughes, 1980, p.52. 

"the office boy": Burns, 1993. 

"did a great job," "a state of insensibility": Chamberlain, pp.129, 130. 

"childhood bullying," "science fiction writer": Graham Freudenberg, personal communication. 

"'serious' lack of personnel": Rawson, 1961, p.75. 

"jointly drafting": Wyndham's papers contain a copy of Maxwell Newton's essay. 

"Evatt's last campaign," Nation, 13 November 1965, which describes this scene. 

"In the 1961 federal election": Griffen-Foley, 2003, pp.85–117. 

"with distinction during a most troublous period": Federal Executive Report to the 24th Federal Conference, 10 April 1961, Box 1, MS 4985, National Library of Australia. 

"Chamberlain's plan": Proposed Federal Secretariat, Report to State Branches by F. E. Chamberlain, Federal Executive Report to the 24th Federal Conference, 10 April 1961, Box 1, MS 4985, National Library of Australia. 

"feather my own nest": Chamberlain, 1998, pp.63–4. 

"to defer Wyndham's start date": Australian Labor Party, 1964. 

"The 'mighty atom' tag": Melbourne Sun, no date.  Contained in news clippings file, Box 6, Wyndham papers, Mitchell Library. 

"Cyril Wyndham is inclined to resent": Australian Financial Review, no date, Box 6, Wyndham papers, Mitchell Library. 

"a small, ratty office suite": Ramsey, 1996. 

"grand plans": McMullin, p.324. 

"Cyril plus two": Burns, 1993. 

"He analysed voting statistics": Wyndham's pamphlets mentioned here are in the National Library of Australia: Wyndham, 1964, 1965b, 1965a, 1966. 

"prevaricate our policy": Wyndham, 1965b. 

"ridiculous, absurd and criminal": Wyndham quoted in Sorell, 1968. 

"Wyndham Plan": McMullin, pp.309–10; Freudenberg, pp.90–1. 

"Faceless men": McMullin, 1991, p.294; Hocking, 2008, pp.226–7. 

"kept away": Botsman, 2011. 

"the scapegoat," "reached the conclusion": Statement to the Finance Committee – four typed pages, unsigned, undated and stapled – Box 1, Wyndham papers, Mitchell Library. 

"ostensible reason": Freudenberg, pp.151–2. 

"casual and offhanded": Letter from Wyndham to Whitlam, 2 April 1968, Box 4, Wyndham papers, Mitchell Library. 

"a professional among amateurs": Sorell, 1968. 

"frustrated reformer": Smark, 1967b. 

"the little Englishman": Reid, 1971, p.261. 

"Keeffe as the Federal President": three typed pages, summarising federal executive meetings, March 1969, Box 1, Wyndham papers, Mitchell Library. 

"The clique": Would Any Democrat?,  seven typed pages, incomplete, unsigned, undated, Box 1 Wyndham papers, Mitchell Library. 

"made it impossible": Burns, 1993. 

"misleading answers": Anon.,  1969, p.3; Australian Labor Party, 1969. 

"his career was 'finished'": Freudenberg, p.152. 

"feed out": Reid, p.263; Burns, oral history. 

"ill-treated, maligned and smeared": Newton cited in Reid, p.263.  See also the biography of her father by Sarah Newton: Newton, 1993. 

"Liberal salary details": Whitington; Hancock, 2000, pp.130, 215. 

"distinct room or office": Crisp, p.78. 

"The Liberals had aspired": Starr, p.79. 

"gala opening": Hancock, pp.1–2. 

"personally selected": Hancock, p.126. 

"meticulously anonymous": Smark, 1967a.  See also Stephens, The Advertiser [Adelaide], 1 February 1969. 

Willoughby "worshipped" Menzies: Hancock, p.126. 

CHAPTER FOUR

On Mick Young and the 1972 election, see Young's own recollections in The Whitlam Phenomenon and Neal Blewett's account: Blewett, 1973; M. Young, 1986.  On South Australia, see Hetherington & Reid, 1962; Blewett & Jaensch, 1971; Stokes, 1983. 

"I did not want," "token of protest": Young, p.96.  Journalist Allan Barnes provides a detailed account of the manoeuvrings around the Chamberlain–Young ballot: Barnes, 1969. 

"consensus method": Stokes, p.133. 

"honourable and colourful": M. Young, 1974. 

"golliwog's shock of black hair": Reid, p.262. 

"sharp intelligence," "cramped and shabby": Blewett & Jaensch, pp.66–7. 

Dunstan campaigns: McMullin, p.319; Young, pp.98–9. 

"At the conclusion": Young, p.96. 

"carried the federal secretariat": Brenchley, 1973. 

"Open to the media": Oakes & Solomon, 1973, pp.20–1. 

"one more state," "We patched things up": Young, p.97. 

"Victory in 1972": Young's memo is summarised in Blewett, p.10. 

"The one thing we've got to have": Oakes & Solomon, p.95. 

"I was quite nervous": Young, pp.106–7. 

"This [labour] movement did not come into existence," "If ... Labor has found its soul": Chamberlain, 1964. 

"We construct a philosophy of failure": Freudenberg, pp.94–6. 

"more and more people": Young, p.94. 

"integral part": Young, p.98. 

"Eisenhower": Diamond & Bates, 1984, pp.62–3. 

1958 Menzies–Evatt election: Rawson, pp.115–23; Griffen-Foley, pp.62–85. 

"to translate public men": Hancock, 2000, p.256. 

"ten-minute documentary": Griffen-Foley, p.107. 

"In the two years before 1949": letter from Rubensohn to Wyndham, Box 1, Wyndham papers, Mitchell Library. 

"Labor stalwarts": Blewett, p.14. 

"MPs who fancied": Young, p.98. 

"He really wasn't into this business": Author interview, 1985.  For another perspective on Rubensohn's view of the rational voter, see Braund, 1978, pp.286–7. 

"Chamberlain's decentralised system": Chamberlain, 1998, pp.80–1. 

"the broad national lines": Wyndham, 1968, published in response to Kaldor, 1968. 

"One of the grave deficiencies": Young, pp.97–8. 

"mastery": Blewett, pp.9–11. 

"defies the very thing": Young quoted in Blewett, p.120. 

"a cast of thousands": Richardson, 1994, pp.31–2. 

"Disjointed and dispirited campaign": Lloyd & Reid, 1974, p.409. 

CHAPTER FIVE

"to re-examine the organisation's role": Starr, p.278. 

"the brightest and most bouncing baby": quoted in Mayer, 1973, p.34. 

"real enemies," "none of the divisions," "central post office," "growing recognition": Hancock, 2000, p.129. 

"all a waste of money and effort": Porter, 1981, p.76. 

"splendid condition": Hancock, 2000, p.131. 

"difficult to work with": Reid, p.281. 

"Carrick was reportedly overlooked," "This 'think-tank' work": Juddery, 1968. 

"disillusioned": Blazey, 1972, p.247. 

"His somewhat amateurish approach": Mills, 1986, pp.97–8. 

"not prepared" to make major decisions: Oakes & Solomon, 1973, p.122. 

"The party president also announced": Starr, pp.283–4.  See also Lloyd & Reid, pp.317–21, 358–9. 

"help finance": Ramsey, 2009, p.17. 

"liaison between Canberra": McLeay, 1974. 

"stood out like dinosaurs": Hancock, 2000, pp.248–9, 269. 

"Gorton, by now navy minister": Hancock, 2002, p.90. 

"Menzies happened to be looking for a new press secretary": Chalmers, 2011, pp.125–6. 

"little twerp": quoted in Henderson, 1998, p.198.  See also Frame, 2005, pp.146–9. 

"closer supervision of the campaign": Hancock, 2002, p.244. 

"like a built-in wardrobe": Barnett, 1985. 

"the federal campaign committee's authority": Starr, pp.295–6. 

"private information": Hancock, 2000, p.145. 

"quiet calm force": O'Reilly, 1987. 

108 "a new approach to election campaigns": Ramsey, 2009, p.18. 

CHAPTER SIX

"There is something demeaning": M. Young, 1974. 

"starved of regular income": Crisp, p.78.  See also Hughes, 1963, pp.654–5. 

"Special Publicity Fund": Overacker, pp.284–5; Crisp, pp.68, 88–92; Rawson, pp.75–6; Murray, p.28; and Reid, recorded in Cameron, 1990, p.482. 

"complex and unconventional relationship with Sim Rubensohn": Rawson, pp.75–6; Braund, pp.285–6; Goot, 2002. 

"small coteries of big business interests": Hughes, p.647.  On United Australia Party finances, see Watson, 1979. 

"determine its own destiny": Starr, p.81. 

"lobbying" the government: Hancock, 2000, p.130. 

"federalism that really thwarted the Liberal Party": West, 1965, pp.237–43.  See also Hancock, 2000, p.131 and 2007, pp.108–10. 

"not a very inspiring way," "This was achieved by": Young, pp.96–8. 

"For his part, Rubensohn professed": Braund, p.287n. 

"NSW branch earned income": Rawson, p.117; Hughes, p.651. 

"bankruptcy": Oakes, 1976, pp.270–95; Cameron, pp.26, 28, 83. 

"intensely annoyed": Hawke, 1994, p.9. 

"Russian diplomat Valery Ivanov": See Marr, 1984, & McMullin, pp.422–4. 

"the bill disappeared": Whitlam, 1985, pp.681–3. 

"Party officials were given a prominent role": administrative operations of the public funding system are documented in the post-election reports by the Australian Electoral Commission, accessible at www.aec.gov.au. 

CHAPTER SEVEN

"philosophy of power": McMullan, 13 April 1986.  McMullan cited The Swedish Road to Socialism, a Fabian publication by Martin Linton, who was later a British MP in the Blair government: Linton, 1985. 

"haunted": Hawke, quoted in Mills, 1993b, pp.66–7. 

"Governments may use public resources": See Young & Tham, p.62. 

"the basic opinion poll": See Mills, 1986, 1999; Mills & Tiffen, 2012. 

"taking research to a new level": author interview, 1985. 

"séances": quoted in Tingle, 2010. 

"doubt, lack of confidence": quoted in Mills, 1986, pp.22–3.  For similar developments in the British Labour Party, see Wring, 2005. 

"most researched and best researched": quoted in Hawke, p.412. 

"A critical contribution": see Mills, 1986, pp.43–65. 

"convincing the contending factions": Walter, 1986, p.104. 

"The environment had risen": Richardson, pp.256–65.  See also Kelly, 1992, p.578; and Papadakis, 1990. 

"moderate even-handed donations": Gray, 1996, p.50. 

Centenary House: Morling, 1994; Hunt, 2004. 

"tackle the corruptive influence": Senate Select Committee on Political Broadcasts and Political Disclosures, 1991.  See also Orr, pp.169–70; and Young & Tham, p.107. 

"retire debt and restore their profitability": Australian Electoral Commission, cited by Johns, 2006, p.52. 

"the principle of entitlement": Young & Tham, p.99. 

"Some of them went on to enter Parliament": Mills, 2010. 

"parties without partisans": Dalton & Wattenberg, 2000. 

"golden age": Marsh, 2006, p.5.  On the foundation of the ALP, see McMullin, pp.1–50.  On the foundation of the Country Party see B. D. Graham, 1966; and on the foundation of the Liberal Party and the "forgotten people," see Hancock, 2000 and Brett, 1992. 

"Party membership began a steady steep decline": Jaensch, 2006, pp.28–30; Cavalier, 2010, pp.47–8.  On voter loyalties and Australian voter behaviour generally, see McAllister, 2011, pp.50–4. 

"'catch-all' party": this influential concept was developed by Otto Kirchheimer.  See Michelle Williams for a contemporary analysis: Kirchheimer, 1966; M. H. Williams, 2009. 

CHAPTER EIGHT

"Cleland engineered support": Martin, pp.66–8. 

"activist presidents": Hancock, 2000, p.126. 

"Wyndham was drafted": Freudenberg, pp.131–2. 

"a modest sort of ruse": see also Ayres, 1987, p.234. 

"Party management": O'Reilly, 2007, p.68. 

Evatt Royal Commission: Cameron, pp.775, 813. 

"Labor's campaign 'skills-set'": quoted in O'Reilly, 2007, p.75. 

Bob Hawke "insisted": Hawke, pp.389–400. 

"O'Brien had got a copy": Carney, 2001, p.186. 

"nearly three months": quoted in Kelly 2009, pp.227–30, and see also Williams, pp.15–21, 55. 

"Hogg came to my office": Hawke, p.502. 

"new generation": Kelly, 2009, p.45. 

"Elliott himself was considering": Kelly, 1992, pp.399–417. 

"Paul Keating opted not to campaign": Edwards, 1996, p.504. 

"Our major strategy," "To win this election": Hogg, 1993. 

"we found no thirty-second solution": Robb, 1993. 

"unAustralian" ALP attempts: Millett, 1996b. 

"A campaign is not a time": Robb, 1996, p.110. 

"You're never on your own": Williams, p.38. 

"Gray got in his car": Ramsey, 1993. 

"Labor's platform document": Australian Labor Party, 1994. 

"Captain Wacky": Williams, pp.260–1. 

"more blood in the water": Gray quoted in Millett, 1996a. 

"There must be intuitive play," "At the end of the day": Keating & Russell, quoted in Williams, pp.275–7. 

"Party selection rules": the original 1915 rules of the federal executive empowered it to "elect and control" its own officers: Rule 5c, Australian Political Labor Executive, in Weller & Lloyd, p.4.  The Liberal Party's 1946 constitution granted its federal executive the power to "appoint all officers" of the secretariat, including its director, and to "fix their remuneration and the terms of their employment": Sections 54c, 61, 62. 

CHAPTER NINE

"Phil & Jenny": Williams, p.65. 

"Lynton Crosby, B. Ec.":  Atkins, 2002. 

"not just what people think": Snow, 1997. 

"the tax was so unpopular," "In the end we found enough seats": Kelly, 2009, pp.418–20. 

"Crosby told Howard": Howard, 2010, p.310. 

"In Labor's top ten safest seats," "a necessary and calculated strategy," "Under our system," "That is the key point": Crosby, 1998. 

"When Howard's boat came in": Walsh, 2002. 

"You seek to achieve legitimate damage": Hudson, 2002. 

"Corporate funding dried up": Don Argus was "pressing" for security, Williams, p.17. 

"Quizzed by a parliamentary committee": Joint Committee on Electoral Matters, 1999, p.197. 

"uncommonly favourable manner": Australian Electoral Commission, 2000, Part 5.4. 

"still walk into their local bank": Dore, 1998.  See also Australian Electoral Commission, 1997. 

The Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Act 2002: Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 9 August 2001 [Slipper] and Senate, 21 August 2002 [Faulkner]. 

CHAPTER TEN

"$3.2 million theft": Parliamentary Debates, Senate, 6 September 1989 [Puplick]. 

"the Liberals were embarrassed": Ramsey, 2004. 

"It is at the core of the strategy," "the database was dubbed Feedback," "as good as any in the world": Mills, 1993a.  See also van Onselen & Errington, 2004. 

"Let me be totally clear": quoted in Bagwell, 1993. 

"hand-to-hand combat": Grattan, 1990. 

"ensure that our national campaign," "candidate selection is critical": Robb, 1997. 

"A vote for your local Liberal team": Marr & Wilkinson, 2004, p.277. 

Robb successfully pressed the Queensland division: Williams, pp.246–9. 

"We ran twenty separate regional candidates," "A campaign works on two levels," "top down and bottom up": Crosby, 1998. 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"legitimate campaign tactic": Shepherdson QC, 2001, p.xiv. 

Hawke–Wran review: Hawke & Wran, 2002. 

"young family man from the suburbs": Gartrell, 2005, p.144. 

"a cross between social workers," "That's one of the benefits": Crabb, 2005; Latham, 2005, pp.154, 233. 

"blizzard of shit": Crabb, 2005, pp.231–2. 

"very hands on": Gartrell, 2004. 

"Gartrell is a nice inoffensive guy": Latham, 2005, pp.338, 359–60. 

"focus, discipline," "the mainstream of the Australian community," "A federal election comprises": Loughnane, 2004. 

"virtuous circle": Lawrence quoted in Jackman, 2008, p.83. 

"candidates of the highest calibre": Simms, 2009, p.88. 

The Kevin07 website: accessible through the National Library of Australia's Pandora collection at www.pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/75521/20070807-1702/www.kevin07.com, accessed 10 March 2014. 

"some key groups in the electorate," "parents": Loughnane, 2007. 

"designed to really wound me": Howard, 2010, p.641. 

"down and dirty": Johnson, 2001, p.11. 

"unexpected discipline and focus": Bitar, 2010. 

"prepared for": Loughnane, 2012. 

"the Lindsay test": Crook, 2011. 

"I suspect what happens": Allanah MacTiernan, the defeated ALP candidate for Canning, interviewed by Alison Carabine, ABC Radio, 24 August 2010. 

"As far as Karl is concerned": Benson, 2010. 

"overruns in campaign expenditure": Savva, 2010. 

CHAPTER TWELVE

On the "Your Rights at Work" campaign: Muir, 2008, 2010.  On the ALP funding crisis, see P. Williams, 2013.  Bruce Hawker provided his own perspective on the 2013 campaign (Hawker, 2013). 

"a surprisingly crowded field": the manoeuvring is reported in Hartcher, 2011. 

"Wright & Loughnane agreed": Coorey & Tingle, 2013. 

"people who were Julia people": Wright quoted in Grattan, The Conversation, 29 October 2013. 

"I took [them] through everything": Hawker, 2013, p.66. 

"This is a campaign": Wright video, "Our Plan to Win," 8 August 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=044ziCWXYEE. 

"a new facility": Wright video, "Step Up!,"  30 August 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmekEDbdcBc. 

"experienced on-the-ground campaigners," "more Facebook likes": Loughnane, 2013. 

For the "Real Solutions" Plan, see www.liberal.org.au/real-solutions. 

"able to manage his leader," "work the party's strategy," "The crucial thing": Wright, 2013. 

"democratic deficit": Wright, 2013. 

"It's pushing political power": The Million Person Campaign: A Report to Members, Australian Labor Party, no date. 

"fewer voters are identifying": McAllister, 2011, p.38. 

CONCLUSION

"a bad press": See for example Michels, 1911 (trans.  1966); Loveday, Martin & Parker, 1977; Parkin & Warhurst, 1983; Warhurst & Parkin, 2000. 

"three faces," "internal battle for supremacy is being won": Key, 1964; Katz & Mair, 1993, 1994, 2002. 

The "cartel party": the "cartel party" theory has been articulated by Richard Katz & Peter Mair: Katz & Mair, 1995, 2002; Blyth & Katz, 2005.  On its possible application to Australian parties, see Marsh, 1995. 

"Peter Reith found": Reith, 2011, pp.23, 28. 

"Labor's review": Bracks, Carr & Faulkner, 2011, pp.9–13. 

"the impact of market research": Ginsberg, 1986; Igo, 2007. 

"only able to do that": M. Young, 1986. 

"The purpose of conducting": McMullan, 1984. 

"The electoral contest has become disconnected": See Marsh, 1995, 2007; Marsh & Miller, 2012: Chapter 5. 

"parties are, if nothing else, survivors": Dalton, Farrell, & McAllister, 2011, p.14. 

#

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#

# INDEX

Abbott, Tony , , ,

advertising , , , , ,  see also direct mail; market research; radio; slogans; television advertising

avoiding advertising blackouts

diversification of delivery channels

national mood and

advertising agencies , , , , ,  see also names of specific agencies

ALP see Labor Party

Anthony, Doug

Arbib, Mark ,

Argus, Don

Atlee, Clement

Atwater, Lee

Austral, John Henry ,

Australian Electoral Commission (AEC)

Australian Labor Party see Labor Party

Australian Political Labor Executive

Beazley, Kim , ,

Bengtsson, W. S. , ,

Bennett, Ken

Berry Currie advertising agency

Bishop, Bronwyn

Bitar, Karl , , , , , ,

Blewett, Neal

Bracks, Steve

British Labour Party , ,

Burns, Netta , ,

Burns, Tom , ,

business donors see donations

Butler, Terri

by-elections see elections

Cain, John , ,

Calwell, Arthur , ,

Cameron, Rod , ,

campaign literature , , , , ,

campaign spending , , ,  see also advertising; funding

electoral reform regarding , 288

overspending , , ,

campaign strategy , ,  see also elections

advertising as part of see advertising

as second step in professionalisation

balance of positive and negative in

building trust in politicians

communications in , ,

components of

different state priorities

discipline driven by party officials , , ,

electoral rules and

electoral success as goal , , ,

importance of promises

local relevance see local campaigning

new methods developed in opposition

newcomers in campaign roles

online see online campaigning

personal attacks in

professional developments see professional campaigners

"relationship campaigning"

research as basis of see market research

strong party leaders in

targeting second preferences , ,

targeting winnable seats see marginal seats

timing of campaigns

training see training in campaign skills

canvassing see personal canvassing; telephone canvassing

Carlton, Jim

Carr, Bob

Carrick, John ,

"cartel parties"

Casey, Dick (later Lord Casey) , ,

Cavalier, Rodney

Centenary House ,

centralisation see state-federal relationship

Chamberlain, F. E. "Joe" , , ,

as national secretary , ,

decentralised approach ,

McMullan and

Wyndham and ,

Chifley, Ben , , ,

death of

Chisholm, Anthony

Cleland, Donald (Brigadier) ,

as first paid campaigner , ,

federal system and

Cleland–White report ,

climate change policy in campaigns

Clyne, Cameron ,

Coalition see Country Party; Liberal Party; National Party

Cogger, Pip ,

Colbourne, Bill

Combe, David , , ,

as national secretary , , , ,

communications strategy

McMullan on

Combet, Greg ,

Commonwealth Labour Parties' Conference 1957:

communications strategy see campaign strategy; online campaigning

communism, ALP and ,

community views see local campaigning; market research; micro-targeting

competitive cycle in campaigns , , ,

compulsory voting

computers see technology

Conservative Party (UK) ,

corporate donors see donations

Costello, Peter

costs of campaigning see campaign spending; funding

Country Party (later National Party) ,

Crean, Simon

Crichton-Browne, Robert

Crisp, Fin ,

Crosby, Lynton , , , ,

as federal director , , , , , ,

on campaigning

on market research

Crosby Textor (company) , ,

Curtin, John ,

Daly, Fred

data see market research; technology

De Bruyn, Joe

decentralised approach see state-federal relationship

democracy, campaign strategies and

Democratic Labor Party (DLP) , , , ,

direct mail ,

directors of the Liberal Party see federal directors

disclosure obligations see under donations

diversification of delivery channels

DLP , , , ,

donations

business donors , ,

disclosure obligations , , , , 288

high-volume, low-value fundraising ,

online fundraising

role of party officials

doorknocking see personal canvassing

Downer, Alexander , ,

Dunstan, Don ,

Duthie, Gil

Edwards, Ron

Eggleton, Tony , , ,

Fraser and , ,

elections see also campaign spending

1925: 0

1937:

1940s , , , , ,

1950s , , , ,

1960s , , , ,

1970s , , , , ,

1980s , , , , , ,

1990s , , , , , , , , ,

2000s , , , , , , ,

2010s , , ,

advertising for see advertising

by-elections , ,

centralised campaigns see national campaign directors

fake leaflets

incumbency campaigns , , , , , , ,

independents in ,

leaks in

marginal seats in see marginal seats

second preferences , ,

slogans in see slogans

"small target" strategies ,

spending on see campaign spending

union involvement see trade unions

unity and discipline in , , , , ,

electoral system ,

Electrac (Polfile) database

Elliot, "Uncle" Doug

Elliott, John , , ,

employees of the party see professional campaigners

environment as campaign issue ,

Evatt, H. V. "Doc" , ,

expenses see funding

"faceless men" , ,

Faulkner, John , ,

federal directors (Liberal Party) before page ,  see also head offices; names of specific directors; professional campaigners

appointed from outside , ,

experience required for

first appointee

first full-time paid official

honorariums and salaries

interviewed for this book

long terms of

managerial expertise

purged from head office

federal/national secretaries (ALP) before page , , ,  see also head offices; names of specific secretaries; professional campaigners

change in name from 'federal' to 'national'

decentralised approach to campaigning

elected by ALP membership

experience required for

first full-time salaried ,

first national campaign director

Hogg's candidacy for

honorariums and salaries , , ,

honorary part-time

influence of ,

interviewed for this book

move away from full-time

move to Parliament from role

role of , ,

short terms served by

wording "full-time" vs "permanent"

financial support see funding

focus groups see market research

Fraser, Malcolm , , ,

Freudenberg, Graham

funding see also campaign spending; donations

electoral reform regarding

government regulation of

influence from ,

Iraqi loan

Labor Party , , , , , , , ,

Liberal Party , , , , , , ,

property investments , , , ,

public see public funding of campaign costs

role of party officials , ,

Gair, Vince

Gallup polls ,

Gartrell, Tim , , , ,

Latham and

Rudd and

gender barrier

Georgiou, Petro

Gibbs, Margaret ,

Gillard, Julia ,

Givens, Tom

Goldberg Agency ,

Goods and Services Tax (GST) , , , ,

Goot, Murray

Gorton, John , ,

grassroots campaigns see local campaigning; micro-targeting; volunteers

Grattan, Michelle ,

Gray, Gary , , , , , ,

contesting seat in Perth

direct mail in marginal seats

Gartrell and ,

incumbency campaign

public funding of campaign costs , ,

Greenfields Foundation

Greens Party ,

ground war see local campaigning

Hall, Steele

Hancock, Ian , , ,

Hansen Rubensohn-McCann Erikson ,

Hansen-Rubensohn Pty Ltd

Hanson, Pauline , ,

Hartcher, Bede ,

Hartley, Bill , , ,

Hasluck, Paul

Hawke, Bob , , , , ,

leadership challenges and

Hawker, Bruce ,

Hayden, Bill ,

head offices , , ,  see also federal directors; federal/national secretaries; funding; local campaigning; national campaign directors; state-federal relationship

authority and coordination , , , , ,

budget of secretariat

campaign strengths in

diversity in

expertise of

Labor Party , , , , , , , , ,

Liberal Party , , , ,

Henderson, Ian

Hewson, John ,

Hill, David

Hogg, Bob , , , , , ,

advised Maxine McKew

experience of

finances and

leadership challenges and

Holt, Edgar ,

Holt, Harold , , ,

Howard, John , , , , ,

Eggleton and

Loughnane and

Howes, Paul

Hughes, Billy

Iemma, Morris

IMGE (consultants)

independent candidates ,

indigenous Australians

interest groups

Iraqi Ba'ath Party (gift affair)

Isaacs, Cyril see Wyndham, Cyril

Ivanov, Valery

Jaensch, Dean

John Curtin House Limited ,

John Singleton Agency , ,

Johnson, Boris

Jones, Barry

Jones, Paul

Kaiser, Mike

Katz, Richard

Keating, Paul , , ,

Keeffe, Jim ,

Kelly, Jackie

Kelly, Mike

Kennedy, President J. F.

Kennelly, Pat (Patrick John) , , , ,

preselection for Senate

travel abroad ,

Kernot, Cheryl

Kirchheimer, Otto

Labor Party , ,  see also federal/national secretaries; names of politicians; names of secretaries

climate change policy

community organising expertise ,

"democratic deficit" of

DLP breaks away from , , ,

election campaigns see elections

environment as key issue ,

executive as ALP decision makers

federal structure see state-federal relationship

finance subcommittee

financial restructuring ,

funding see funding

grassroots campaign vision

history of

increased postal allowance

internal balances threatened

membership decline

National Campaign Committee (NCC) , ,

national head offices see head offices

new management structure

path to professionalism

philosophy of power ,

Progressive Business entity

review of internal procedures

Special Publicity Fund (Leader's Fund) ,

state secretaries see state secretaries

targeting winnable seats see marginal seats

turnover of campaigners

unanimity and cohesion ,

values of

Victorian state branch abolished

Wyndham critical of ,  see also Wyndham Plan

Lampe, Amanda

Laris, Skye

Latham, Mark

Lawrence, Neil

leadership battles , , ,

levies see funding

Liberal and Country League (South Australia)

Liberal Party , , ,

1972 revival of

awareness of marginal seats

defeats ,

election campaigns see elections

Federal Directors see federal directors

Federal Fund

Federal Policy Support Unit

"Feedback" database

fought postal allowance increase

funding see funding

history of

managerial innovations , , ,

membership decline

Menzies House , ,

Millennium Forum (fundraising arm)

national campaign committee ,

path to professionalism

slogans see slogans

staff of

Staff Planning Committee (SPC) ,

states and see state-federal relationship

top-down campaign vision

values of

Lindsay test

literature see campaign literature

local campaigning , , , ,  see also direct mail; personal canvassing

ALP's "democratic deficit" and

community engagement

cultural change needed in

grassroots campaigns

head offices and

micro-targeting ,

preselection , ,

public meetings

volunteers in ,

Loughnane, Brian , , ,

as federal director , , , , ,

funding challenges

Liberal Party review and

public funding of campaign costs

Lynch, Phillip

Macfie, Malcolm , , ,

MacTiernan, Allanah

Mair, Peter

Makin, Norman

marginal seats , ,

"ground war" in ,

targeting , , , , ,

market research , ,  see also advertising; slogans

campaign strategy based on

catch-all parties and

effect on democracy

focus groups , , ,

marketing-driven campaigns , , , , , , ,

national security issues

party officials' role in ,

"Phil" and "Jenny" (hypothetical voters) , ,

qualitative , ,

scientifically random sampling ,

telephone polling

Marplan ,

Marsh, Ian

Martin, Nick ,

Martin, Peter

Masius Wynn Williams

Masius Wynn Williams advertising agency

Matthews, Richard

McConnell, Douglas

McConnell, John

McGrath, Charles

McKew, Maxine

McLeay, George

McLeay, Leo

McMahon, Bill

McMullan, Bob , , , ,

communications strategy

Hawke and

left head office for Parliament

marginal seat campaigning

market research and ,

on need for coordination

philosophy of power

McNamara, Daniel , ,

as official and MP

media 1,  see also advertising; newspapers; online campaigning; radio; television advertising

Meeking, Charles

members see political parties

Menzies, Robert , , , , , ,

Eggleton and

"faceless men" comment

McLeay on staff of

Menzies House , ,

micro-targeting

need for volunteers

mining tax

Mitchelmore, Tony

money see funding

Morgan, Roy ,

Mullins, Clarke and Ralph ,

National Australia Bank (NAB)

national campaign directors , , ,  see also professional campaigners; state-federal relationship

criticism of

funding see funding

in process of government ,

influence of ,

newcomers in role

spending see campaign spending

National Conferences (ALP)

National Farmers' Federation

national head offices see head offices

National Party (previously Country Party)

national secretaries of the ALP see federal/national secretaries

national security in campaign

nationalism vs federalism see state-federal relationship

newspapers ,

Newton, Maxwell , ,

Nutt, Tony

O'Brien, Kerry

Olifent, J. H.

One Nation Party ,

online campaigning

Labor Party , , ,

Liberal Party

opinion research see market research

O'Reilly, David ,

Overacker, Louise , ,

party leaders ,  see also leadership battles

party members see political parties

party officials see federal directors; federal/national secretaries

Pascoe, Timothy , , , ,

Peacock, Andrew ,

"permission-based marketing"

personal canvassing , ,  see also telephone canvassing

personalised mail see direct mail

Phillips, Morgan

Playford, Tom

Poke, George

Polfile (Electrac) database

policy development process ,

electoral contest disconnected from

market research and

political donations see donations

political parties

as survivors

changing nature of , ,

membership-based party model

three sets of actors

two-party system ,

polls see market research

Porter, Charles

preselection see local campaigning

press see newspapers

professional campaigners , , , ,  see also campaign strategy; head offices

1915-1945: pre-professional era

1945-1972: emergence of professionalism

1973-2000: intensification

2000-2013: diversification and deadlock

2013: new phase using volunteer labour

appointment vs election of ,

as officials and MPs

campaign management experience

centralisation and see head offices; state-federal relationship

competitive cycle in campaigns , , ,

criticism of

early transformation of role ,

effect on democracy

elections and see elections

electoral cycle and

factors within parties

first full-time paid ALP official

first paid official ,

gender barrier

Labor Party see federal/national secretaries

Liberal Party see federal directors

loyal, independent outsider as

managerial expertise

market research by see market research

media experience and skills

military prototype of , ,

money and see funding

national focus of see national campaign directors

personal attacks by

philosophy of power

relationships with parliamentarians , , , , ,

role and characteristics of , , , ,

short terms served by

strategies of see campaign strategy

succession planning

technological determinism see technology

unity and consistency from

property investments , , , ,

public funding of campaign costs , , , ,

administrative funding

cartel-like behaviour

electoral reform regarding

received after election day

public opinion polls see market research

Punch, Gary

radio , ,

Ramsay, Alan

Rawson, D. W.

reforms see Wyndham Plan

regional seats , ,

Reid, Alan

Reith, Peter

research see market research

Richardson, Graham

Ritchie, Tom ,

Robb, Andrew , ,

as federal director , , , ,

consultancy overseas

marginal seats and ,

move to Parliament

on funding ,

Roy Morgan market research

Rubensohn, Sim , , , , ,

1968 SA campaign

work for Liberal Party ,

Rudd, Kevin , , ,

Bitar and

Wright and

"safe" seats , , , ,  see also marginal seats

Santamaria, B. A.

Schmella, Jack ,

secretariats see head offices

secretaries see federal directors; federal/national secretaries

Sheezel, Julian

Shepherdson, Tom

Singleton see John Singleton Agency

slogans

"Go for Growth"

"If he wins, you lose"

"It's Time" , , , ,

"Kevin O'Lemon"

"Kevin07"

"Real Solutions"

"Turn on the Lights, Australia"

"Your Rights at Work" , ,

Smark, Peter

Snedden, Bill , , ,

social media see online campaigning

Southey, Bob , , , , ,

speaker's notes , ,

Spectrum International

Starr, Graeme

state directors (Liberal)

New South Wales

Queensland , ,

Victoria , , ,

state secretaries (ALP) ,

New South Wales , ,

Queensland , ,

South Australia , ,

Victoria , , , ,

state-federal relationship , , , , , ,  see also head offices; national campaign directors

centralisation and , , , ,

different state priorities

funding and see funding

integration of state branches

Labor Party , , , , , , , , ,

Liberal Party , , , , , , , ,

Stewart, Archibald ,

Stokes, Geoff

strategy see campaign strategy

succession planning

surveys see market research

Swan, Wayne

swinging seats  see also marginal seats

swinging voters , , ,

Tanner, Lindsay ,

technology , ,

databases and direct mail , , ,

telephone canvassing , ,

robocalls ,

telephone polling see market research

television advertising , , , , , ,

advertising blackout

cost of

television debates

Textor, Mark , , ,

address to unionists

Crosby and ,

Textor Crosby

The Political Broadcasts and Political Disclosures Act 1991

trade unions , ,

ALP relationship with ,

training in campaign skills , ,

Tripovich, Jack ,

United Australia Party ,

Utting, John ,

Utz, Stanley

Valder, John

Virgo, Geoff

volunteers see local campaigning

voters see advertising; elections

Wake, Nancy

Walker, Ron

Walsh, Eric

Walsh, Frank

Walsh, Geoff , , ,

elected national secretary ,

Gartrell and

Walsh, Peter

Weber, Max ,

West, Katherine

Westerway, Peter , ,

White, David

White, Eric , ,

Whitington, Don ,

Whitlam, Gough ,

1972 campaign , , , , ,

Combe and ,

Iraqi loan

Wyndham and ,

Whitlam, Margaret

Williams, Pamela

Willoughby, Bob , , ,

federal system and ,

winnable seats see marginal seats

Woods, Bob (Dr) ,

WorkChoices

"Your Rights at Work" campaign , ,

Wright, George , , , ,

micro-targeting by ,

Wyndham, Cyril (born Isaacs) , , , ,

accused of misappropriating party funds

ALP institution and

as federal secretary , ,

as returning officer

characteristics and role of , ,

Evatt and

TV advertising and , ,

Whitlam and ,

Wyndham Plan

Yabsley, Michael

Young, Mick , , , , ,

1968 SA campaign ,

election to seat of Port Adelaide

McMullan on

on campaign funding , , 
  1.  FRONT COVER
  2.  COPYRIGHT
  3.  THE PROFESSIONALS
  4.  DEDICATION
  5.  TABLES
  6.  INTRODUCTION
  7.  MILITARY PROTOTYPE
  8.  NUMBERS MAN
  9.  A MEETING IN LONDON
  10.  NATIONAL CAMPAIGN DIRECTOR
  11.  A BLOODLETTING
  12.  A QUESTION OF MONEY 
  13.  A PHILOSOPHY OF POWER
  14.  CONTESTED TERRAIN
  15.  A LIBERAL ASCENDANCY
  16.  A GROUND WAR
  17.  A LINE OF SUCCESSION
  18.  MICRO-TARGETING
  19.  CONCLUSION
  20.  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  21.  NOTES ON SOURCES
  22.  BIBLIOGRAPHY
  23.  INDEX

