WHE N 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
Mills, S. 2014 The professionals : strategy, money and the rise of the political
campaigner in Australia, Black Inc., Collingwood, Vic.
ISBN 9781863956710
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A LINE OF SUCCESSION 211
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 GeoffWalsh’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
212 THE PROFESSIONAlS
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 rightwing
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
- The ALP learned many new technical skills during this
period, such as how to integrate websites, social media and microtargeting
into its campaigns, and it continued to be well served by
the pollster John Utting of UMR, whom Gary Gray had hired in - 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
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A liNE Of SUCCESSION 213
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
214 THE PROFESSIONALS
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 - 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
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A liNE OF SUCCESSION 215
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:
218 THE PROFESSIONAlS
in Loughnane’s four campaigns, he has faced off against three firsttime
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 2ooos, this experience was concentrated at the state level; the
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A LINE OF SUCCESSION 217
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.
218 THE PROFESSI!JNALS
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
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A LINE OF SUCCESSION 218
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
220 THE PfUJFES8HlNALS
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 6o (with three independents). The Coalition’s support
also translated into an absolute majority in the Senate –
unprecedented since Malcolm Ftaser’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
A LHH Of SUCCESSION 221
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 “Kevino7,” 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 Kevino7 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 Kevino7 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
222 THE PROFESSUlNALS
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
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A LINE OF SUCCESSION 223
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
- Bitar completed his education at Bankstown TAFE and
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224 THE PROFESSIONALS
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.
J.
A LINE OF 8UilCESSION 225
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
226 THE !lllOFESSHlNALS
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.
A LINE OF SUCCESSION 227
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 “Kevinoi’ 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 NSWfocussed
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.
228 THE PROFESSIONAlS
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 lemma, 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, ‘o4, ‘o7, 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
•
A LINE OF SUCCESSION 220
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.
—-~—– ··-·····—–
230 THE PROFESSIONAlS
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,
……
A liNE OF SUCCESSION 231
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 shortagt: 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:
232 THE PROFESSIONAlS
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.
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