Campaign Professionals: party officials and

the professionalisation of Australian

political parties

Stephen Mills

Thesis submitted to satisfy the requirements of the degree

of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Government and International Relations

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

University of Sydney

2013
 I affirm that this thesis is my own original work, that it has not been submitted for any other
degree, and that I have acknowledged all the assistance I received in preparing it and the sources
it employs.

Word length: 95,500 words plus appendices and bibliography

Stephen Mills

ii
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgements v

Abstract vii

Introduction 1

New Party Actors and a New Approach to Election Campaigning 2

Research Questions and Significance 4
Hypothesis and Research Design 5
Thesis Structure 6

Chapter One: Understanding Change in Political Parties and Election Campaigns 8

Changing Parties, Changing Campaigns 9

Party Officials: From ‘Back-room Boys’ to ‘Campaign Professionals’ 14
Understanding Change as Professionalisation 19
Discussion 22

Chapter Two: Research Design and Methodology: Institutional and Qualitative 24

Research Method: Semi-Structured Interviews 26

Research Method: Documentary Sources 28
Qualitative Data Coding and Analysis 29
Interpretation and Theory Building: Historical Institutionalism 31

Chapter Three: ‘I Do Regard Myself as a Professional’: Economic, Technical and

Ideological Characteristics of Head Office Professionals 34

Professional Campaign Management 34

Professionals on Professionalism 37
Professionalism: a Distinctive Economic Status 38
Professionalism: Technical Competence 39
An Ideology of Professionalism: Serving the Client 43
Discussion 44

Chapter Four: ‘A Highly Contested Ballot’ and ‘Lines of Succession’:

Professionalisation and Party Structures 46

Lifelong Party Members 47

Seasoned Campaign Practitioners 48
Elected or Appointed Officials 50
The Liberal Party: a consensus appointment model 51
ALP: a contested election model 52
ALP: a consensus election model 54
ALP: a consensus appointment model 55
ALP and Liberal Party: duration of employment 57
Contested Relationship with Party Leaders 59
Discussion 64

Chapter Five: ‘The Left Hand Never Knew What the Right Hand Was Doing’: Head
Office and the Centralising Imperative 66

Decentralised Campaign Management pre-1970s: The ALP 67

Decentralised Campaign Management pre-1970s: The Liberal Party 70
Centralised Campaign Management in a Federal System 71
Appointing a National Campaign Director 74
Strengthening the Head Office 76
Building National Cooperation 78

i
 Imposing Consistent Internal Communications 81
Engaging Specialist Agencies 83
Building a national party 86
Discussion 89

Chapter Six: ‘What Is Required To Win the Election and What Do We Have To
Do?’: Head Office and the Strategic Imperative 91

Strategy as a Plan of Action 92

Strategic Development: Intelligence Gathering 94
Strategic Development: Identification of Strategic Pathways 98
Strategic Development: Message Development 102
Strategic Development: Resource Acquisition and Campaign ‘Know-how’ 105
Strategic Implementation: Message Dissemination 108
Strategic Implementation: Targeting 110
Reviewing the Campaign 117
Discussion 120

Chapter Seven: ‘If I Had Another Couple of Million Bucks’: Head Office and the
Funding Imperative 122

Federal Problems of Party Finance 123

Contrasting Models of Centralised Funding 124
ALP: Reforming Internal Funding 126
ALP: Promoting Public Campaign Financing 130
ALP and Liberal Party: Funding Crises of the 1990s and Beyond 132
Debt-funded Campaigns: Living Beyond their Means 137
Discussion 138

Conclusion: Party Officials, Party Professionalisation – and Party Decline? 140

………….

Appendices

One: Party Officials: Biographical Notes 148

Two: The First Marginal Seat Campaign 159

Three: Party Officials: Interview Data, Demographic Data and Party Experience 161

Table 1: Research Interviews: where and when conducted

Table 2: Interview Coding Schema: Principal Themes
Table 3: National Secretaries and Federal Directors: Place of Birth and Education
Table 4: National Secretaries and Federal Directors: Occupations and Political
Experience Prior to Appointment
Table 5: National Secretaries and Federal Directors (interviewed): Prior Election
Campaign Experience
Table 6: National Secretaries and Federal Directors: Age at Appointment and Years
in Office
Table 7: ALP Federal Conference Rules: Secretary’s Term of Office
Table 8: Key Agency Relationships of Federal Head Offices, 1972-2010
Table 9: Methods of Centralising Public Funding Receipts

Four: Interview Outline 175

Bibliography 178

………….

ii
 Tables and Figures (in text)

Table 1: Structure of Major Australian parties: Three Faces (Katz & Mair, 1993) and Two Levels 17

Table 2: Federal/ National Secretaries of the Australian Labor Party: Life Dates and Terms in Office 25

Table 3: Federal Directors of the Liberal Party: Life Dates and Terms in Office 25

Table 4: Prior Campaign Management Experience (Summary) 50

Table 5: Methods of Selection: Consensus and Contested Models 56

Figure 1: O’Neill, Ward (1997), ‘Liberal Party director Linton (sic) Crosby consulting a map on his
way to the next election, May 1998’; National Library of Australia Ward O’Neill collection ref nla.pic-
vn3564956 96

Table 6: Major Party Receipts as a Percentage of Total Public Funding 131

Table 7: 40-year Electoral Record of the Professional Campaign Model 144

iii
iv
 Acknowledgements

The principal debt I owe is to the party officials themselves whose willingness to be interviewed
made this research possible. I gratefully acknowledge their generosity in granting me their time,
their careful attention, and their trust. I hope I have repaid them sufficiently with this study of
their remarkable contribution to Australian political life. I must particularly acknowledge Cyril
Wyndham who at the age of 81 graciously 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.

I also want to acknowledge the tremendous support I have received at the University of Sydney
throughout this project and, first and foremost, from my academic supervisor Professor Rod Tiffen.
Rod planted the seed of this research in my mind several years ago and as the project grew into
the light of day he was a tireless, patient and insightful teacher and mentor. I could not have
imagined a more constructive relationship and I am deeply grateful. I have also benefited from
the advice and assistance of other faculty members in the Department of Government and
International Relations, including Ariadne Vromen, Louise Chappell (now at UNSW), Rodney Smith,
Anika Gauja, Peter Chen, Betsi Beem and Colin Wight. I have been fortunate to have a highly
congenial and supportive second ‘home’ on campus, at the Graduate School of Government under
the direction of Geoff Gallop, where colleagues Gabi Ramia, Zina O’Leary and Joanne Kelly, along
with Leanne Howie and Richard Prekodravac, have provided support and advice in many ways. I
also received great practical assistance from Karen Chilcott and her colleagues at the University’s
Fisher Library. On board the PhD roller-coaster, I shared the thrills and spills with fellow riders
including Drs Trevor Cook, Naser Ghobadzadeh and Stewart Jackson, and soon-to-be Drs Judy
Betts, Ben Moffitt and Chris Neff, benefiting from their constructive feedback while enjoying their
good humour and friendship. Thanks all.

Off campus, this project evolved within a very supportive environment created by many colleagues
and friends. Right from the start, Ian Marsh, now at the Australian National University, has been
unfailingly enthusiastic and acutely insightful. Jennifer Lees-Marshment at the University of
Auckland provided valuable feedback and, moreover, a publishing opportunity. Malcolm Mackerras
kindly provided copies of his electoral pendulum. David Piggott gave me an early idea, Elias Hallaj
gave me early encouragement, Imre Salusinszky gave me a contact or two, Vin Plant gave me a
book, and Ward O’Neill gave me permission to use his drawing. Fergus Hunter chipped in when it
mattered. Jeff Richardson arranged a stay at Trinity College at the University of Melbourne. Again,
thanks all.

To friends and relatives in Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, Queanbeyan, Bawley Point and Tathra who
listened to my ruminations on Australian party officials, interrupting only to offer another glass of
inspiration, thank you. Thanks also for critical discussions during the many ascents of Red Hill and
the one ascent of the magnificent Mt Gulaga. 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; they will, I suspect, be delighted at the completion of this project.

Stephen Mills

November 2012

v
vi
 Abstract

A
ustralian political parties and election campaigns are often said to have become
professionalised, yet the term lacks clear definition and the nature of professionalisation as
a process of institutional change is poorly articulated. This thesis elaborates the nature, the
timing and the drivers of the changes in Australian elections and political parties, principally
through depth interviews with present and former officials of the two major Australian political
parties, who occupy the important but long neglected third face in Katz and Mair’s model of
political parties. The interview data reveal the distinctive identity of party officials as ‘campaign
professionals’, and provide a robust definition of professionalism in a party context: the officials
are paid, they have high levels of technical competence, and they are devoted as partisans to the
electoral interests of their client, the party. The interviews also provide new evidence about
professionalisation as a process of institutional change. The national party officials are central to
this process, creating a professional campaign model through centralising campaign authority in
their own hands at the expense of state branches and, at times, of the party leaders; through
taking responsibility for developing and implementing campaign strategies; and through acquiring
the financial and other resources necessary to sustain this new style of campaigning. Over a three-
phase process of professionalisation – identified as an emergent phase (from 1945 to 1972), an
intensification phase (1973 – 2000) and a phase of diversification and deadlock (from 2001) - this
model has come to dominate Australian party campaigning. Political parties are in some senses
increasingly embattled, with radically declining party membership, a weakened linkage role, and
increased electoral volatility. But in other respects as this thesis demonstrates, their campaigning
capacities, with their campaign professionals as central agents, continue to become better
resourced and they remain strongly entrenched and empowered in Australian elections.

vii
viii
 Introduction

I
n October 1945, Donald Cleland was appointed the first Federal Director of the newly-formed
Liberal Party of Australia. A Perth lawyer and repeatedly unsuccessful election candidate for
the conservative cause in Western Australia, Cleland had seen wartime service as an army
quartermaster in North Africa and New Guinea; he had risen to the rank of Brigadier and been
decorated. But he was a ‘rather humourless cove’ and in the by-election following the death of
Prime Minister John Curtin had failed to win the support of the voters of Fremantle. Cleland’s first
task in his civilian role was to embark on a national tour to inspect the party’s state branches,
accompanied by the equally new Public Relations Officer Eric White. Their report back to the
Federal Executive was sombrely realistic. Their national overview was challenged by the competing
perspectives of ‘six separate entities’ in the state capitals, which ‘vary in efficiency and in extent’
and were not campaign ready. They observed: ‘Taken overall, the organisation is weak and
spasmodic as compared to the overall organisation of the anti-Liberal forces’ (Starr, 1980: 89-90;
Nelson, 1993; Martin, 1999: v2,p31).

In its focus on electoral preparedness, its comparison with their political rivals the Australian Labor
Party (ALP), and its frustration with state divisions, the Cleland-White report foreshadowed many
of the concerns that would preoccupy Liberal Party officials in the decades to come. Curtin’s Labor
Party had won a smashing victory at the previous federal election in 1943. Seeking to forge the
diverse fragments of Australian conservatism into a single united Liberal Party, Opposition Leader
Robert Menzies told potential adherents at the Canberra Conference in October 1944 that of course
Labor’s policy was ‘repugnant to us’. But its ‘unanimity and cohesion on the organisational side’
was a decided political asset, he said; its journals were so effective that a Labor supporter in
Bunbury would express the same point of view in almost the same words as one in Townsville.
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 (Starr, 1980: 75).

For Menzies and many other anti-Labor figures at this time, organisational questions were more
important to the revival of conservative electoral fortunes than questions of policy (Aimer, 1979;
Hancock, 2000: 20-1). Indeed he placed organisational shortcomings at the top of the list of their
‘defects’:

First, 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 (Starr, 1980: 75).

The delegates duly recommended ‘the formation of a permanent secretariat at Canberra’ (Starr,
1980: 79). Though the Head Office remained in Sydney for several years, Cleland’s appointment
as a paid professional administrator provided the party with its first national ‘general staff’.

Beating Labor at its own game, then, appears to have been a key motivation for founding the
Liberals’ Head Office. So it is no small irony that the Labor campaign machine so respected by
Cleland and Menzies was so much less well organised than they imagined. To be sure, Labor’s
national identity and common cause predated Federation, and its Federal Executive had operated
since 1915. But before Curtin’s victory in 1943, Labor had not been an electorally successful party
at the national level, winning just three elections in the previous forty years (in 1910, 1914 and
1929). While the Liberals employed three full-time executives - Cleland and White were soon
joined by a Senior Research Officer - national Labor’s entire staff apparatus consisted of a single
part-time honorary official. At 69 years of age, Daniel McNamara was certainly experienced: he
had laboured in this role since 1925. But being Federal Secretary was not his most important job,
and national politics was not his main focus: McNamara was a state party official and his full-time
paid job, which he had also held from 1925, was secretary of Labor’s Victorian branch. McNamara
was also an elected member of Victoria’s Legislative Council (from 1917) and, for three short
periods, had been a minister in Victorian Labor Governments (Strangio, 2012). This arrangement
allowed national Labor the thrifty fiction of borrowing its administrator from the Victorians in
exchange for a meagre honorarium, in the knowledge that his actual livelihoods were subsidised
by the party members and taxpayers in that state. Nearly twenty years after the Federal
Parliament had moved to the national capital, Labor’s Head Office, such as it was, remained in
Melbourne; Labor’s federal business was essentially run out of McNamara’s office there. 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.

In setting up their Head Office then, the Liberal Party responded to Labor’s perceived strengths;
but doing so seems to have spurred Labor to lift its own game. In February 1945 – months after
the Canberra Conference - Labor’s Federal Executive issued a call to state branches and the
Federal Parliamentary caucus for ‘better coordination’ at Federal elections. At its next meeting, in
May, the Executive’s minutes record a ‘long discussion’ about a proposal ‘for a Federal Secretariat
of the Party to be set up at Canberra as early as possible’. McNamara was directed to explore the
idea and to work out the details, including how much this would cost the states to fund; but his
inquiries stalled when he fell ill in early 1946 and he was forced to stand down as Federal
Secretary. He died of tuberculosis in December 1947 (Weller & Lloyd, 1978: 281, 298; Cook,
1986: 347).

Perhaps what Menzies admired about Labor existed not within its Head Office but outside it, in the
form of its long-standing commercial advertising agency Hansen-Rubensohn Pty Ltd. More than an
advertiser, its principal Sim Rubensohn was also fundraiser, political strategist and confidant of
party leaders at state and national level. ‘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 losing
to Labor again, under Prime Minister Ben Chifley, in the 1946 federal election. The Liberals
promptly hired the ‘tradesmen’ away from Labor and put them to work in their campaign for the
1949 election. It was a successful recruitment. Rubensohn’s radio advertising campaign - ‘the
longest and most lavishly funded political campaign ever seen in Australia’ according to Murray
Goot (2002) - played an important role in the Liberals’ campaign which saw them defeat Labor and
Menzies become Prime Minister. The central element of the campaign was a radio series of
dramatised political satire, ‘John Henry Austral’, which ran twice-weekly on stations around the
nation for some twenty months in the lead-up to the 1949 Election Day. Its exact cost is unknown,
but an estimate of £800,000 still impressed commentators a dozen years later as an
unprecedentedly large sum (Whitington, 1961; Mills, 1986: 87-95; Hancock, 2000: 90-4; Mills,
2012c). With an election win under his belt, Cleland stepped down from the Secretariat and
returned to Papua New Guinea as Administrator; he was later recommended for a knighthood.

New Party Actors and a New Approach to Election Campaigning

Cleland’s appointment marked the departure point for a significant, but little-understood,
transformation of party organisation in Australia. Into the traditional cast of party actors – party
members and elected representatives – a new actor was introduced: a paid party official.
Alongside the traditional stages for internal party activity – local branches and legislative chambers
– a new stage was created: a central Head Office. In contrast to Labor’s part-time state-based
‘honorary secretary’, the Liberals’ innovation of a full-time paid party official in a well-resourced
national Head Office became entrenched in the Liberal Party and was ultimately – though only
after several false starts - adopted also by the ALP. Labor did not employ a Federal Secretary who
was not also a state secretary until 1951; it was another twelve years, in 1963, before Labor
employed its first full-time national secretary on the Cleland model. Over time these new party
actors introduced a new form of party activity: the new approach to election campaigning, which
the Liberals had pioneered in 1949. Labor was not able to match their effort until 1972. In the
intervening decades, of course, the technologies of communications had been revolutionised, and
new marketing tools emerged, most notably market research; demographic change enlarged and

2
transformed the voting population in significant respects. Yet with due allowance for these
developments, the essential features of Labor’s 1972 campaign resembled the Liberals’ 1949
model. Both campaigns were built around Opposition Leaders whose powerful messages of
change, supported by extensive and expensive electronic advertising, were organised and
delivered by a centralised campaign organisation based in the parties’ national Head Offices.
(Astonishingly, the resilient Rubensohn was involved with them both.)

After Labor’s win in 1972, this style of campaigning was progressively adopted and refined in both
parties. But this did not happen on a smooth forward trajectory. The arrival of the party officials,
with their novel approach to campaigning, disrupted established elements of the party structure.
Not everyone accepted the basic idea, for example, that a party should try to win elections. In the
wake of Labor’s defeat in 1949, the powerful secretary of the Western Australian branch F. E. ‘Joe’
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 ... (Chamberlain, 1964).

Still in the wilderness after seven years, Chamberlain – by now the party’s federal president -
continued to insist there was ‘much to be thankful for’ in Labor’s 1955 election loss:

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
(Chamberlain, 1964).

Such outspokenness may be rare. But the adoption of the new campaign style was accompanied
by a chorus of concern from within the parties. In 1972, ‘stalwart’ Labor Party members were
‘aghast’ at the ‘soft-sell’ involved in Labor’s campaign marketing (Blewett, 1973). In the
Queensland Liberal Party in the 1980s, a former party official bemoaned the arrival of ‘filleted
young men’ into executive positions, downgrading member sovereignty in favour of ‘top control’
(C. Porter, 1981). As the new campaign style was adopted, party membership began – for
whatever reason - a precipitate decline; Head Office adjusted by taking over or abandoning many
of the powers, such as policy formation and candidate selection, formerly exercised by members
through local branches. Grassroots canvassing performed by volunteer members was superseded
by capital-intensive market research, direct mail and television advertising which linked Head
Office directly to the electors. Meanwhile, the parties’ federal structures were centralised at the
national level, and state officials were co-opted into the new model. Parliamentary representatives
too had to adjust to a pervasive campaign model which reached into pre-selections, policy making
and even leadership selection. Moreover, paying for the new campaign model required funding
levels that were quite beyond the traditional capacities of the parties; parties’ financial reliance on
membership subscriptions was supplanted by corporate donations and, from the 1980s, subsidies
provided by the taxpayer.

Amplified by media commentary, a murmur of internal disquiet has become a dominant narrative
of discontent, especially within the ALP: party officials are ‘faceless men’ driven by ‘focus groups’
and ‘negative’ advertising; members of parliament are conviction-free vote-seekers who can win
elections but cannot govern or lead. Retired Labor minister Lindsay Tanner exemplified this
narrative by berating the party’s class of ‘cynical manipulators’ and ‘political professionals’ who
were ‘extremely adept at the mechanics of politics but largely uninterested in its purpose’. Labor,
he claims, has become ‘an electoral machine’ (Coorey, 2012). Beneath the inevitable
simplifications, party concern is real. Following the 2010 Federal Election which produced a hung
Parliament, the Liberal Party commissioned former Howard Government minister Peter Reith to
conduct an internal review of the campaign effort. He found that the Federal Secretariat had for

3
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 (Reith, 2011: 23, 28). Labor’s
counterpart review, conducted by party elders Steve Bracks, Bob Carr and John Faulkner,
identified similar problems: ‘Modern campaign techniques introduced over the last 30 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 in numbers and
participation levels, while the party’s focus on election campaigning had often come at the expense
of resources dedicated to party-building activities (Bracks, Carr, & Faulkner, 2011: 9-13).

Research Questions and Significance

These developments – wide ranging in their potential ramifications for citizens, for political parties,
and for democratic practice as a whole - suggest a rich field for research. At a basic level, it is
clearly necessary to establish the identity and characteristics of the party officials in their Head
Offices – to retrieve a lost lineage of party officials stretching back nearly sixty years to Cleland,
and in the ALP nearly a century to the first Federal Secretary in 1915. Who are these individuals?
How did they come to occupy this role in the party: what was their skill-set and experience and
how were they selected? While the equivalent data is readily available about parliamentarians, one
searches the academic literature in vain for a consolidated data set of party officials.

Beyond these basic questions of identity, it is also necessary to explore the new campaign style
these officials introduced: what constitutes this new approach to election campaigning, what roles
do the party officials play in it, and how does it differ from previous campaign practice? Of
particular importance, it is necessary to explore whether and how this new model has changed the
way parties operate and the relationships among party actors. Political parties are often
understood as bilateral structures that link citizens with the state by providing a democratic chain
of participation, representation and accountability (K. Lawson & Merkl, 1988; Dalton &
Wattenberg, 2000b; Dalton, Farrell, & McAllister, 2011). In this bilateral model, essential party
work is thought of as being performed in forums of deliberation and participation such as the
branch meeting, the party conference, the caucus room, the legislature. As such, the model has
powerful normative connotations. Its apparent decline underpins the sense of despair, almost of
existential crisis, expressed by the 2010 party reviews. Its bilateral structure leaves little
theoretical justification for party officials and discounts party work performed in the national Head
Office. Addressing this shortcoming requires a more complete framework of party structure, one
that recognises the role of the party officials while also taking account of the apparent
disintegration of accepted notions of democratically appropriate party structures. Such a
framework can ask new questions about the relationships between party actors, ranging as they
do from relationships of rivalry, trespass and to collaboration and emulation. Within the party, how
do the officials relate to members, elected parliamentarians and state branches? Have indeed the
‘professional’ campaign techniques promoted by party officials triggered the contemporary party
crisis by driving away members – or are they an adaptive response to membership decline?
Beyond the party, who employs the non-party marketing consultants and what role do they play in
campaign decision making? Between the parties, what similarities and differences can be observed
between officials of the two major Australian parties? Can patterns of emulation and learning be
observed?

This leads to a third set of questions. The normative standing of the bilateral linkage model relies,
in part, on a glorification of the amateur, volunteer, status of the party members. Its flip side
implicitly discounts the party officials because they are paid for their party work. Yet
‘professionalism’ and its cognates are ambiguous and highly contested terms. Could Cleland and
McNamara, for example, be termed professional in the 1940s? Cleland was a salaried employee
while McNamara, as a part-time honorary secretary, looks more the amateur. Moreover, Cleland
was a professional lawyer who went on to become a professional soldier; he had requisite training
and qualifications in both roles; McNamara lacked any such professional standing. At a time when

4
party organisation tended to be haphazard and mediocre, Cleland brought advanced skills of
management acquired in military service and was supported by a trained staff; McNamara had no
such resources. Yet McNamara had a life-long commitment to and experience in party affairs, and
seems more like a political professional than Cleland, a neophyte and outsider. Perhaps neither of
them was a professional. Unlike the traditional doctor or lawyer, neither was self-employed.
Moreover, as partisans, both lacked the dispassionate independence of judgement that might be
considered a hallmark of professional conduct. Perhaps there is even a trace of class consciousness
in the discussion, with Menzies’ description of Rubensohn’s advertising agency as ‘clever
tradesmen’, available for hire like a team of bricklayers; clearly, they could not be regarded as
professional. Since the 1940s, the term has become more widely applied within political parties
and election campaigns and, arguably, even more ambiguous. In using these terms to describe
Australian party officials and election campaigns, a careful attempt at definitional clarity is
required.

A final group of questions transfers these issues of identity and relationships into a dynamic
process of change through time. It is clear parties and election campaigns have changed from the
1940s to the present day. How and why did such change occur? The question takes us to the heart
of the structure-agency debate. Institutions like political parties and the system of rules and
practices that build up around election campaigns endure for many decades and powerfully shape
human behaviour. But these same institutions are also destabilised, disrupted and modified by the
actions of the human actors within and around them. If we are to understand the transition from
the Liberal Party of Cleland in the 1940s to the ALP of Young in the 1970s, and the continuing
changes since then, we will need to explore a broad spectrum of potential drivers of what is
apparently a complex process of change. Exogenous factors played a potentially critical role,
creating new channels for campaign communication (television) and new tools of campaign
strategy (market research); societal changes lifted education levels, changed work habits and
domestic arrangements, breeding new attitudes and behaviours among voters. But endogenous
factors also seem likely to have played a critical role. Parties win and lose office, attract and lose
members, adopt and abandon policy positions, promote and overthrow leaders, learn and forget
campaign skills. They contain changing power dynamics, ideological leanings, and resource levels.
All these factors may have influenced their propensity to adopt or refine the new campaign
approach. And parties may have influenced each other in this endeavour. Like armies, parties exist
to compete and to prevail. Driven by a competitive logic, they spend much of their time observing
their fiercest rivals so as to neutralise any advantage; in the process differences are homogenised
and the rivals come to resemble each other. A further consideration in understanding this complex
process is the tempo of change. While membership decline occurs slowly, over a long period of
time, technological innovations may emerge quickly and unexpectedly, forcing sharp and rapid
change.

In all this complex and multi-factored change occurring within institutions, how do we account for
the role of human agents? At one level it is possible to see party officials as nothing more than the
creatures and servants of the party organisation – employed and paid to do a job. At another level
however party officials might be seen as altogether more influential actors, critically aware of the
need to free up rigidities within their party organisations and to generate campaign change. Amid
technological and demographic change, within parties replete with personal and political contests,
locked in battle with a rival Head Office, the party officials may be highly influential agents in
promoting campaign change.

Hypothesis and Research Design

To address these questions, it is necessary to focus on the national party officials. Party officials
occupy centre stage in this thesis. The research presented here – based on interviews with eight
former National Secretaries of the Australian Labor Party and five former and incumbent Federal
Directors of the Liberal Party, supported by relevant documentary research - was designed to
understand the role national party officials in Australia’s two major political parties played in
election campaigning and, specifically, in the adoption and operation of the professional approach

5
to election campaigning. The research tests the hypothesis that the party officials were responsible
both for operationalising the professional model during specific election campaigns and more
generally for driving its adoption throughout the party organisation. With its core characteristics of
centralisation, strategic resource allocation, specialised marketing and high cost, this new
approach to election campaigning constitutes a ‘professional campaign model’. Its adoption
constitutes the ‘professionalisation’ of election campaigning. Driving this process, developing the
skills to manage and refine the professional campaign model, marshalling resources for it, driving
its wider adoption within their parties and enforcing its disciplines, the descendants of Cleland and
McNamara in the national Head Offices were themselves transformed and became ‘campaign
professionals’.

Thesis Structure

The thesis is structured so as to provide an unfolding discussion of these issues. The foundation of
the discussion, presented in Chapter One, lies in a review and evaluation of the extensive scholarly
literature on those central, enduring, but ever-changing, institutions of representative
democracies, political parties. This review also considers the extensive scholarly and other
literature on changing campaign practices, including the efforts to model these changes as a
transition from contests dominated by parties to contests between rival marketing campaigns. The
chapter then moves to consider the contested notion of professionalisation. Thus traversing
literature on political parties, campaigns and professionalisation, the chapter is able to propose a
three-face two-level framework of party organisation within which to understand the distinctive
character of the officials and to explore their role as campaign professionals. On this basis,
Chapter Two discusses in more detail the methods employed to define, conduct and analyse the
interviews with the party officials. The semi-structured elite interviews conducted for the thesis
represent the first attempt to engage party officials in a comprehensive and comparative (cross-
party and over time) empirical study. The chapter argues that the lens of historical institutionalism
provides a valuable way of explaining, with a dense qualitative narrative, the process of change in
Australian political parties. This narrative assumes significance not just for what it tells us about
the professionalisation of Australian electoral politics but for its enlightening insights about the
broader processes of institutional change.

Introducing the first of the research findings, Chapter Three explores the party officials’ own
understanding of campaign professionalism and the ways they have constructed identities as
campaign professionals. This provides a working definition of professionalism built around
economic, technical and ideological dimensions. Chapter Four builds on this definition to explore
the tensions in the relationship between the party officials and their party organisation, focussing
on their status as party members, their campaign experience within the party, the party’s methods
of selecting them as party officials, and their sometimes troubled relationships with the
parliamentary leader. The next three chapters then describe the work performed by these
campaign professionals in Head Office. Drawing extensively from the interviews, each chapter
analyses a specific theme or ‘imperative’ that contributes to the professional campaign model:

 Chapter Five deals with the centralising imperative: in parties that were divided (as the
three-face two-level framework suggests) on federal and functional lines, the national
Head Office acquired authority for campaign management over state branches and
parliamentary groups;
 Chapter Six deals with the strategic imperative: having secured authority over campaign
management, the national Head Office developed and deployed effective campaign
strategies in pursuit of their superordinate goal of electoral success. Defining campaign
strategy as an understanding of the requirements for electoral success, the research
outlines seven key tasks, identified in the interviews, which are performed by Head Office
to formulate and implement a professional campaign strategy;
 The twin imperatives of centralisation and strategy were directly associated with a third:
the campaign professional requires a cash flow sufficient to fund the operations of the
capital-intensive professional campaign model. Chapter Seven deals with this funding

6
 imperative, describing the officials’ ceaseless and innovative efforts to develop a
sustainable funding basis for the parties.

A final chapter draws conclusions from the foregoing, confirming the central role of the party
officials in the professionalisation process and identifying the major phases and characteristics of
that process. The tensions and conflicts generated within the parties by this process, understood
through the three-face two-level framework of party organisation, provides some support for the
‘cartel’ theory of party development. The findings deal with campaign management, not with voter
behaviour or other aspects of electoral participation: professional campaigns are conducted amid
uncertainty about whether and why they succeed or fail. Yet it is suggested that parties and party
officials will persist with the professional campaign approach. Unlike other research pointing to the
decline of parties and linking this to the spread of professional campaigning, this research
underlines the continuing centrality of parties and the success, in Australia, of party-centred
professionalisation and of the party-based campaign professionals.

7
 Chapter One

Understanding Change in Political Parties and Election Campaigns

P
olitical parties remain central to the operation of representative democracy in Australia.
Parliaments are made up almost entirely of party representatives: having been recruited by
parties and preselected by parties and elected under party banners, they debate in party
language and vote on disciplined party lines. This is as true of the bicameral national parliament as
it is of parliaments in the six states and two territories. Executive government is permeated by
party: Prime Ministers, Premiers and Chief Ministers, their Cabinets and their ministers are drawn
from party ranks and selected by party processes; they operate as elements of party; Oppositions
seek government as party blocs. Partisanship imbues the policy debate and the legislative agenda
at the state and national levels and colours the supra-national Council of Australian Governments.
Election campaigns are saturated with partisan contest, whether at the national level with its
media-oriented contest between party leaders or at the electorate level with its street-by-street
struggle between local party representatives. Parties retain the allegiance and attract the support
of most voters (McAllister, 2011). Parties were written into the Australian Constitution in 1977 and
from 1984 have received public subsidies. It is true that important institutions of the Australian
polity remain free from overt partisanship, notably the public service, the judiciary, the military,
the media and the administration of elections; but party service acts as no bar to appointment to
public posts up to and including vice-regal positions. Dean Jaensch’s assertions as to the ‘ubiquity,
pervasiveness and centrality’ of party in Australia (Jaensch, 1983, 1994) remain valid; they hold
the key to understanding the national polity (Jaensch, 2006). Two political parties in particular
exercise wide and enduring influence: every national government and most state governments
since the Second World War have been formed by either the Australian Labor Party (ALP) or the
Liberal Party of Australia in coalition with its junior partner the National (formerly Country) Party.

And yet, these critical Australian institutions have undergone radical change. Over the six post-war
decades, parties have transformed from mass-membership organisations that provided meaningful
opportunities for member participation at the grass-roots level, into hollowed-out structures
managed from the national centre. Declining membership has weakened the parties’ linkage role,
while the rise of television and the more recent digital technologies have provided citizens with
abundant alternative supplies of information and participation outside the parties. Parties remain
essential to the mobilisation of electoral support yet this function, too, has transformed with the
rise of marketing and communications technologies. Once reliant on engaged volunteers and class-
based donors, parties now depend on public subsidies and corporate donors to meet their
escalating campaign costs. They have also, since Cleland, become employers of professional staff
who have built up well-resourced Head Offices and introduced a professional model of campaign
management.

As noted in the Introduction, the advent of these campaign professionals represented a turning
point in the transformation of political organisation in Australia. The transformation is explored
through the research undertaken for this thesis. Before presenting the research, it is necessary to
place it within the setting of the relevant international and Australian scholarship. Robert Michels’
pioneering 1911 study of party oligarchy reached its centenary while the thesis was in preparation,
underlining the venerable character of this area of scholarship. Theoretically rich, empirically
strong, truly international in character while also respecting the particularities of local institutions
and practices, this scholarship provides three areas of particular relevance for this research. This
chapter evaluates them in turn by

 first, reviewing theories of change within parties and within election campaigns, and
relating these to what we know about Australian parties and elections;

8
  second, reviewing the relatively neglected area of party scholarship that deals with the
distinctive role and function of party officials, and relating this to the officials in the Head
Offices of Australia’s major political parties; and
 third, reviewing the contested term professionalisation and establishing its potential
application to describing, explaining and measuring the transformation of parties and
campaigns.

Changing Parties, Changing Campaigns

Change within political parties – shifting organisational structures, personnel, functions and values
– reflects a changing relationship between parties and the social environment in which they
operate. The ‘mass membership’ party in the western European context, for example, has its
distinctive apparatus of branches, conferences and other forums of deliberation and participation
because it expresses and aggregates the political demands of a large homogenous group whose
origins lie in deeply-rooted social cleavages (Michels, 1911 (trans. 1966); Duverger, 1951 (trans.
1964); Lipset & Rokkan, 1967: 1-65; Katz & Mair, 1995). The decision in 1891 of the Australian
trade union movement to create a political party that would pursue their demands on behalf of the
rural and industrial working class marked the emergence in Australia of such a party, with its
distinctive membership base, programmatic clarity, socialist orientation and subscription funding
(Freudenberg, 1991; McMullin, 1991). The formation in 1920 of the Country (later, National) Party
by representatives of farming organisations (Ellis, 1958; Graham, 1966; Davey, 2010), and
Menzies’ assembly in 1944 of the Liberal Party as the self-appointed advocate for the ‘forgotten
people’ of the broad middle class (Starr, 1980; Brett, 1992), represent efforts on the conservative
side of Australian politics to create similar ‘mass’ party organisations. Katz and Mair suggest
(1995: 12) that conservative parties were never as committed to the ‘mass’ party model as those
on the left. Indeed, while the Liberal Party sought to build a broad membership base, to organise it
in local branches across the nation, to formulate policy through party conferences and to fund its
activities through member subscriptions (Hancock, 2000: 38-9, 44, 121), the Liberal membership
base was not as socially distinctive as Labor’s industrial base and, in any event, the Liberals
continued to emphasise the independence of the parliamentary party under Menzies as its
electorally successful leader, ahead of any representative accountability to members (Hancock
2000: 120, 157). Even so, the post-war years were a ‘golden age’ for Australian mass parties, a
30-year period of high party membership and party identification at the ballot box (Marsh, 2006:
5). Their deep roots in civil society provided mass membership parties with a strong normative
and practical rationale to play a central role in the affairs of the polity (Katz & Mair, 1995).

By the late 1960s however the long cycle of post-war economic prosperity had ameliorated social
conditions (Katz and Mair 1995: 12) and eroded class distinctions on which party loyalties had
been based (Kirchheimer 1966: 190); new non-party avenues for political engagement emerged
through television (Mendelsohn & Crespi, 1970; Seymour-Ure, 1974) and social movements
(Marsh, 2006: 6; Lawson & Merkl, 1988). Party membership began a steady steep decline (I.
Ward, 1991; Jaensch, 2006: 28-30; Johns, 2006; Cavalier, 2010) in line with that occurring in
European parties (van Biezen, Mair, & Poguntke, 2012); voter loyalties also declined (McAllister,
2011: 50-4). This emergence of ‘parties without partisans’ (Dalton & Wattenberg, 2000b) did not
herald the disappearance of political parties, but it did require them, in Australia as in Western
Europe, to redefine their relationship with civil society. In particular, they found it necessary to
find new sources of electoral support outside their long-established class (or in some Western
European cases, denominational) base in the electorate. Shedding ideological baggage in order to
win new sources of voting support from the population at large, they transformed themselves, in
Otto Kirchheimer’s influential analysis, into ‘catch-all’ parties (Kirchheimer, 1966; M. H. Williams,
2009). Among its many implications, the catch-all party adopts a changed party structure, with
member participation replaced by elite-driven or centrally-controlled organisational structures
(Kirchheimer 1996: 190-1). To carry out the new catch-all electoral strategy, party bureaucrats
were replaced by a new type of party official, identified by Angelo Panebianco as the ‘electoral
professionals’ (Panebianco, 1988). As their gravitational centre shifts away from their declining
member base to the broader electorate, catch-all parties require electoral-professionals skilled in

9
polling, mass media and policy analysis to link with the electorate via ‘television and interest
groups’ (1988: 264-6, 312 fn12). The basis on which these partisan-free parties will operate is not
clear. For Panebianco, a legitimation crisis looms as the new form of party destroys the collective
identities of the old cleavage structures creating conditions of turbulence and ungovernability
(1988: 272). Mancini, too, speaks of the party of the future as ‘a feeble apparatus made up of
bureaucrats … whose main job is to coordinate the contributions of professionals coming from
outside the political realm to win election campaigns’ (1999: 242-3). Certainly, as Katz and Mair
remind us (1995: 6), the mass membership party derived much of its legitimacy and normative
strength from nineteenth-century patterns of social organisation and concepts of democratic
governance which will not persist into post-industrial conditions.

These developments have had profound implications for the conduct by parties of election
campaigns. Australian election campaign practices have been extensively documented (Goot,
2007) though coverage of Federal election campaigns prior to the 1970s was sporadic (Overacker,
1952; Mayer & Rydon, 1954; Rawson & Holtzinger, 1958; Rawson, 1961; Overacker, 1968). In
1972, Henry Mayer at the University of Sydney expressed surprise that ‘no academics’ were
intending to survey the forthcoming campaign. His edited collection of contributions by an eclectic
set of academics, political practitioners, activists and journalists (Mayer, 1973) provided a
template for an almost unbroken stream of campaign documentation and analysis by academics
both international (Butler, 1974; Penniman, 1977, 1979, 1983) and Australian (McAllister &
Warhurst, 1988; Clive Bean, McAllister, & Warhurst, 1990; Clive Bean, Simms, Bennett, &
Warhurst, 1997; Simms & Warhurst, 2000; Warhurst & Simms, 2002; Simms & Warhurst, 2005;
Simms, 2009c; Simms & Wanna, 2012). These collections provide valuable source material,
though their static compartmentalised structure limits their analytic value. Also from 1972,
journalists too began to produce informative ‘insider’ accounts of election campaigns (notably
including Oakes & Solomon, 1973; Oakes & Solomon, 1974; Oakes, 1976; Haupt & Grattan, 1983;
P. Williams, 1997; Marr & Wilkinson, 2004; Jackman, 2008). The episodic, campaign-specific,
constraints of all these accounts have been transcended by studies taking a thematic approach –
for example, on techniques of dealing with the news media (Tiffen, 1989: Ch6), on the emergence
of polling and advertising consultants (Braund, 1978; Mills, 1986), on television advertising (S.
Young, 2002, 2003, 2004), on campaign financing (C. A. Hughes, 1963; S. Young & Tham, 2006;
Tham, 2010), on ‘virtual’ digital and internet-enabled campaigning (Gibson & Ward, 2002; Chen,
Gibson, & Geiselhart, 2006: ch4), and on electoral law (Orr, Williams, & Mercurio, 2003; Orr,
2010). Valuable further evidence on changing campaign practices are provided in party-specific
studies (Crisp, 1955; West, 1965; Parkin, 1983; McMullin, 1991; Henderson, 1998; Hancock,
2000; Parkin & Warhurst, 2000; Faulker & MacIntyre, 2001; Hancock, 2006, 2007) and in
systemic studies of Australian parties and elections (Jupp, 1964, 1982; Jaensch, 1983; C. A.
Hughes, 1992; Jaensch, 1994).

Overacker’s (1952: Ch10) account of the 1946 election campaign provides a suitable benchmark
for tracing the transformation of Australian campaign activities along the lines suggested by
Kirchheimer and Panebianco. In this campaign - the first attempt by the newly formed Liberal
Party, with Cleland as Federal Director, to unseat Chifley’s Labor Government – most campaign
activity consisted of face-to-face campaigning and broad-brush propaganda rather than targeted
communications to specific voter groups. In 1946 there were public meetings, paid newspaper
advertising, and leaflets, handbills and posters; radio broadcasting had ‘come into its own’
however and ‘party managers and news correspondents’ already believed public meetings were
less well attended as a result (Overacker, 1952: 272; Duthie, 1984; Martin, 1999: v2, 50-8; Mills,
2012a: 144). Polls on voting intentions were sporadically published in newspapers; it was not until
the late 1960s that parties started conducting their own market research (Mills, 1999; Hancock,
2000: 68). There were no television broadcasts of campaign events until 1958 – relatively late by
British or American standards (Rawson, 1961: Ch8; I. Ward, 1999; Hancock, 2000: 256; Griffen-
Foley, 2003: 68-80). Advertising in 1946 was mostly printed in newspapers, distributed as
handbills, displayed as posters or, where campaign budgets permitted, sent by mail. In 1946,
Menzies and Chifley did not debate each other – the first televised leaders’ debate took place in
1984 (Senior, 2008). Parties were not preoccupied with ‘marginal seats’ in 1946; that term was

10
not in use until 1951 (see chapter 6). In the absence of market research, the ‘marginal’ status of
any seat was knowable only through the imperfect means of voting statistics; that now familiar
tool of Australian campaign analysis, the Mackerras pendulum, was not developed until 1972
(Mackerras, 1972).

In this transformation, two developments appear to have been particularly salient. Plasser and
Plasser (2002: 1) refer to them as the ‘marketing revolution’ and the ‘media revolution’ of
campaigning. In the first, opinion research methodologies have been progressively improved by
commercial marketing practitioners, from Gallup-style door-to-door surveys of the 1940s,
telephone polling in the 1970s, computer-assisted phone polling in the 1980s, and on-line panels
of the present day. At the same time, these quantitative measures of apparently rational opinion
have been supplemented by qualitative measures of affect and attitude through discursive ‘focus
group’ research. These developments have been closely monitored by political parties and eagerly
adapted to campaign use. The plebiscitary idealism of media-sponsored ‘public opinion’ polls has
been eclipsed by a more proprietary, party-driven, approach to ‘market research’ conducted on a
confidential basis. Improved statistical analysis of voting and polling data by computerised systems
has also revolutionised the parties’ knowledge of voter preferences and improved their capacity to
segment the electorate by geographical, socio-economic and attitudinal classifications. This
scientific knowledge has allowed parties to objectify and domesticate public opinion (Ginsberg,
1986; Igo, 2007) while also serving to disempower grass roots, parochial sources of political
knowledge and encouraging a ‘secretive hierarchical culture’ among party leaders at the centre
(Wring, 2005: 175; J. K. Smith, 2009). In the second of Plasser and Plasser’s revolutions, the
media revolution, repeated waves of technological innovation have transformed the way campaign
organisations communicate with the electorate. The dominance of the printing press was
challenged by the emergence of radio which in turn was eclipsed by television, first by large
single-channel network broadcasters and then by multiple-channel cable and satellite vehicles.
Television became not only a vehicle for mass distribution of campaign messages but also a major
- perhaps the major - arena in which campaigning takes place. The arrival of ‘new media’ on on-
line and digital platforms continues to open new avenues of campaign communications (Foot &
Schneider, 2006; Australian Centre for Public Communication, 2008). At the same time, personal
communications have been continually revolutionised with fixed line telephone, mobile telephony,
emails, instant messaging and social media. Taken together, these twin revolutions have given
parties the ability to ‘track’ changes in voter attitudes and to choose appropriate communications
channels to ‘target’ specific campaign messages to selected segments of the electorate (Mills,
1986).

Scholars in the US and Europe have developed a number of models that seek to provide synoptic
interpretations of these sweeping campaign changes. The models claim to integrate key
characteristics of campaign change and to place them within the larger processes of societal
modernisation and technological change occurring through western societies. Typically the models
conceptualise change as a three-stage process. Farrell and Webb select eight campaign
characteristics (campaign preparations, use of media, campaign organisation, agencies/
consultants, sources of feedback, campaign events, targeting of voters and campaign
communication) and trace their change through three phases which they simply named stage one,
stage two and stage three (Farrell & Webb, 2000: 104). Norris also selects eight, somewhat
different, campaign characteristics (campaign organisation, preparations, central coordination,
feedback, media, campaign events, costs and electorate) and shows them passing through three
phases which she labels premodern, modern and postmodern (Norris, 2000: 138). Gibson and
Römmele select four campaign dimensions (tools, mode/style, orientation to voter and internal
power distribution) and show them passing through three phases: premodern campaigns, modern
campaigns and professional campaigns (Gibson & Rommele, 2001: 34). Other three-phase change
models are presented by Blumler and Kavanagh (1999) simply as ages one, two and three, and by
Farrell, Kolodny and Medvic (2001) as Newspaper Age, Television Age and Digital Age. Plasser and
Plasser have aggregated and synthesised many of these models into a single matrix, based on
Norris’ headings (Plasser & Plasser, 2002: 6).

11
Such models serve useful heuristic purposes, drawing together a diverse set of variables into a
coherent narrative of change (Farrell and Webb 2000: 106, Plasser and Plasser 2002: 4). Taken
together, these models present campaign practice as having originally been party-dominated and
decentralised. In this original state, parties embody societal cleavages and attract long-lasting
voter identification and loyalties; their campaigns rely on top-down propaganda through party
press, posters, public meetings, mass rallies and canvassing, and are informed by impressionistic
‘feel’ for the electorate rather than objective feedback. Labour intensive, low-budget and short-
term, this original style of campaigning makes only minimal use of external agencies or
consultants; the ‘politicians’ are firmly in charge. All the models agree a decisive change occurs
with the arrival of television. In this middle phase, campaigning becomes more centralised and
nationalised, and more capital intensive, with salaried party campaign managers and their external
specialist consultants focussed on attracting network TV news coverage with press conferences,
sound-bites and candidate debates – and on designing and buying television advertising spots. TV
news broadcasts penetrated a section of the electorate which hitherto had been less exposed to
political communications, a critical element of catch-all appeals (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999:
212). Opinion polling provides campaigns with increasing amounts of data about the electorate.
Campaigns move into a third phase in which broadcast channels multiply, proliferate and
fragment. Operating in decentralised fashion but with central scrutiny, campaigns engage even
more consultants to manage increased polling and to disseminate segmented targeted campaign
communications such as computer-assisted telephone calling, direct mail and interactive cable TV.
Campaign costs continue to spiral upwards. It is an age of ‘communications abundance’ in which
politicians perceive the media as a hydra-headed beast with many mouths clamouring constantly
to be fed (Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999). Efforts to reconnect with voters through targeted
campaigns need constant reinforcement since voter loyalties cannot be assumed (Gibson and
Römmele 2001: 33). The ‘basic trends’ of the three-stage models thus describe ‘a gradual shift
from electioneering as essentially a localist, largely amateur, part-time affair directed at party
loyalists to the permanent campaign of today that is personified by a focus on slick presentation,
the prominent role of campaign consultants and an emphasis on marketing of image and campaign
issues’ (Farrell, Kolodny, & Medvic, 2001).

For all the narrative strength of such generalised accounts, these models are limited in their
capacity to explain campaign change. This arises in part because, as suggested above, the models
all employ different sets of campaign characteristics with which to measure change. No doubt as a
consequence, they also differ in naming the change process. For Plasser and Plasser, it is simply a
set of ‘changing campaign practices’; for Norris, a process of campaign ‘evolution’; for Farrell it is
the ‘professionalisation of election campaigning’ and for Gibson and Römmele, the ‘rise of the
professional campaign’. These labels remain undefined. The models also attribute a powerfully
deterministic role to television, whose arrival appears as the (literally) central event around which
they are organised. Yet the significant impact of radio (Ward 1999: 327-8) is discounted and
consigned to the premodern era, while the more recent and arguably even more disruptive
transformations wrought by the advent of ‘new media’ are classified under the flexible heading of
‘postmodern’, a third stage beyond which no further development is conceptualised. Preoccupied
with the communications aspects of televised campaigns, the models also discount the emerging
importance of market research in shaping those communications. In all these respects the models
carry assumptions, largely unexamined, about causation. Observed changes are presented as
driven by exogenous system-level changes (such the advent of television or the demographic
changes leading to declining partisan allegiances) leaving little room for endogenous or sub-
systemic explanations. Critically, political parties and party officials are discounted as agents of
change; professionalising activities that party officials might reasonably be expected to perform –
such as developing campaign strategies, gathering intelligence and raising funds - are neglected.
The decline of party is presented as an observed fact rather than a phenomenon specific to the
US; the survival of party in the European (and Australian) context is overlooked. Only Gibson and
Römmele (2001: 34) reject the portrayal of parties as ‘victims of professionalisation’ and search
instead for evidence of inter-party variation in the professionalisation process which would suggest
a role for party agency.

12
Another influential model of campaign change, which also employs a three-phase structure, avoids
many of these procedural problems: Jennifer Lees-Marshment’s political marketing model (Lees-
Marshment, 2001, 2009, 2011). Political marketing conceptualises the electorate as a
marketplace, voters as consumers and party policies and leadership as products (Lees-Marshment,
2001: 1; O'Shaughnessy, 2001: 1048; Wring, 2002). Three stages of campaign practice are
presented, based on the extent to which the party has adopted a ‘market orientation’ (Lees-
Marshment 2001: 28-9). In the first phase, a Product-Oriented Party (POP) has no market
orientation, determining its electoral strategy entirely from its own skills and beliefs without regard
to voter preferences, and persisting regardless of whether it achieves membership or electoral
success. A Sales-Oriented Party (SOP) focuses on selling its arguments to voters, using
technologies of persuasion such as advertising; it ‘does not change its behaviour to suit what
people want, but tries to make people want what it offers’ (Lees-Marshment 2001: 29). The
Market-Oriented Party (MOP) fully embraces market orientation, in that it ‘designs its behaviour to
provide voter satisfaction’ (Lees-Marshment 2001: 30). A MOP focuses all its operations – product
design as well as campaign communications - on satisfying the preferences of consumers as
identified by market intelligence; it does not seek to change those preferences. Combining
theoretical description with practitioner prescription, the MOP concept has been criticised on both
empirical and conceptual grounds (Lees-Marshment, 2006; Ormrod, 2006). Comparative studies
outside the United Kingdom have refined the model (Lilleker & Lees-Marshment, 2005; Lees-
Marshment, Rudd, & Stromback, 2011); Australia, for many years something of a terra incognita
in political marketing scholarship, is now attracting some attention (O'Cass, 2001; A. Hughes &
Dann, 2010; Mills, 2012b).

Lees-Marshment’s concept of change avoids the trap of technological determinism apparent in the
other three-phase models by granting parties an adaptive learning capacity – in this case, the
capacity to learn marketing techniques, to adopt a market orientation and indeed to progress and
regress along the spectrum of market orientation. Equally, inter-party variation is permitted
depending on endogenous circumstances. For example, parties may adopt a market orientation in
opposition, but once elected to government may abandon the practice due to the perceived need
to make tough decisions (Lilleker & Lees-Marshment, 2005: 212-3). Thus the political marketing
model places primary emphasis on the strategic activities of parties, politicians and campaign
advisers in their efforts to maintain or expand their market share. Pippa Norris (2000: 148)
explicitly rejects this approach, reasserting her conceptualisation of the third-stage postmodern
campaign which places ‘greater emphasis on the ways that technological and socioeconomic
developments are altering the context of political communications … to which all actors (parties,
campaign professionals and journalists) are being forced to respond’.

Here then is a critical area of uncertainty and dispute: who or what is driving campaign change?
The challenge is to define a model of institutional change which accommodates systemic, party
and individual level drivers, respecting the autonomy and structuring force of parties as
institutions while simultaneously recognising them as artefacts of human activity and arenas for
human agency, choice and conflict. Literature on organisational change (van der Ven & Poole,
1995) provides some assistance in identifying evolutionary, dialectic and teleological models of
change; institutional scholars identify single-actor design, conflict design and learning models
(March & Olsen, 2006: 11); while a recent party scholar describes a period effect and generation
effect (Hellmann, 2011). As ideal-types, such models are intended to provide exclusive and
distinctive accounts of change. Empirically however it seems likely that political parties actually
experience change from combinations of drivers: at different times deliberately planning their
goals, adapting to changes in the external environment, learning or borrowing new skills, and
competing against external rivals while also experiencing internal division and factional contest.
Systemic processes of technological change and societal modernisation create conditions for a
changing relationship with civil society, to which the parties purposively and iteratively respond by
adopting catch-all electoral strategies and by engaging electoral-professionals to implement them.
Tenscher and Mykkanen (2012) provide a neat summary: ‘Faced with some fundamental changes
in the socio-cultural, political and media environment, political parties have initiated a number of

13
substantial transformations both in their organisational structures and their communicative
strategies’.

Amid this narrative of change, certain features of continuity must be noted. Lipset and Rokkan
found it ‘amazing’ in 1967 that so many of the western European parties which had emerged with
mass suffrage had survived in ‘frozen’ form through the First World War, a global recession, the
onslaught of fascism, a second world war and a series of profound post-war social and cultural
changes into their time (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967: 50-1). They would surely be impressed that the
party system in Australia has remained institutionally frozen for another four decades into the
twenty-first century. Voters in the 2010 election faced essentially the same Labor–Coalition choice
as Overacker observed their grandparents facing in 1946. Indeed, since 1908, only the ALP and
the Coalition (if one traces the Liberal Party back to its Nationalist and United Australia Party
antecedents) have formed national governments. The tumultuous ALP splits of 1916, 1931 and
1955, the occasional outbreak of tensions between the Coalition parties, and the comet-like
appearance in the Senate of minor parties such as the Democratic Labor Party, the Australian
Democrats and the Greens, have not altered the essentially two-party character of Australia’s
party system (Jupp, 1964; Loveday, Martin, & Parker, 1977; Jaensch, 1994; Strangio &
Dyrenfurth, 2009). Campaigns remain intensely partisan contests between incumbents and
oppositions conducted with zero-sum, winner-take-all intensity (Tiffen, 1989: 128).

Party Officials: from ‘Back-room Boys’ to Campaign Professionals

A striking feature of this party literature is its relative neglect of the party official. Lipset and
Rokkan observed in the 1960s that party scholarship was much better informed about the social
base of political parties and about their participation in public decision-making than about their
‘internal management and … organisational functioning’ (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967: 51). For
Panebianco in the 1980s, ‘bureaucracy is surely the most neglected theme in studies on parties’
(Panebianco, 1988: 221). Despite many advances since those observations were made, party
literature continues to display the same neglect of the party official. Webb and Kolodny argued in
2006 that party employees were ‘one of the most under-researched fields’ in the study of political
parties. As a result, they said, ‘relatively little’ is known of these paid employees who run the day
to day operations of the parties, notwithstanding that their importance was likely to be ‘greater
now than ever before’ (Webb & Kolodny, 2006).1 Even at the level of journalism and political
commentary, party officials have tended to inspire only episodic attention as shadowy players at
election time.

The reasons for this neglect are numerous. Panebianco (1988: 210) observed that parties are
reticent about their organisational make-up; or, as the long-serving director of the British
Conservative Party Lord Fraser of Kilmorack put it, in relation to the party’s policy research unit:
‘The correct place for back-room boys is in the back room’ (Ramsden, 1980). As voluntary
associations, Australian parties operate with little legislative or judicial scrutiny of their internal
affairs and have sought with some success to protect this privacy even as regulation of their
external activities increases (Somes, 1996; Gauja, 2006, 2008). Few in numbers, party officials
have tended to be lumped in with larger and more visible groups of party actors – for example, as
part of the ‘extra-parliamentary’ wing (for example, West, 1965; Parkin & Warhurst, 1983;
Jaensch, 1994). Yet locating officials alongside members surely serves to blur distinctions rather

1
A detailed illustration of scholarly oversight of party officials in Australia – more generously, of scholarly focus
on issues of accountability and representation at the expense of organisation and administration – is provided
in Jaensch’s respected survey of the Australian party system (1994:123, Figure 5.1). Two charts purport to
show the ‘party structure’ of the ALP and Liberal Party. The ALP chart includes several representative entities
such as Young Labor and the Federal Labor Women’s Organisation but does not include the party’s Head Office
and identifies the secretary only as part of the ‘federal executive’; the ‘federal campaign committee’ is named
without mentioning the secretary as campaign director. (The terminology is also out of date in using ‘federal’
nomenclature which had been switched to ‘national’ in the 1970s). The Liberal chart displays the same blind
spot. The Secretariat is identified but is represented as not having a role in the campaign committee; the
Federal Director / campaign director is not identified at all. Nor does the Staff Planning Committee appear.

14
than clarify them; it also runs counter to Michel’s ‘iron law’ which draws a hard line between
members and the party elite (Katz & Mair, 1993: 185).

As for the party officials themselves, they may see their role – perhaps even their identity – as
requiring minimal disclosure about their activities, particularly while they hold office. Only a tiny
proportion of party officials have published memoirs (C. Porter, 1981; Richardson, 1994;
Chamberlain, 1998) or campaign analysis (Rawlinson, 1983; Litchfield, 1984; Neat, 1987; Robb,
1996a; Hogg, 2002, 2003). Since 1993, national party officials have addressed the National Press
Club after each election campaign and have participated in the academic post-election symposia.
These initially provided valuable insights (Robb, 1993 (1 April); Hogg, 1993 (24 March)), but over
time have become subordinated to the party’s preferred campaign narrative and have not
infrequently been delegated to colleagues (Hallaj, 2012; Loughnane, 2012).

Aside from these practical obstacles, normative issues have served to impede research into party
officials. Panebianco (1988: 210) blamed the ‘generally negative connotation’ of the word
bureaucracy – a traditional antipathy which dates back at least to Robert Michels, who identified
officials as part of the ‘oligarchy’ which he argued inevitably arises in organisations to subvert the
democratic structures and rhetoric of even mass membership parties such as the German Social
Democratic Party (Michels, 1911 (trans. 1966)). Duverger likewise located the ‘permanent officials’
of western European parties within an ‘inner circle’ of party oligarchs (Duverger, 1951 (trans.
1964): 151-5). In this sense, the party organisation can be regarded with ‘some distaste’,
disparaged as an instrumental and self-interested ‘machine’ because it is seen to be working not
for the party’s overarching cause but for its own survival (Loveday, et al., 1977: 466; Parkin &
Warhurst, 1983: 16-26). As noted earlier, with the normative strength of the political party in a
representative democracy understood in a dyadic ‘linkage’ role uniting the grassroots with the
highest offices of state, it is not easy to accommodate let alone justify a third element like a party
organisation.

Whatever its cause, this scholarly neglect has served to mask what is in fact a quite distinctive
character of party officials within political parties, including Australia’s. Party officials are party
members, but their status as party employees sets them apart from ‘rank and file’ party members,
amateur enthusiasts and volunteers. At the same time, while officials occupy prominent or even
oligarchic positions within the party’s leadership apparatus, they do not share the obligations of
public representation and accountability borne by the parliamentary wing. Questions of ideology
and policy that may be core to their party’s identity and aspirations may be incidental to their own
work, which consists of specialised administrative functions performed in their own central Head
Office location. Party members and elected representatives express themselves, in full and in the
open; party officials tend to work silently and out of the spotlight. Party officials may act on behalf
of the party membership and the party’s elected parliamentarians, but directly answer to neither.

It was not until the 1940s, and it was not in Europe but the United States, that a framework of
party analysis was elaborated that could accommodate this distinctive character of party officials. V
O Key’s institutionalist classic Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups moved beyond the linear ‘elite-
grassroots’ dichotomy by presenting a tripartite framework of party analysis: three distinct groups
of party actors were identified. Describing the US Republican and Democratic parties, Key
recognised the ‘party-in-the-electorate’ (that is, those voters who support the party’s candidates at
election time) and the ‘party-in-government’ (that is, the party’s elected representatives in
legislatures). Each of these groups is separate and distinct from each other and from the third
element, which he termed the ‘party organisation’, that is, ‘the group of more or less continuous if
not professional party workers’. The distinctive character of each group lay largely in their different
activities or functions - that is, their distinctive contributions to the achievement of the party’s
goals. The function of the party organisation was to gain power – specifically, control over the
government – which required campaigning and vote winning. So while in a strict theoretical sense
party workers should be regarded as the instruments of the party membership, Key noted, ‘in
actual behaviour’ they constitute ‘something of a lodge of their own’ (Key, 1964: 181-2, 335-49).

15
Key made a further important advance. Having located this distinctive ‘lodge’, he recognised that
the party organisation actually consisted of two sub-groups. There were ‘congresses’ or ‘policy
forming organs’: elected representative bodies such as the committees and conventions involved in
national, senatorial, congressional, state and even county level campaigns. There were also
‘bureaucracies’ or ‘administrative or executive machinery’. In Michelsian tones Key noted, but
dismissed as ‘largely fiction’, the suggestion that the representative congresses and conventions
controlled the party; it was the highly autonomous bureaucratic elements that in fact constituted
an ‘inner core’ or ‘a party within the party’ (Key 1964: 337). At the heart of this bureaucracy was
the ‘kingpin’ - the chairman of the national committee, like Republican Mark Hanna and Democrat
James Farley, who made this role one of power and prestige. Key went on to identify three
distinctive characteristics about kingpins. First, the chairman’s chief responsibility is managing the
presidential campaign and as such he is a ‘technician, a specialist in campaign management and
machine tending’. Second, he exercises his power ‘only so long as he enjoys the confidence of the
presidential nominee’. Third, electoral outcomes matter: while the chairman of the losing candidate
worries about how to keep his job, the winner gets to dispense government patronage (Key 1964:
341-5).

Key’s tripartite framework proved to be of enduring influence in the study of political parties not
only in the United States (Sorauf, 1968; Aldrich, 2006) but in Australia (I. Ward, 1991), Europe of
the 1990s (Katz and Mair 1993) and advanced industrial democracies in general (Dalton &
Wattenberg, 2000a); indeed it ‘helps structure our thinking about political parties in all
democracies’ (Aldrich, 2006). In the context of this thesis, Key’s description of party ‘kingpins’ –
devoting their specialist campaign expertise, in a competitive environment, to electoral success,
amid an uneasy relationship with the ‘party in office’ represented by the presidential nominee –
provides a particularly relevant foundation for understanding the campaign professional. Yet
figures such as Hanna and Farley, and the wards and precincts of their parties, remain some
considerable distance from their contemporary descendants. Electoral reforms in the United States
reduced the powers and prerogatives of those very kingpins, shifting responsibility for election
campaign management out of the hands of parties into those of candidates and their external
consultants (Agranoff, 1972; Broder, 1972; Ranney, 1978; Sabato, 1981; Polsby, 1983). By
contrast in Europe – and in Australia - the decline of the ‘mass’ party did not mean the decline of
party itself; the task of formulating and implementing ‘catch-all’ electoral strategies remained with
the party and, indeed, with the electoral-professionals within it.

The tripartite party structure, and the distinct role of party officials within it, was further elaborated
by Katz and Mair in their 1993 study of party organisation in western Europe (Katz & Mair, 1993).
Rejecting any perspective that regards parties as unitary actors or as purely dichotomous
structures, Katz and Mair identified – though oddly without reference to Key – what they termed
the three ‘faces’ of parties. The ‘party in public office’ consists of ‘those who have themselves been
successful in elections’ while the ‘party on the ground’ includes not just those formally enrolled as
party members but activists, donors and loyal voters. The third or organisational element appears
under new terminology as the ‘Party Central Office’, generally located in the national capital and
consisting of the national executive structure and the central party staff or secretariat (Katz and
Mair 1993: 185, 187-9). Like Key, then, Katz and Mair see the third ‘face’ of the party as
distinctive - in function, location, accountability and resources - and as heterogeneous. But their
analysis takes the tripartite analysis a major step further by suggesting that the three ‘faces’ are
also engaged in a competitive internal struggle. Political parties in this analysis are arenas for
internal conflict as much as they are vehicles for attaining collective goals. ‘Each face entails a
different set of resources, constraints, opportunities and patterns of motivation that bear on party
leaders within it’, they asserted; these differences gave rise to conflicts among party leaders ‘on
the basis of which organisational change could be understood’ (Katz and Mair 1993: 184-5).

Katz and Mair’s framework provides a tool for exploring and understanding conflicts within and
transformations of Australia’s political parties and their campaign practice. Presented schematically
(Table 1), the three faces of the parties are arranged vertically, with the ‘party central office’
occupying the intermediate role between the ‘party on the ground’ and the ‘party in public office’.

16
This vertical arrangement must be expanded horizontally to take account of the federal structure of
the Australian parties, in which the national party structure replicates the state units (Jaensch
1994: 120-1). This gives rise to a three-face, two-level framework for understanding the
organisation of Australia’s major political parties, and the role of the party officials within in.

The framework is useful on several levels. First, it takes the party officials out of the back-room
and allows examination of them, in isolation from the other party faces. This ensures the distinct
characteristics and functions of the party central office are not lost within broader classifications
such as the parliamentary/extra-parliamentary dichotomy, the ‘oligarchy’ (Michels, 1911 (trans.
1966)) or the ‘machine’ (Parkin & Warhurst, 1983). At the risk of stating the obvious, locating
Australian campaign professionals within the party central office makes it clear that they are not
located elsewhere. They are not, for example, located alongside the party leader as part of that
leader’s retinue of advisers, or alongside a leadership candidate, as may occur in Britain or
Canada. Nor are they located outside the party, in the commercial marketplace or media industry
as a campaign consultant as in the United States.

Table 1: Structure of Major Australian Parties: Three Faces (Katz & Mair 1993) and Two
Levels

State Level National Level

Party in Parliamentarians (Premier/ Opposition Parliamentarians (Prime Minister/

Public Leader, ministers/shadow ministers, Opposition Leader, ministers/shadow
Office party room) ministers, party room)

Staff (ministerial and electorate) Staff (ministerial and electorate)

Candidates Candidates

Party State secretary/ state director National Secretary/ Federal Director

Central
Office Other Head Office officials Other Head Office officials

Representative organs (state Representative organs (National Executive,

Executive, state conferences) Federal Executive, National Conferences)

External consultants External consultants

Party on Members/ Activists/ Voters Activists/ Voters

the Donors Donors
Ground Affiliated organisations

Second, the framework allows examination of the conflict between each of the faces which,
according to Katz and Mair, provide the basis for understanding organisational change within the
party as a whole. In the Australian parties there is a rich mix of issues to explore. In ‘mass’
parties, for example, it could be expected that a large and active membership would provide the
party on the ground with significant influence. Membership decline conversely may change the
character of membership; there seems no reason to doubt that the description of European parties
by van Biezen, Mair and Poguntke applies equally well to Australia. They argue that, in the
absence of a mass membership, the remnant few party members include those who have or seek
a political career; these remaining members might reasonably be seen ‘not as constituting part of
civil society, with which party membership has traditionally been associated, but rather as

17
constituting the outer ring of an extended political class’. Adopting the three-face framework, they
suggest that membership of this type ‘might have more in common with the party in central office
and even the party in public office, than with the party on the ground’ (van Biezen, et al., 2012:
15-6).

In Australian parties, as Table 1 shows, membership of both the ALP and the Liberal Party
operates through the state not national level. Membership decline therefore is likely to weaken the
state units of the party, and trigger a contest for influence between the central office and the party
in public office revolving around the development of new campaign strategies not reliant on
volunteer work by members. Katz and Mair describe such a struggle, and suggest the party in
public office is successfully acquiring new resources and staff and thus asserting control over the
party central office. As a result, the central office ‘may indeed lose its centrality’, remaining useful
but not indispensable since ‘most of the services it provides can be secured through alternative
means’ (1993: 198-9, 205). This intriguing proposition has not yet been tested in Australia.

Beyond these important questions of resources, the relationship between the central office and the
party in public office may hinge on organisational practices. In particular, practices of selection and
accountability - who appoints whom? – seem quite central. If party officials are selected or
appointed from within the party central office – for example, by the national executive or party
president, as is the case in Australian parties - they are likely to have considerable autonomy from
the party in public office. This may underpin their influential role in recruiting candidates for public
office – either by taking on the preselection role surrendered by the diminished party on the
ground, or by administering the ‘list’ system of selection for upper house candidates (McAllister,
1992: 211). They may even exercise influence in selections and replacements of parliamentary
leaders – though this has yet to be acknowledged in studies of this subject (Bynander & 't Hart,
2007). On the other hand if party leaders play a role in the selection of party officials, then
accountability and responsiveness is like to follow. Key’s ‘kingpins’, for example, always required
the confidence of the party’s presidential nominee. In Britain, likewise, the Chairman of the
Conservative Party is typically appointed by the party leader from among the ranks of the party in
public office, where they hold cabinet or shadow cabinet rank; in the British Labour Party, too,
Prime Ministers have significant influence in the selection of the General Secretary (see for
example Blair, 2010: 82). In Canada, the primaries-based election method means party officials
are responsible to parliamentary leaders and candidates (Thorburn, 1991: 136-7; Carty, Cross, &
Young, 2000: Ch9). The distinctiveness or otherwise of Australian practice can be elucidated by
reference to the three-face framework.

Third, in addition to opening up these important questions about the relationships between the
three faces, the framework also allows a close focus on the struggles within each face, including at
different levels. The party in central office at the national level is likely to have different interests
and relationships from its counterparts at the state levels, which will themselves differ in size,
influence and resources. Moreover, each central office is to be understood as a heterogeneous
arena of contest between the paid party officials and the representative organs such as the
national executive. Key (1964: 337) suggests that the party officials form an inner core, with
‘largely fictional’ accountability to the executive. Katz and Mair (1993: 189) likewise suggest that
the central party bureaucracy ‘should be’ the servant of the national executive but in reality may
have sufficient resources to support a more assertive role; in some cases they may indeed
constitute the true central office, with the national executive reduced to a ‘purely nominal or
ceremonial role’. The analysis can be extended to include the external consultants who bring to the
central office their commercial skills in market research, advertising and media management. A
relevant question is who engages these consultants: are they engaged by the party in public office
or, as in Australia, by the party central office? And do the national and state offices share the
same consultants or do they engage different ones? Within the party on the ground, too, there is
evidence of important change taking place. Membership decline creates opportunities for other
elements of that face - notably voters and external donors - to assume greater salience within the
party organisation. This indeed characterises the transition to a ‘catch-all’ party. As part of this
transition, the party’s quest for a new relationship with civil society beyond its diminished

18
membership or class base is likely to become caught up in the struggle for control between the
party central office and the party in office. If the party in central office is able credibly to identify
and execute a ‘catch-all’ electoral strategy it is likely to exert continuing influence in the affairs of
the party as a whole.

Understanding Change as Professionalisation

On this robust bedrock of party scholarship, it is possible now to erect a discussion about the much
more fragile concepts of professionals, professionalism and professionalisation. The study of
professionals has become ‘involved, distracted and perplexed’ by matters of definition, in part
because professionals have themselves ‘energetically propagated’ their claims to this sought-after
status, and self-ascribed special types of knowledge, ethics and ideals (Burrage, Jarausch, &
Siegrist, 1990). Scholars and journalists have increasingly embraced these terms to describe the
changing character of party activity in representative democracies. But all too frequently they have
done so without regard to the broader party scholarship, and indeed without pausing to define the
terms or to establish whether and how they might properly be applied to the party context. The
terms are widespread but their application ‘haphazard’ (Grossman, 2009), having been attached to
individuals and activities including elected politicians (Jones, 2008), marketing consultants
(Medvic, 2006; Grossman, 2009), broadcast journalists (Golding & Elliott, 1979: 176-92), political
communications (Negrine, Mancini, Holtz-Bacha, & Papathanassopoulos, 2007), political advocacy
(Blumler and Kavanagh 1999: 209), as well as party officials (Fisher & Webb, 2003; Webb &
Fisher, 2003). Not without reason, have Lilleker and Negrine (2002) posed the questions, in
relation to professionalisation in political campaigns: ‘Of What? Since When? By Whom?’

Part of the confusion has arisen from the understandable but ultimately futile efforts to define
political professionalism by reference to itemised characteristics of ‘traditional’ or established
professions such as medicine and the law. Differences between these traditional professions and
the work of a ‘campaign professional’ are quickly apparent. Entry to the medical and legal
professions, and conduct within them, is based on mastery of a body of knowledge assessed and
certified by peers. This level of competence underpins the capacity of professionals to self-employ,
to set appropriate fees for their services, and to organise in autonomous colleges or societies. The
professional arrangements also provide individual clients, and society at large, with some notional
guarantee of adequate performance (Nimmo, 1970; Scammell, 1997: 5; Marquand, 2004). In the
context of political parties, no such body of knowledge exists; no peer assessment exists; there
are few barriers to entry; they are not necessarily self-employed and are often subject to
supervision by line managers (Webb and Fisher 2003: 11). There are no professional colleges or
societies; the International Association of Political Consultants, founded in 1968, is a paid
membership body which sets no standards and exercises no disciplinary control over the
profession. Scammell (1993: 9, 16) dismisses the idea that that those within the campaign ‘war
room’ are professionals; they are craft practitioners informed less by the social science research
than by personal experience and ‘political folk wisdom’.

The fallacy of this line of inquiry is that it assumes professionalism in the political sphere emerged
only as a recent derivative from those other occupational activities. Professionalism in fact has a
long history as an organising concept for political activity. Michels (1911 [trans 1966]: 29) noted
calls for official training and examination of would-be party leaders in order to create ‘a class of
professional politicians, of approved and registered experts in political life. Where Michels
emphasised technical expertise, Weber’s classic 1919 discussion of the ‘profession and vocation’ of
politics highlighted economic and vocational aspects of professionalism. After political rulers
themselves, Weber described the earliest ‘professional politicians’ as those who enter the service
of those rulers and who ‘made the procurement of the prince’s policies into a way of earning their
material living on the one hand and, on the other, into an ideal content for their own lives’:

There are two ways of making a vocation or profession out of politics. Either one lives ‘for’
politics or one lives ‘from’ politics. The antithesis is by no means an exclusive one.
Generally one does both. Anyone who lives ‘for’ politics ‘makes this his life’ in an inward

19
 sense. … The person who lives ‘from’ politics is one who strives to make it into an enduring
source of income (Weber, 1919: 316-8).

Using Weber one can identify professionalism as inherent within democratic practice. While citizens
in a representative democracy are ‘part-time’ or ‘occasional’ politicians (Weber, 1919: 317),
contributing their votes and voices only sporadically, democracy also requires some individuals to
make a more full-time commitment – not least, those whom the citizens elect to public office.
Supporting those elected officials are individuals committed to their service: enthusiastic
volunteers living ‘for’ politics as well as people with technical know-how striving to live ‘from’
politics. Among this latter group one can locate party officials, whose experience and skills in
campaigning helps the governor achieve power and implement policies. Their involvement in
politics will be intensive and protracted; their contribution will be characterised less by volunteer
enthusiasm than by pragmatic calculation; and their service will be rewarded by payment.
Panebianco transported Weber’s professional politician from the ‘mass’ party era into the ‘catch-all’
party (Mancini, 1999: 233-4); ‘electoral professionals’ provide the party with the technical skill-
sets needed to implement the electoral strategies of the new era of polling and mass media.
Mancini (1999: 237-40) also contends that ‘professionalism in campaigning’ is constituted by the
technical expertise of ‘professionals’ skilled in political consulting, polling and media production.
Later still, Webb and Fisher assert that the ‘heart’ of the notion of professionalism is ‘expertise’
and ‘special competence’; a key criteria of professionalism in their survey of British Labour Party
staff is their high level of education and training (Webb & Fisher, 2003). In a long scholarly
tradition, therefore, professionalism has been identified in politics through some combination of
full-time commitment and specialised expertise. This is the sense in which the term was used in
1961 by the journalist Don Whitington, when he described the ‘highly paid, highly skilled team of
professional political experts’ working in the Liberal Party’s national Head Office following that
party’s ‘switch to professionalism’ (Whitington, 1961).

Importantly however, this combination of technical and economic characteristics does not imply a
lack of personal commitment to the political cause. Indeed, Weber emphasised that ‘generally’,
professionals live both ‘from’ and ‘for’ politics, with economic and vocational motivations co-
existing. Reliance on the economic and technical aspects as the defining characteristics of
professionalism is thus inadequate. Professionalism also implies some element of altruistic
behaviour. Specifically, professionals are devoted to the interests of their clients. A doctor or
lawyer uses their technical expertise to advance those interests. To do otherwise – to harm their
clients or to profit themselves - cannot be regarded as a professional; client service must override
personal self-interest. In the political context, political professionals apply their skills to promote
the higher cause in which they are engaged – the service of their political client. This principle
overrides self-interest and is not corrupted by the competitive political environment in which it
operates. Campaign professionals do not believe they can do ‘what we can get away with’
(Scammell 1997: 6). Surveying political consultants in the United States, Grossman has found
evidence they share a ‘professional ideology’ based around serving the interests of their clients,
who are candidates for elected office. They define their ‘purpose’ as ‘to help candidates win’ and
they will not, for example, make a recommendation that was in their own financial interests but
not in the interests of the client (Grossman 2009: 98).

The foregoing discussion suggests meaningful definitions of the terms professionalism and
professionalisation in the political context. Yet they remain deeply contested and ambiguous terms
in the party literature. In their survey of professionalism among British Labour Party employees,
Webb and Fisher felt the need to differentiate an ‘ideal’ sense of the word from a ‘soft’ or ‘less
rigorous’ or ‘everyday’ usage (Webb & Fisher, 2003; Webb & Kolodny, 2006: 340). Negrine
responded forcefully, rejecting ‘complex and contested language of professionalism’ as ‘essentially
irrelevant’ as a description of the organisational changes underway in political parties (Negrine,
2005). Lilleker and Negrine went further, suggesting the terms be abandoned in favour of more
specific descriptors such as specialisation and centralisation (Lilleker & Negrine, 2002). The
literature is further complicated by the definitional chasm separating American scholars, who
regard professionalism as largely occurring outside the parties and empowering non-party

20
consultants in their stead (Sabato, 1981; Johnson, 2001; Medvic, 2003, 2006; Grossman, 2009),
from those operating in electoral systems where parties themselves have undergone a
professionalisation process (Webb, 1992; Webb & Fisher, 2003; Wring, 2005; Negrine, et al.,
2007). Professionalisation should remain a systemically-neutral term; thus the spread of US-style
consultants into Western Europe seems more properly an ‘Americanisation’ of campaign practice or
‘convergence on a US-style model’ (Farrell, et al., 2001).

There seems little merit in abandoning the term. With Weberian roots, it has become deeply
entrenched in the literature. Unlike the more narrow words suggested as replacements,
professionalism captures a broad set of interrelated processes of organisational and attitudinal
change. Equally, qualifications - such as ‘soft’ professionalism or ‘quasi’ professional - seem only to
add further layers of ambiguity. Yet Lilleker and Negrine (2002) are surely justified in demanding
that those who use the terms identify what is being professionalised, over what time period and by
whom. This thesis will attempt to do so. It will propose a definition of professionalism based on the
experience of Australian party officials who have been at the heart of the process of change over
several decades. It will be argued that rather than some impersonal process of exogenous change,
professionalisation has been driven by these human agents within the parties. At one level, it will
be shown that ‘professionalisation’ occurs where part-time volunteers are replaced by salaried
employees with specialist skills. But beyond this mere change of personnel, professionalisation will
be defined as a cultural transformation, in which the party officials adopt and implement a
strategic approach to the conduct of election campaigns.

The military etymology of the words campaign strategy, with their implied metaphor of politics as
warfare, provides a useful blueprint for any form of effective mass social action (Pitney, 2000;
Stockwell, 2005). Strategy has been a major concern of business scholars and practitioners (M.
Porter, 1979; Mintzberg, 1998; Quinn, 1998; M. Porter, 2008), public sector management (Moore,
1995) and social movements (Ganz, 2010). Yet there have been few attempts to critically assess
the topic in relation to electoral contests (Barber, 2005). Margaret Scammell observed fifteen
years ago that campaign literature has tended to focus on ‘what’ is done in a campaign. Much less
attention has been paid to ‘why’ it is done, even though campaigners operate on the basis of views
of the electorate, ideas about persuasion and the winning of elections, which fundamentally shape
their exploitation of the communication technologies (Scammell, 1997). Understanding campaign
strategy requires further research on how campaigners develop their views of the electorate and
their ideas about electoral success – areas which remain largely uncharted in the campaign
literature. To the extent that strategic concerns have been addressed in campaign literature, it has
been in relation to an aspect of strategy not addressed by Scammell: resource allocation.
Campaigns are understood to require ‘maximising votes through rational allocations of time,
money and personnel’ (Nimmo, 1970: 34) or bringing about ‘a better or more efficient – and more
reflective – organisation of resources and skills in order to achieve desired objectives’ (Negrine,
2007: 29). Taking a lead from private sector literature on the resource-based view (RBV) of
strategic management, resources have been defined broadly to cover ‘the tangible and intangible
assets firms use to conceive of and implement their strategies’ (Barney & Arikan, 2006). In
applying the RBV to competition among political parties, Richard Lynch and his colleagues (Lynch,
Baines, & Egan, 2006) considered three classes of resources as relevant: human resources
(including the party’s leadership, but also its supporters and its policy-developers); intellectual
resources (essentially the party’s policies) and its organisational and communications skills. They
further distinguish between long-term resources such as leadership, policies and campaigning
skills, which may take years for the party to develop, and short-term resources such as volunteer
activities, media messages and a campaign plan, which are likely to be acquired and deployed in
the intense but brief time frame of an election campaign. Taken together, Lynch et al argue these
resources underpin, and can help explain, why some parties are able to secure a sustained
competitive advantage over other parties, as measured by electoral success and government
incumbency. Similarly, Polsby and Wildavsky (1984: 53), assert that certain resources – those
disproportionately available to one or other of the contending parties - play a significant role in the
strategic environment of presidential elections. They list incumbency, organisational skill, policy
knowledge, reputation, speechmaking skills, wealth and stamina as among the relevant campaign

21
resources. A significant weakness of the RBV argument is that this broad definition overlooks what
this thesis argues is, in the eyes of the Australian campaign professional, a campaign resource of
the highest priority, namely money (Mills, 2012b). Lynch et al do not include money or financial
resources in their analysis, arguing (2006: 81-2) that the resources that truly deliver superior
performance are imperfectly mobile. The thesis seeks to address the gap identified by Scammell,
since the development and implementation of campaign strategies – including but not limited to
resource allocation - are critical to our understanding of the professional campaign model and of
the role of the campaign professional.

Several of the themes canvassed in this chapter – causation and party agency, changing campaign
techniques, and definitions of professionalisation – have been integrated by Gibson and Römmele
(2001) in their CAMPROF index. Promoting a ‘party-centred’ theory of professionalised
campaigning and rejecting the notion of parties as passive ‘victims’ of broader social forces,
Gibson and Römmele seek to ‘put parties into the explanatory picture’ (2001: 40). CAMPROF seeks
to measure varying levels of professionalisation across parties using a mix of exogenous and
endogenous variables. Qualitative studies have long suggested the importance of party-specific
variables: the British Conservative Party, for example, professionalised faster than its Labour rival
(Kavanagh, 1995; Wring, 2005). But CAMPROF is the first attempt to quantify professionalisation,
and was validated in relation to parties contesting the 2005 German federal elections (Gibson &
Rommele, 2009) and, in modified form, the 2006 Swedish election (Stromback, 2009). More
recently, CAMPROF has been further modified and applied to parties in Austria, Finland, Germany
and Sweden for the 2009 European parliamentary elections (Tenscher, Mykkanen, & Moring, 2012)
and, on a longitudinal and two-level basis, in Finland and Germany in national and European
elections from 2004 to 2011 (Tenscher & Mykkanen, 2012). The authors stress the exploratory
nature of this quantitative approach, but confirm the party-specific and campaign-specific
character of the professionalisation process including the significance of election defeat in
explaining why parties professionalise. Further work is required to establish the applicability of the
CAMPROF index outside the Western European context. At face value, for example, Gibson and
Römmele’s hypothesis (2001: 36) that professionalisation is most likely to take place in large vote-
maximising catch-all parties seems applicable to the ALP and Liberal Party. Likewise, in identifying
professionalisation as most likely to occur in ‘a well-funded, mainstream, right-wing party with
significant resources and a centralised internal power structure that has recently suffered a heavy
electoral defeat and/or a loss of governing status’ they accurately describe the Liberal Party in the
1940s and 1970s. That hypothesis however was specifically disputed in recent research (Tenscher,
et al., 2012: 159). The corollary - that left-wing or socialist parties structured around internal
democracy would resist the centralising, marketising and capital intensity of campaign
professionalism – might also describe the ALP’s reluctant, patchy and poorly-resourced adoption of
new campaign practices in the early and mid-1960s. It would not of course explain the rapid
changes that occurred in the ALP from 1969. Altogether, however, such speculation is untested.
‘The hunt for good explanatory variables continues’ (Tenscher, et al., 2012: 159).

Discussion

Political parties, then, remain central to the operation of Australian representative democracy,
though their organisational arrangements as well as their campaigning practices have changed
radically. While these changes have been documented and modelled, critical questions and
disputes persist about causation. In exploring these issues, party officials - too often neglected in
party scholarship - emerge as influential and distinctive agents shaping the behaviour and
structure of parties. Amid a frequently confused debate about professionalisation of parties and
campaigns, it is the party officials who, living both ‘from’ and ‘for’ politics, appear to possess the
technical skills and the commitment to client service which are characteristic of professionalism in
the political context. If the process of change in party and campaign can be understood as one of
professionalisation, then it is time to pay attention to the identity and role of the professionals.

To advance this inquiry, a framework has been proposed, adapted from the ‘three faces’ model of
V O Key and Katz & Mair, which takes party officials out of the ‘back-room’ of party scholarship

22
and places them at the centre of this change process where they rightly belong. This framework
allows analysis of the distinctive character of national party officials within a federal party
structure, and of their relationships with the other faces and other levels of that structure. This
framework is erected on a broad base of scholarly literature. This thesis will test its validity in
relation to the study of party officials in Australia.

At the risk of an overly simple metaphor, we must determine if parties are corks bobbing on an
ocean of change, or ships ploughing through the waves under their own steam, occasionally
shifting course and even jettisoning some cargo, but remaining under the command of captains
and crews to reach their chosen destinations. If this nautical metaphor is apt, then causation can
perhaps be best understood by interviewing the ships’ captains about their role, backgrounds,
skills, methods of appointment, and operating procedures. This approach is described and further
justified in the next chapter.

23
 Chapter Two

Research Design and Methodology: Elite, Qualitative and Institutional

‘I see a lot of academic research, on election campaigns that I’ve been very personally involved
with, that have put forward all sorts of theories and hypotheses, and none of the (researchers)
have spoken to me.’

‘I don’t think I gave anything too much away.’

‘In politics, the thing that you do is you characterise yourself as inheriting a wrecked, destroyed,
burnt-out hulk that you heroically (transformed) … or that you inherited the termite-riddled African
Queen that you pulled through the swamp.’

F
ourteen individuals occupied the post of ALP Federal Secretary or National Secretary over
nearly a century from 1915 to 2010. Eight individuals occupied the post of Liberal Party
Federal Director over the nearly seventy years from 1945. Of these twenty-two Head Office
leaders, more than half were by good fortune alive at the time of the research. These thirteen
individuals – eight from the ALP and five Liberals - form the principal subjects of this research
(Tables 2 and 3, next page).

These thirteen individuals constitute what political scientists refer to as an elite. The term does
not, in this context, denote high socio-economic status or social privilege. Rather, political elites
are those with ‘close proximity to power or policymaking’, such as elected representatives, senior
public servants, organisational executives and decision makers in general (Lilleker, 2003: 207;
Burnham, Gilland, Grant, & Layton-Henry, 2008: Ch9). They are considered as experts who
possess ‘specific interpretive knowledge (“know-why”) as well as procedural knowledge (“know-
how”)’ (Littig, 2009); their expertise can help answer a given research question (Brians, Willnat,
Manheim, & Rich, 2011: Ch21). The national Secretaries and Directors of the two major Australian
parties thus derive ‘elite’ status from their influence and their expertise. Selecting this elite as a
subject for research presents one significant design strength. While many elite studies must select
a representative sample from a larger group of potential subjects, the focus on the National
Secretaries and Federal Directors presents no sampling problems: the study covers the universal
set of party officials to have occupied these posts in the two parties. This approach was validated
by the complete participation rate. Every living official was invited to participate, and everyone
invited to participate agreed to do so. The study therefore covers party officials dating back to the
1960s, holding office through decades of profound change and engaged in campaigning in all
fifteen Federal elections since 1974. Even so, there are inevitable gaps: no Liberal officials from
before 1974 and no Labor officials before 1963 have survived, and both officials from the
important 1969 and 1972 campaigns have died.

This research design complemented the three-face two-level framework of party structure outlined
in chapter One. Research into party elites has tended, since Michels, to blur the distinction
between Head Office and other elements of the party. This study by contrast is designed to
explicate the distinctive character of Head Office, so as to trace its interactions with the other
party ‘faces’ and interrogate its role in the professionalisation process. It follows that the research
design deals with the production rather than the consumption of electoral politics, and with the
campaigning stage rather than with electoral outcomes. The research does not focus on voters (for
example by exploring voting behaviour or citizen participation in electoral deliberation and choice)
or on candidates (exploring problems of democratic leadership, follower-building or goal-setting)
but on the ‘campaign directors’ in the national Head Office. Their claims to ‘direct’ or ‘manage’
complex and dynamic campaigns is a large one, as it suggests they can influence the actions and
behaviours of large numbers of candidates and millions of voters; it implies that campaigns are

24
best understood as exercises in strategic planning. In evaluating this claim, the relevant question
is not so much about its validity – whether the professional campaign model ‘succeeds’ in changing
voter behaviour or delivers electoral success – than about the extent to which parties and party
officials believe it is valid.

Table 2: Federal/National Secretaries of the Australian Labor Party: Life Dates and
Terms in Office

ALP Life dates Term in office

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
David Combe 1943- 1973-81
Bob McMullan 1947- 1981-88
Bob Hogg 1937- 1988-93
Gary Gray 1958- 1993-2000
Geoff Walsh 1953- 2000-03
Tim Gartrell 1971- 2003-08
Karl Bitar 1971- 2008-11**

* Cyril Wyndham died in July 2012. ** George Wright was appointed ALP National
Secretary in April 2011 and does not form part of the research for this thesis.

Table 3: Federal Directors of the Liberal Party: Life Dates and Terms in Office

Liberal Life dates Term in office

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
Andrew Robb 1951- 1991-97
Lynton Crosby 1956- 1997-2003
Brian Loughnane 1957- 2003-

The research design also enables comparative analysis. While many elite studies focus on a cohort
of individuals in a single period of time in a single institution, the elite studied in this project
constitute a sequence of office holders, in two rival organisations. By examining the sequences of
office holders in the two major party organisations we can illuminate change - for example, the
professionalisation of election campaigning - through time and across two organisations. If
professionalisation were found to impact on the parties in the same way and over the same time,
we might conclude they were responding to similar exogenous circumstances. Alternatively,

25
building on the party-centred theory of professionalisation, inter-party variation of timing and
impact might suggest endogenous factors – such as the circumstances, structures and adaptive
practices of each party – were shaping the change process.

The exclusion of minor parties perhaps opens this project to Henry Mayer’s critique of ‘big party
chauvinism’ (Mayer, 1980). Yet the ALP and Liberal Party are Australia’s only truly national parties,
having demonstrably adopted and pursued catch-all electoral strategies. They typically contest
every federal and state election and have done so since inception; they are the only parties which
have formed national government since the Second World War; they have an uninterrupted
succession of national party officials, stretching over many decades. Minor parties such as the
Democratic Labor Party, Australian Democrats, and Greens have existed for shorter periods of
time, have largely been successful in Senate not House of Representatives elections, have not
formed government, and have typically not had strong national organisational structures and
employees. The National Party does have a long organisational history and has regularly formed
government at the state level. But at the national level it remains a sectional party playing the
junior role in a coalition dominated by the Liberals; its federal directorship, moreover, dates back
only to 1968 (Davey, 2010: 407).

A final design consideration must be noted. The researcher is a former political journalist and
ministerial staff member, and had become acquainted with, had written about, and had worked
alongside several of the party officials studied in this research. 2 These relationships had the
potential to impact on the research in unpredictable ways – for example by facilitating or
hampering access to the officials, or by making them more or less confident in the credibility of
this project. A neutral stance towards respondents, at all stages of the research and analysis, was
therefore more than usually necessary. In the event this requirement dovetailed with, and
decisively reinforced, this project’s ambition for cross-party comparative research. Marian Simms
notes the ‘incredibly politicised’ character of the study of Australian political parties, which she
attributes in part to the many ‘poachers turned gamekeepers’ – that is, political practitioners who
turned to academic writing about their party (Simms, 2009b: 186-7, 190). Far from adding to the
existing predominance of Labor Party research, this researcher has been animated as a former
practitioner by a belief that there was merit in applying the experience of a ‘gamekeeper’ to a
genuinely comparative project. The subject matter of campaign professionalisation, with its impact
transcending party boundaries, seems particularly well suited to that ambition.

Research Method: Semi-Structured Interviews

The most appropriate research technique for this task is the semi-structured interview using open-
ended questions (Aberbach & Rockman, 2002; Burnham, et al., 2008; Pierce, 2008; Brians, et al.,
2011). In a party discourse dominated by the parliamentary wing and filtered through news
media, the voices of party officials, it was believed, would offer new and distinctive research
perspectives on questions of party structure and change. Elite interviews allow the researcher to
penetrate ‘behind closed doors’ (Lilleker, 2003: 208), to gain ‘insight into the mind’ of a political
actor (Harrison & Deicke, 2001), and to concentrate upon ‘distinctive features of situations and
events and upon the beliefs and personal experiences of individuals’ (Vromen, 2010: 258).

Political scientists have long been aware of the potential pitfalls of closed-end questioning of elites:
comparing a study of working men that used open-ended questions with a study of French and
German elites that used closed-end questions, Bernard Brown noted that the former treated the
views of bricklayers as if they were opinions of an elite, while the latter interviewed elites and
treated them like bricklayers (cited in Aberbach, Chesney, & Rockman, 1975). Closed-end

2
As a journalist in the Parliamentary Press Gallery in 1978-83 and 1991-3, the researcher had contact with
Eggleton, Robb, Combe and Gray. Researching The New Machine Men (Mills, 1986) involved interviews with
Eggleton, McMullan, Hogg and the late Mick Young about various aspects of campaigning. As adviser
(speechwriter) for Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke from 1986-1991 (Mills, 1993b), the author worked
alongside Hogg as Hawke’s political adviser, McMullan as National Secretary, and Walsh as Hawke’s press
secretary; for good measure, Walsh had earlier been a colleague at The Age newspaper.

26
questions imply researchers know in advance the direction or content of elite concerns and can
reduce those concerns to a small number of discrete variables (Vromen, 2010: 257). Elites
however tend to hold strong views and can articulate them clearly; they may be less willing to
cooperate with a closed-end approach (Aberbach, et al., 1975: 7). Open-ended questions in a
semi-structured framework by contrast grant elite respondents ‘latitude to articulate fully their
responses’ and permit them to ‘organise their answers within their own frameworks’ (Aberbach &
Rockman, 2002). Care must be taken however to ensure that flexibility and discursiveness does
not veer into irrelevance or trivia. The researcher must identify in advance the priority questions
and areas of interest that must be traversed in the interview and needs to prevent ‘control’ of the
interview passing to the respondent (Burnham, et al., 2008: 240-1). At a more pragmatic level,
the interviewer needs flexibility to cope with the inevitable contingencies of the elite interview
process: time is limited and subject to interruption and distraction.

Elite interviews constitute a robust and well-established method for researching election
campaigns, political marketing and party change in the United States and Britain (Devine, 2002:
200). Scammell conducted ‘well over a hundred’ formal and informal interviews, mostly
unstructured, with politicians, campaign managers, press officers, advertisers, pollsters and
journalists (Scammell, 1995). Webb and Fisher interviewed employees of the British Labour Party
as part of their study of that party’s professionalisation (Webb & Fisher, 2003). O’Reilly also
conducted ‘a large number of original interviews with politicians and individuals working in politics’
in the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, including ‘ex-Prime Ministers, sitting and
former ministers, senior party officials, political apparatchiks, policy advisers and academics’
(O'Reilly, 2007). Lees-Marshment has conducted ‘100 interviews with practitioners and advisors’
for her latest political marketing study (Lees-Marshment, 2011). An innovative ‘focus group’ style
of research involving the ‘campaign managers’ of presidential elections in the United States has
been conducted at Harvard University since 1972 (see for example Institute of Politics, 2008),
offering what the convenor described as ‘glimpses of the planning, calculation, contrivance,
miscalculation and mischance that determined what the electorate saw’ (E. R. May & Fraser, 1973:
1). In Australian political science, significant interview-based projects have explored the work and
role of ministers (Weller & Grattan, 1981), journalists (Tiffen, 1989) and ministerial advisers
(Walter, 1986; Maley, 2000). But scholars of parties and elections have rarely used interviews as a
research tool, and national party officials have never been the subject of systematic research. 3

After the Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of Sydney granted approval for the
proposed research in August 2009, the research design was operationalised in the first instance by
sending a letter to twelve current and former party officials in December 2009. Address details had
been assembled from public sources, in the case of the two incumbent party officials at the time of
the letters (Bitar and Loughnane) and the three Members of Parliament (Robb, McMullan and
Gray), and from personal contacts for those in private roles or retirement. The letter invited their
involvement in the research project by agreeing to a two-hour interview ‘about their Head Office
role’, explaining that the project sought to describe Head Office changes ‘across time, across party
officials and across parties’ with a principal theme of evolving professionalism in election
campaigning. A thirteenth letter was sent in December 2010 to Cyril Wyndham, the oldest
participant, following the happy discovery in the course of interviews that he was living in quiet
retirement. All respondents agreed to be interviewed, though most required follow-up prompts.
Interviews were conducted in the order in which respondents agreed and appropriate
arrangements could be made. The first interviews were conducted in February 2010 and all but
one were completed by March 2011. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the final interviews were
with the two most recent party officials; the Bitar interview was not conducted until after he had
resigned his post. Venues were chosen to suit the practical convenience of the respondent
(Appendix Three, Table 1).

3
The US-style focus group did inspire a conference of NSW campaign managers after the 1988 state election
(Public Policy Forum, 1989).

27
Respondents were understood to be familiar, from their experience as campaign managers, with
interview techniques and capable of deflecting or ignoring questions as they saw fit. They were
also assumed to be wary of questions dealing with confidential party matters. Efforts were made to
put them at ease on both counts by assuring them, at the outset, that the interview was not
intended to deal with ‘nuts and bolts’ of specific campaign events or to elicit confidential party
information, but rather to focus on their personal career experience and the nature of their role in
the party Head Office. Open-ended questions dealt with the respondents’ unique personal
knowledge and experience or their subjective perspective. For example respondents were invited
to describe their role as National Secretary/Federal Director, to summarise their major
achievements, or to explain if they regarded themselves as professional. Some questions were
somewhat closed in nature, seeking factual information about the respondent’s career. For
example, respondents were asked to state ‘when and why’ they joined their political party, to
describe their early campaign experience or to recall ‘how and by whom’ they were selected into
Head Office. Even here it is apparent that questions were amenable to narrative and subjective
responses. Throughout, the approach was designed to allow respondents’ the flexibility to
structure their answer as they saw fit while also maximising the potential for comparison of
responses. Thus within these semi-structured exchanges, care was taken to ensure that all
interviews covered the same set of core questions. To this end an interview outline was developed
and used for all interviews to guide questioning. Organised in three sections, the outline dealt with
the interviewee’s personal political background, party experience including in Head Office and
campaign experience (Appendix Four). Core questions all fell in the first two sections and most
interview time was spent on these two sections; only in rare interviews were all questions on the
outline explicitly raised.

Interviews were conducted on an ‘on the record’ basis and digitally recorded. It was a high priority
of the research to capture quotations attributable to named individuals. Undertakings were
provided before the interviews, and repeated in a project update sent in April 2011, that
participants could review any such quotations prior to publication with a view to requiring part or
parts of them to be considered non-attributable. To this end, interview transcripts were sent to
respondents on two occasions. A raw transcript was sent shortly after each interview; in
September 2012 respondents were sent another copy with the proposed quotations highlighted,
with the request they review and confirm the excerpts as attributable to them. All but one of them
responded affirmatively, with some seeking minor non-substantive clarifications. The willingness of
party officials to be interviewed, and their sustained involvement throughout the project, suggests
they saw the research as a worthwhile and legitimate exercise - or at least saw value in shaping it
through participation. As Loughnane put it:

I see a lot of academic research on election campaigns that I’ve been very personally
involved with, that have put forward all sorts of theories and hypotheses, and none of the
(academic researchers) have spoken to me.

Research Method: Documentary Sources

Interviews must not be relied upon as the single source for a research project (Lilleker, 2003;
Burnham, 2008: 232). Claims made in interviews need to tested and contextualised by
triangulation against other data. At one level, this can be done by recourse to other sources of
verbatim speech by the officials themselves: speeches; oral history (Pascoe, 2010); contemporary
newspaper reports and profiles; post-campaign narratives by journalists (Williams, 1997) and
academics (O'Reilly, 2007); and other published sources (Cameron, 1990; Botsman, 2011). The
late Mick Young provided an invaluable account of his role in the 1972 election campaign in a
speech to a Fabian Society conference in 1985 (M. Young, 1986). More generally, the thesis draws
on documentary records to complement the interview data in two ways: by providing context for
the statements and activities reported in the interviews, and by extending the narrative back
before the period covered by the interviews to throw light on early party officials.

28
Documents produced by the parties themselves shed important light on the role of the Head
Office. These include the parties’ constitutions and amendments, rule books, conference papers
and reports, policy platforms, post-election reviews, speeches, newspapers and newsletters.
Produced for public consumption or widespread internal distribution, such records are commonly
available in the National Library of Australia and, in some recent cases, on the parties’ own
websites. Some party records have been collected and published by academics from public sources
(such as Graeme Starr’s (1980) documentary history of the Liberal Party) or with the assistance of
the parties (such as Pat Weller and Beverly Lloyd’s (1978) minutes of the ALP Federal Executive).
Party histories (Crisp, 1955; West, 1965; McMullin, 1991; Hancock, 2000) and other secondary
accounts of party activities (Murray, 1970; Blewett, 1973) also provide relevant party documents.
Some early party officials are recorded in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Using these
records, it is possible to construct authoritative accounts of the ‘founding moment’ and early years
of each national party and each party’s Head Office which illuminate changing party practices
governing the selection and work of party officials.

Documentary research of course carries the risk of selection bias (Vromen, 2010: 262). The Crisp
and Weller-Lloyd volumes travel no further than the Labor Split in the mid-1950s; West leaves the
Liberals at their zenith in the mid-1960s, while Starr and Hancock both trace the Party to
Opposition in the mid-1970s; McMullin’s is a party centenary volume that is complete to 1991.
More contemporary records are generally not available from either party in consolidated published
form. Both parties routinely archive their documents with the National Library of Australia;
however researchers must seek permission before access is granted. 4 The reality is that for both
parties, documents of potential relevance to this project – if they have survived - are likely to
remain tightly held while they retain any strategic significance. These include campaign manuals
(‘how to’ handbooks published by Head Office for distribution to electorate campaigners),
campaign strategy documents, internal post-election reviews, minutes of national campaign
committees, market research reports and campaign finance records. While these are rarely
available in original form, sporadic examples emerge in campaign accounts by academics (Blewett,
1973) and journalists (Oakes & Solomon, 1973; Oakes & Solomon, 1974; Oakes, 1976; P. Kelly,
1984, 1992; P. Williams, 1997; P. Kelly, 2009). Funding and disclosure reports filed with the
Australian Electoral Commission also provide basic though uneven data about how parties
gathered, handled and spent their campaign funds.

Qualitative Data Coding and Analysis

Open-ended semi-structured elite interviews generated rich and relevant data for this project,
supplemented by varied documentary sources. Of course the different circumstances of each
interview created data that is uneven and highly contextual. This project invited respondents to
reflect on events that had taken place years - in some cases, decades - previously, and to appraise
their performance, and that of others, in high-stakes political activity. Inevitably, recall and
memory varied; retrospectivity is inherent; some personal justifications are to be expected;
confidentiality and reputation are shoals to be carefully negotiated. One official was apparently
relieved, in his informal post-interview comment, that:

I don’t think I gave anything too much away.

Another official noted sardonically the heroic theme of some political reminiscence:

In politics, the thing you do is, you characterise yourself as inheriting a wrecked,
destroyed, burnt-out hulk that you heroically (transformed) … or that you inherited the
termite-riddled African Queen that you pulled through the swamp.

4
This researcher sought the approval of both parties to access their records in the National Library. Approval
from one party was readily granted. In the event, archival research archives proved beyond the scope of the
project and neither request was pursued.

29
These factors needed to be carefully weighed at the coding and analysis stage of research. The
starting point however must be the recognition that qualitative interviews are not designed to
produce literally accurate accounts. Rather, it is the respondent’s ‘version’ of events that is
properly the subject of inquiry. The personal views and perspectives of party officials derive
authority from their close involvement in election campaigns and in party management. The goal
of research is to explore their subjective experiences and the meanings they attach to those
experiences (Devine, 2002). As Brians puts it, rather than regarding ‘what interviewees say as
factual data’, researchers should instead ‘treat the fact that they said it as data’ (2011: 367,
emphasis in original).

With this approach, translating this data into meaningful understanding (O'Leary, 2010) entailed
an inductive, iterative process of coding and analysis. Despite the attractions of computer-aided
qualitative data analysis programs such as NVivo, the relatively small number of interviews in this
project, and the researcher’s desire for intensive ‘hands-on’ exposure to each of them, suggested
manual coding as the appropriate approach. Following close and repeated reading of each
transcript, supplemented by the contextual documentation, clusters of common elements gradually
emerged. After several iterations, these clusters were refined and assembled into a coding
schedule which itemised key themes and sub-themes (Appendix Three, Table 2). Interviews were
then coded according to this schedule.

Some themes emerged as ‘manifest coding items’ that reflected ‘direct responses to particular
questions’ (Aberbach & Rockman, 2002). Examples included questions about prior campaign
experience and methods of selection. To the extent that these responses included factual material
such as dates and numbers, they could be quantified, aggregated and tabulated (see Appendix
Three). Key attributes of the various methods of party selection could be captured and used to
generate models of party behaviour (see Table 5). These quantitative approaches generated
comparative patterns of party behaviour which, changing through time, helped develop theories
about the process of professionalisation within each of the parties. In this limited sense then,
qualitative data was used as an avenue for interpreting and informing quantitative analysis
(Aberbach, et al., 1975; Aberbach & Rockman, 2002). The grand positivist traditions of US social
science (exemplified by King, Keohane, & Verba, 1994) relegate qualitative research to an
epistemologically dubious realm where it can perform the essentially subordinate or supplementary
role of illuminating or verifying theory developed through quantitative means (Furlong & Marsh, :
196-7; Mahoney, 2010). Rejecting that approach, this thesis asserts that qualitative research can
in fact generate valid descriptive and causal inferences in its own right. Interviews constitute a
form of qualitative research built on an interpretive epistemology where social reality is ‘dynamic,
constructed and evolving’ (Devine, 2002). In this sense, professionalisation in the Australian
political parties can be discerned through the words of party officials – words which carry the
authoritative experience of expert informants – and analysed through ‘thick’ description rather
than numerical generalisations (Vromen, 2010).

Beyond the ‘manifest’ items then, coding more typically proceeded as a search ‘below the surface’,
for themes which were often buried in indirect responses to questions and which only emerged as
coding proceeded. A particularly rich vein of data was of course presented in the responses on
professionalism. The ambiguity of the term and the open-ended nature of the questions
encouraged respondents to construct their own interpretation of the term. In coding these
responses, care was taken to disentangle and isolate the multiple threads of meaning they
contained. In addition, two open-ended questions yielded responses whose unexpected importance
emerged as coding proceeded. In one, respondents were asked to identify their ‘key relationships’
while working in Head Office. This yielded surface data about relationships with party members,
with party leaders, with state branches and so on. It was only once these clusters had been
assembled that their analytical importance could be appreciated: the dynamic relationships
between national and state branches, and between party officials and party leaders, emerged as
important factors in the work of Head Office and this, in turn, suggested broader patterns of
centralisation underway in each party. Similarly, when asked the broad question about their ‘role
as national secretary/federal director’, many respondents provided unexpectedly specific and

30
detailed responses about strategic planning and fundraising. These topics had not been envisaged
in planning the interview outline. It is a matter for speculation whether such rich results would
have been generated by direct questions. But taken together with the centralisation theme, they
proved essential in conceptualising the three imperatives facing party officials which ultimately, as
the thesis will argue, fed into an emerging understanding of the professionalisation process. At the
same time, the responses to this question were also significant for what they failed to mention.
While they are concerned from a strategic perspective about the overall communications messages
emanating from the party, respondents made no mention of performing media management
functions responsibility for which appears to lie not in Head Office but in the parliamentary party.

Interpretation and Theory Building: Historical Institutionalism

In hypothesising the centrality of party officials to the professionalisation process, this research
goes to the heart of an unresolved scholarly debate about the processes and causes of change and
continuity in institutions. Political scientists have long been interested in the capacity of institutions
to impose order on a potentially inchoate world, ‘shap(ing) how political actors define their
interests and … structure their relations of power to other groups’ (Thelen & Steinmo, 1992: 2). A
venerable tradition of institutional studies – empirical, descriptive and largely non-theoretical –
was submerged in the 1950s and 1960s by the emerging behaviouralist tide in social sciences,
which attributed the prime explanation for social, economic and political outcomes not to
institutional contexts but to individual preferences. More recently, institutionalism has been
revived in a vigorous and critical new form. ‘New’ institutionalism operates with a more expansive
and sophisticated definition of institutions and with richer and more explicit theoretical frameworks
(Lowndes, 2010: 61). Where the ‘old’ focus was largely on the institutions of state power, new
institutionalists are concerned with a much broader set of institutions operating independently of
the state such as political parties, trade unions, interest groups and policy networks (Thelen &
Steinmo, 1992: 11, Lowndes, 2010: 67-9). Indeed, the former emphasis on the formal and static,
constitutional and hierarchical, characteristics of institutions has been supplanted with a
recognition that institutions’ informal and dynamic conventions can equally create ‘stable,
recurring, repetitive, patterned’ behaviour (Goodin, 1996: 22). From solid, ‘brass name-plate’
entities (cited in Lowndes, 2010: 67), institutions have dematerialised into a ‘mix of rules,
routines, norms and identities’ (March & Olsen, 2006: 11) or, more simply still, into ‘rule
structures’ (Sanders, 2006: 39).

The new institutionalist insights have clear implications for the analysis of the interviews with
campaign professionals. In Australian political studies, new institutionalism has been dismissed as
just one of the ‘latest American programmatic manifestos’ which have failed to disrupt the
discipline’s modernist-empiricist norms (Rhodes, 2009; Rhodes & Wanna, 2009). Yet while it may
not have been extensively theorised, institutionalism’s evolving empirical agenda is certainly
apparent, as two contrasting studies of the ALP demonstrate. For Crisp in 1955, the ALP could be
understood through ‘essentially a constitutional history’ that described the operations and
interactions of the party’s formal structure of committees, executives and representatives while
deliberately ignoring the rank-and-file and the trade unions (Crisp, 1955: 1). Thirty years later,
Parkin and Warhurst insisted the ALP could only be understood through the varied, fluid and
essentially extra-constitutional activities they describe as ‘machine politics’ (Parkin & Warhurst,
1983: 13, 16-26). A study of professionalisation must consider both the formal rules of the party
organisation and its informal conventions, both its fixed structures and office holders and its more
fluid power relations and conventions. Such concerns are squarely on the new institutionalist
agenda. Specifically, given the multiple sub-themes that have appeared under the new
institutional banner - Lowndes (2010) identifies nine, each emphasising different types of
institutions and employing different theoretical approaches to assessing institutional influence –
the ‘historical institutionalist’ variant offers significant opportunities for the analysis and
interpretation of the professionalisation process in Australian political parties.

Historical institutionalism focuses on the way in which choices about institutional design shape
future decision-making by individuals within the institution (Lowndes, 2010: 65; Thelen &

31
Steinmo, 1992: 9). For Elizabeth Sanders (2006: 39), there are two interrelated conditions that
interest historical institutionalists in seeking to illuminate human political interactions. The first
acknowledges that those interactions take place within the context of ‘rule structures that are
themselves human creations’. That is, while institutions are ‘political actors in their own right’
(March & Olsen, 1984: 738) with powerful structuring and stabilising characteristics, they are also
subject to change at the hands of those very human agents whose behaviour they shape. As
Thelen and Steinmo (1992: 10) comment, institutions can shape or constrain political strategies
but are themselves also the outcome of deliberate political strategies, conflict and choice. Sanders’
second condition concerns the process and timing of political activity: it must be understood as
occurring ‘sequentially, as life is lived’ (Sanders, 2006: 39). For historical institutionalists, the
order in which events take place is crucial, as early decisions and events impose powerful
constraints on subsequent events. In this sense, institutions are said to be ‘path dependent’: ‘once
a particular path gets established … self-reinforcing processes make reversals very difficult’
(Pierson, 2004: 10). The contrast with ‘rational choice institutionalists’ is complete. Rational choice
institutionalists see individuals choose strategies within institutions to achieve their goal of
maximised self-interest. Historical institutionalists focus instead on satisficing: goals themselves
are uncertain and contingent (Thelen & Steinmo, 1992: 8); outcomes may be inefficient, non-
optimal, abrasive and problematic (March and Olsen, 1984: 737, Pierson, 2004: 55-6); and power
is distributed unevenly among winners and losers (Hall & Taylor, 1996). Instead of the ‘ruthless
elegance’ of rational choice (cited in Thelen & Steinmo, 1992: 12), historical institutionalism is
‘messily eclectic’ relying on narrative to set out its unavoidably long causal chains (Sanders, 2006:
44). Critically, historical institutionalism emphasises the temporal dimension, focussing not on
institutional choice but on institutional development (Pierson, 2004: 177). Sanders (2006: 35)
dismisses rational choice analysis as a ‘snapshot’ (Sanders, 2006: 35); in a more damni ng
metaphor, Pierson claims that a rational choice chef would perfectly assemble all the necessary
ingredients for a meal and perfectly measure them, but would be entirely indifferent as to how
they were combined, in what order, or for how long (Pierson, 2004: 1).

Though the term is recent, scholars of political parties have long recognised the path dependent
nature of change in parties and party systems. Key’s (1964) three-face framework is essentially an
(old) institutionalist statement about the structuring force of institutional location on the
behaviours and interests of party actors. Lipset and Rokkan (1967) identified the underlying social
cleavages in western Europe that were transformed into party systems that endured, in ‘frozen’
form, for subsequent decades. Panebianco (1988: xiii), reviving Weber’s emphasis on the
‘founding moment’ of institutions, also argued that structures and rules formulated at the point of
creation continue to shape party activities long after the founding environment has changed. He
suggests ‘the way in which the cards are dealt out, and the outcomes of the different rounds
played out in the formative phase of an organisation, continue in many ways to condition the life
of an organisation even decades afterwards’. The appointment of ex-Brigadier Cleland as the first
Federal Director of the Liberal Party started a pattern which, as we shall see, endured for future
appointments; in electing Arch Stewart from among its state officials as its first Federal Secretary
the ALP likewise began as it was to continue.

Yet such instances only serve to highlight the deep and unresolved tension at the heart of the
historical institutional approach: institutions develop, and shape individual behaviour, in powerful
but somewhat inflexible ways – yet they are created and shaped by human agency and
intervention. Institutions are defined by their stability and endurance – yet they do change.
Political parties endure, but their platforms are revised, rules amended, committees reconstituted;
deals are brokered, alliances forged and abandoned, and dearly held values shed and replaced;
parties unite (Hancock, 2000:3-4) and parties split (Murray, 1970: 5). Parties may also undergo a
process of professionalisation. How can such changes be explained or at least understood? New
institutionalism is at its weakest when explaining this puzzle (Lowndes, 2010: 74). Path
dependency grants little space and uncertain powers to human agency to ‘break free’ of the past;
change is implicitly posited as an exogenous disruption (Greener, 2005).

32
We thus return to the challenge identified in chapter one. How can the systemic, party and
agential level drivers, the exogenous and endogenous factors, be accommodated within a
theoretically satisfying model of institutional change? Historical institutionalism suggests the
answer may lie in understanding campaign professionalisation as a new structure of rules.
Emerging within parties as an adaptive response to a rapidly changing external environment of
new technologies and new voting alignments, these new rules of professionalism differ from, and
sharply challenge, parties’ existing rules - their formal rules and constitutions as well as their
informal conventions of venerable practice and ideological commitments which in some cases date
from the parties’ foundation and which have shaped the path of party growth in powerful ways. Yet
the new rules also draw on long-standing party ambitions: they represent a modernised approach
to achieving the parties’ goals of electoral success. Human agency, in the form of the party
officials, can be observed formulating and applying these new rules of professionalism, adopting
the identity of campaign professionals, driving the process of professionalisation, transforming
parties’ operational practices and the attitudes and working habits of those individuals within it.
Interviews with elite party officials, spanning both parties and covering four decades of profound
change in the political and broader environments, have provided a new set of data with which this
process of institutional change can be confidently explored.

33
 Chapter Three

‘I Do Regard Myself as a Professional’: Economic, Technical and Ideological

Characteristics of Head Office Professionals

‘I do regard myself as a professional. A professional does their job to the best of their abilities
given the resources they’ve got. That’s how I view it.’

‘It’s not “Amateur Hour”. You’re dealing with important things – or what you believe are important
things - like policy, delivering good government, dealing with the democratic ideal.’

‘I’m not an administrator – 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.’

‘Trying to be dispassionate about it, I think experience does matter. I see myself as a campaign
professional. I don’t aspire at all to go into parliament.’

W
hat does professionalism mean in the context of Australian parties and campaigns? The
term, as already noted, is beset by many definitional ambiguities which have not,
however, prevented its widespread usage by campaign scholars and political
commentators. This chapter seeks to address this shortcoming. It does so by establishing how
party officials themselves describe their work, and by using that foundation to clarify the concepts
around the ‘professional’ character of party and campaign work. It is not to be expected that the
party officials can produce the hard definitions or unambiguous criteria of professionalism that so
far have eluded others; the singularities of context and the idiosyncrasies of expression of more
than a dozen political actors spanning several decades of Australian election campaigns are likely
to conspire against any such outcome. Nor should it be expected that their concepts about
professionalism will necessarily match those that surround other more traditional professions.
What can be expected, given their unique position at the head of party organisations, is that the
party officials will speak authoritatively about campaign change; if professionalisation has taken
place they are likely to have, at least, observed it. Accordingly two questions were put to the party
officials in the research interview: they were asked to describe their job as National Secretary or
Federal Director in their respective Head Offices, and they were asked whether in performing this
role they regarded themselves as professionals. Reporting their responses, this chapter draws out
key themes about the professionalisation process in Australian political parties.

Professional Campaign Management

Political parties are traditionally rich in activities arising from their presence ‘on the ground’ and in
‘public office’. Party members gather in branch meetings to debate policy, select delegates and
promote the party’s cause, especially at election times. Candidates vie for preselection within the
party and then for election by the voters. Members of Parliament promote legislative expression of
their party’s policies, representing their supporters and promoting their communities’ interests on
the broader stage. Amid this busy diversity – which has of course ebbed with the decline of the
party membership – the party officials occupy highly specialised internal roles. Alone within the
party, they are exclusively focussed on the task of campaigning and winning elections.

This exclusive focus is apparent from the descriptions given by the National Secretaries and
Federal Directors about their work. For most of these officials, campaign management is a
prominent element of their job. This prominence has increased through time to the point where it
has become the definitive element. This trend is apparent among both ALP and Liberal officials.

Only two of the thirteen responses made no mention of election campaign management:
Wyndham and Pascoe. These are the two earliest officials interviewed in each party, whose

34
experience dates back to the 1960s and 1970s; this suggests that in their day campaign
management was not at least the superordinate task. For Wyndham, the job consisted of:

Policy. Stop the states from bickering.

For Pascoe, who entered the Liberal Party Head Office as a management consultant in turbulent
circumstances after the 1972 loss of Government:

My role was like being brought into a company, to turn it around. It was a turnaround.

Two more officials from the 1970s, Eggleton and Combe, mentioned campaign activities as a
prominent but not exclusive part of their job descriptions. They both employ the private sector
metaphor of a Chief Executive Officer and describe their role in essentially managerial terms:

It was essentially being Chief Executive of the party headquarters, with all that involved. …
I never failed to accept that my principal role was to make the organisation work, to have a
professional relationship with the state divisions, to make sure that we had appropriate
research (and) good relations with the agency, that we had the confidence of all the state
directors, and were ready for election campaigns (Eggleton).

I suppose you’re Chief Executive Officer of the organisational wing of the party … running it
as a business. Q: Was there anything more than the financial/ administrative role? A:
Well, the campaign role, because there were so many damn elections: in eight years, four
national elections (Combe).

For later respondents, campaign management assumes a steadily more prominent element of the
role. Four of these respondents – three Labor and one Liberal official – used virtually identical
terms to describe their role as consisting of two parts, one of which is campaign management and
the other party administration. For McMullan, for example, the job combines the role of ‘efficient
administrator of the organisation’ with ‘creative campaign director’. Walsh says the role has
‘always’ had an administrative and a campaign management component. For Gartrell, ‘half the job,
or a third of the job really’ was taken up by the ‘shepherding’ role of administering the national
conference and the National Executive; the balance of the time was taken up as campaign director.
Loughnane, the incumbent Liberal official, says the job consists of two parts, being Chief Executive
and campaign director.

This combination is a problematic one, requiring different skills at different times. According to
McMullan, ‘all jobs of this character’ in both the ALP and, he understood, the Liberal Party contain
the ‘inherent tension’: efficiency and creativity need to be combined in the one person. Walsh put it
pithily: ‘most people are forced to do the former (administrative role), and enjoy to do the latter
(campaign role)’. For Gartrell likewise the campaign role was the ‘most challenging but most
rewarding’ part, without which the National Secretaryship would ‘just be a boring crap job with a
lot of difficult meetings with difficult people’. Which of these two halves is the more important
element? McMullan and Loughnane – spanning the 1980s and the 2000s – agree it is campaign
management:

A key priority was to have the party in the shape that it was capable of running and
winning an election campaign and forming a government. That was our number 1 task
(McMullan).

The other way to look at it is, my job is to win elections (Loughnane).

In the more detailed descriptions of the role provided by two more Labor respondents,
campaigning is again prominent:

Obviously campaigning, party development, finance, policy development – probably that’s

the quartet (Hogg).

It’s one of those jobs that you define for yourself, and you define it around your own
personality and capability. I saw it 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. …
Q: How did that conceptualisation of the role differ from your predecessors and successors?

35
 A: I built on the work that my predecessors had done. I became literally the embodiment
of McMullan’s obsession with campaign capability and Hoggy’s obsession with building the
asset base (Gray).

The most detailed response was given by Crosby. Describing himself as ‘effectively the national
CEO of the party’, Crosby provided a long list of responsibilities attached to that role. These
included ‘organisational stewardship’, supporting the national forums such as the Federal Executive
and Federal Policy Committee, providing political strategy and advice to the parliamentary party,
providing policy advice, training party employees, managing the party’s international relations and
fundraising. All these activities ‘came together’ in campaigning, which provides the ‘ultimate
reason’ for them. Emphasising this campaign priority, Crosby had earlier emphasised that he saw
himself primarily in a campaign role, while delegating lesser party tasks:

Really, I’ve always been interested in campaigns. I’m not an administrator – 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. … As far as I was concerned, it was campaign
director first, and most of the party support stuff you can fan out.

Thus for Crosby, the job involves more than the party’s operational continuity. Outcomes matter.
Professional campaign management is about helping the party achieve its goals:

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 (Crosby).

Two more respondents, Robb and Bitar, answered solely in terms of a campaign role. Robb recalls
that his mission was to take the Liberal Party’s campaign management to a new level of centralised
technical sophistication:

I think (the Liberal Party) thought they were moving to, not a new generation, but a new
perspective (in hiring me). There was a view that they had to … centralise some of the
activities, the coordination at least of the on-the-ground activities. … But also there was a
view that we need 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.

Bitar saw the role as a specialised campaign one with a specific political goal:

The federal secretary (doesn’t) have to … look after the party membership 5. You’re running
a national organisation, but it’s pretty much a very specialised campaign director role and
managing the national executive. … I saw my primary job as getting the government re-
elected. I saw that as my primary role.

From Wyndham and Pascoe through to the recent incumbents, campaign management has
become the primary or even exclusive role. The party officials recognise – indeed, they insist –
that this development carries implications about the character and broader purpose of the political
party. McMullan states it explicitly: having described (above) campaign readiness as his ‘number 1
task’, he recognises that other important party activities such as political participation and policy
debates are relegated behind, or subsumed into, that priority. Because they will not themselves
win elections, these lesser functions can be dismissed as the activities of a ‘debating society’:

The administrative things about the character of the party, democratisation, the
opportunity for (participation) – those are important. But 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. So you do have to think about things
like equity and propriety, and all those (administrative) things about how you run any
organisation whether it’s a tennis club or a political party. But (the) fundamental drivers,
the thing that distinguishes (the party) from other organisations you run, is that (the
party’s) job, its only real job, is to win the election.

5
Party membership in both parties is managed through the state branches and divisions.

36
No doubt McMullan’s emphasis on electoral success was particularly shaped by his achievement as
campaign director in taking Labor from opposition into Government and keeping it in office through
successive elections. Indeed, other officials who had enjoyed campaign success and who led a
governing party, made the same general point about campaign priority:

There is no point in having a well-run organisation where the paper flows in a timely
manner if you never win an election (Crosby).

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).

You build your secretariat for campaign capability - not for the day to day running of your
party membership, but your big load (campaign) events (Gray).

It is apparent from all that they say, here and elsewhere, that the party officials do not regard
their campaign focus as a normatively poor or unhealthy development for the party. To the
contrary they regard it as a very proper and desirable characteristic: well-run campaigns serve the
best interests of the party by maximising its chances of electoral success which in turn allows the
party to implement its policy in government. In this sense, the party officials feel justified in
imposing their campaign focus on the activities and purposes of the party as a whole. This logic, it
emerges, is a key element of the party officials’ understanding of themselves as professionals: as
professionals they define their work as helping the party achieve its goal of electoral success.

Professionals on Professionalism

Each party official interviewed for this research was asked if he regarded himself as a professional
and what he meant by the term. The responses suggest that, while professionalism may be a
contested term among scholars, the term is in increasingly wide usage among Australia’s
campaign managers and carries a rich and coherent set of meanings. It is, moreover, readily
embraced by them as an appropriate way of describing their occupation.

More than half the interviewed group - seven of the thirteen party officials, representing both
parties - accepted without hesitation the description of themselves as ‘professional’. These were
McMullan, Eggleton, Robb, Crosby, Gartrell, Loughnane and Bitar. Another three accepted the
description with some qualification: Wyndham, Combe and Hogg. Another two who rejected the
description of themselves as professionals – Pascoe and Walsh - did so with qualifications about
the precise circumstances of their professional qualifications. Only Gray resisted the term, in terms
which are significant and which will be discussed below.

For the great majority of this group, the term professional is a positive one. To be described as a
professional is a ‘compliment’ (McMullan, Hogg); it is a desirable description (Combe, Loughnane);
it carries positive connotations about skill levels (Gartrell, Bitar) and methods and standards of
work (McMullan, Hogg); and it also captures a sense of engagement in public matters that are
‘important’ and ‘serious’ (McMullan, Hogg, Loughnane). Pascoe regarded himself as a political
‘novice’ though his professional (corporate) skills contributed to the ‘professionalisation’ of the
Liberal Party’s Head Office; Walsh likewise regarded himself as a professional but only in one
specific campaign discipline, political communication.

There are of course many variations in expression and different approaches to defining the nature
of professionalism. For several officials, professional work is described in contrast to other political
activities; it is described by what it is not rather than what it is. Thus a professional is not an
‘amateur’ (Wyndham, Pascoe, Hogg, Crosby); nor is a professional someone who aspires to enter
parliament (Eggleton, Loughnane). Crosby firmly describes himself as neither administrator nor
media manager nor policy specialist, but as someone interested in election campaigns. Yet despite
such negative definitions, the party officials do broadly agree on the core criteria that they believe
constitute their work as professional. Examination of the interview transcripts reveals three broad
clusters of professional characteristics or aspects of professionalism: an economic aspect centred
around payment for services, a technical aspect centred on competence and experience, and an

37
ideological aspect centred on commitment to the client. These aspects of professionalism are
discussed in turn below.

Professionalism: a Distinctive Economic Status

Professionals are paid for their work. This economic aspect is fundamental to an understanding of
professionalism, and provides a basic point of differentiation between party officials as paid
employees and all other parts of the party. Underlining the distinctions drawn in Katz and Mair’s
(1993) ‘three faces’ analysis of party organisation, party officials are not unpaid volunteers at the
branch level. Wyndham acknowledges that:

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. It’s like running a business -
running a business with a cause.

McMullan commented that campaign work is ‘not a part-time activity for dilettantes’; Hogg
declared, ‘It’s not Amateur Hour’. In similar terms, Crosby differentiated those who ‘as a career
choice’ chose employment in the ‘professional wing’ of the party from the ‘well-meaning amateurs’
and weekend activists who indulge in politics as a ‘pastime’:

In some countries - and the (British) Conservative Party has been like this somewhat -
politics … has been the pastime of the well-meaning amateur. ‘It’s what a chap does when
a chap’s made a bit of money and wants to put something back’. … 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. I was a Young Liberal –
probably a pretty obnoxious one - and they loved to play the game of politics, stacking
branches and all that. That’s not professional politics. … I am unusual in that I started as a
Young Liberal and have been fortunate to fumble my way through (to) the professional
side of the party.

Likewise, party officials may define themselves by contrast to the party ‘in office’:

I never saw myself as a parliamentarian. … (I had no) aspirations to use that then as a
stepping stone to go into parliament (Eggleton).

I see myself as a campaign professional. I don’t aspire at all to go into parliament

(Loughnane).

Even within the party’s central office, as V O Key noted, the party official stands in contrast to
elected office holders – the party president, treasurer and other members of the central executive
committee – who are honorary volunteers. In a party context of voluntary service, he is a paid
employee. But there has been another critical change as well. The employee’s role has shifted
from a ‘secretariat’ role, providing clerical or logistic services to those honorary office holders, to
an active executive role in a Head Office. The employee has become an employer and decision
maker. This complex transformation is a hallmark of the professionalisation process:

(That’s) my point about professionalism in a way. Once I think it was a case that the
director was - perhaps not a facilitator, but – (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 (Crosby).

In assuming this distinctive economic status, the officials are of course confirming Weber’s
definition of the person who lives ‘from’ politics: one who strives to make it into an enduring
source of income (Weber, 1919: 318). Yet the actual salaries paid to the officials do not
themselves seem to be at issue; officials are not apparently motivated by remuneration and in any

38
event, as Loughnane states, ‘just about everyone’ among them ‘could be earning more money
doing something else’. This underlines the significance of Gray’s rejection of the description of
himself as a professional. He did so because he was uneasy about its implications for his motives
and commitment as a political actor. In Weberian terms, Gray lived ‘for’ politics - giving his life
meaning and purpose by devoting it to a cause – and rejected the suggestion that he was living
from politics as an income-earning official:

I'm not really sure what (the term professional) means, which is why I struggle a little bit.

Q: What do you mean by it? A: I got paid for doing political work. 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

Q: You think professionalism implies a lack of personal commitment because you’re paid?
A: I think professionalism can sometimes be taken to mean you’re a gun for hire. A good
political professional is a professional partisan.

Gray was the only one to express it in these terms, but he is far from the only official to declare
partisan commitment. Indeed, the officials’ priority on campaign management is an expression of
their commitment to the party’s cause. This suggests the economic aspect of professionalism may
sit uneasily alongside a deep-seated partisan sympathy. Weber attempted to resolve the dilemma
by noting ‘Generally one does both’. Yet in the context of the party official, this dilemma seems
more enduring and will require further attention in the following chapter.

Professionalism: Technical Competence

Professionals are highly skilled and experienced. Party officials acknowledge that the reason for
their economic distinctiveness as professionals relates directly to their possession of scarce and
distinctive expertise. They are paid because of their skills, which are derived from long experience,
and which are applied to complex problems with high standards of care and competence.
Campaign management is a complex challenge, a task requiring skills of a high order; for
Wyndham in the 1960s, a professional attitude meant:

bearing in mind all the time, that (though) there were many things to be juggled, that you
had one aim, to win election.

Forty years later, Gartrell used a similar metaphor: campaign management is not juggling but
assembling a complex 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 …

Bitar described an even longer list of technical skills that are required for professional campaign
management:

knowledge of research quant and qual, … knowledge of campaigning – pamphlets,

brochures, TV (and) radio advertising – all the things that it actually takes to run a
professional campaign - understanding MPs, understanding marginal seat campaigning …

Campaign managers do not necessarily employ all these tools themselves in a hands-on way, but
they need sufficient understanding of them to appraise and direct the external consultants who do
provide them, and to adopt new technological opportunities as they emerge. Campaign managers
do this within a context of resource scarcity, where choices need to be made between what is
strategically desirable and what is financially affordable. Two Labor officials summarised these
constraints in defining the professional party role:

39
 Professionalisation is about disciplined application of resources to election campaigning and
the development of the opportunities that modern technology gives you to run campaigns
of a sort … inconceivable before (McMullan).

I do regard myself as a professional. A professional does their job to the best of their
abilities given the resources they’ve got, that’s how I view it (Bitar).

How do campaign managers acquire the skills to master this complexity? Part of their expertise
may arise from formal education. Educational attainments by officials of both parties have
increased over time (Appendix Three, Table 3). Given the white collar clerical nature of the work,
some level of secondary education appears to have been typical. But not all of the early officials
completed secondary school and until the 1960s, none had a university degree. Since Hartcher (a
1940s graduate) and Combe (1960s), all the party officials except Hogg are university graduates.
Pascoe is the exceptional outlier with a double undergraduate degree, a doctorate from Cambridge
and an MBA from Harvard.

Yet Gartrell is probably speaking for many of the party officials when he recognised that formal
educational qualifications are less relevant than practical training:

Q: In defining yourself as a political professional or a campaign professional, obviously

your background is relevant? A: Yes, doing political science at uni (is relevant but) less
so than understanding the (labour) movement. Coming up through the movement is really
important.

More often, the party officials speak of acquiring skills over a long period of time, through repeated
exposure to campaigns and through regular practical experience of campaign management:

… (It’s) not something that someone can pick up very quickly. You can’t just walk in the
door and do it (Gartrell).

(A professional is) 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 (Crosby).

Q: What made you a professional? A: Practicing 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. … You just acquire skills by practice (Walsh).

I’m a great believer that experience matters in these jobs. There’s no other job quite like
them and there’s no adequate external preparation really (Loughnane).

I absolutely loved the campaigning. Being state organiser and working in the party office is
about the worst job in the world, it is so full-on. … I threw myself into it. It was hard, hard
work. I loved the campaigning - absolutely loved the campaigning (Bitar).

In the interviews, officials of both parties emphasised the need to build their campaign capacities
by providing training opportunities for young up-and-coming campaign managers. This can take
the form of overseas travel to participate in election campaigns with fraternal parties in the United
States and the United Kingdom. More typically, it consists of local training in the form of extensive
exposure to campaigning:

In 1990 I was the marginal seat guy. I’d spent all of 88 and 89 on the campaign trail. I
had worked every single state election campaign in that period (Gray).

One thing Gary (Gray) was big on - and he was right, I tried to do it too - is (to) get young
smart campaigners and roll them through state elections. A federal election only comes up
every three years. But there’s always a state election somewhere and you would deploy
the really smart ones and say, ‘This month you’re off to the South Australian elections’,

40
 and three months later it’s New South Wales. So you can give someone twenty years of
campaign experience by rolling them through all these state elections. You also build up
their networks as well. So they can come through pretty quickly (Gartrell).

I always took the view and I have always been a strong advocate of it – the importance of
training, to offset this deficiency that I thought existed. So when I became the deputy
(federal director) … we provided a lot of training for staff. ... Training programs on
messaging, on how to run a good electorate office… It’s not done any more but for a
couple of years we ran summer schools: we got the states to pick out some of the
brightest - they didn’t want to be an MP but could be active in the Young Liberals, a young
lawyer who’s in the party, whatever - but interested in (becoming) more effective as
campaigners (Crosby).

Mastery of complexity requires more, however, than technical expertise or textbook knowledge.
Judgement is required as well, and this too emerges only with time and practice. Robb suggests
that the judgement was harder to acquire than the technical knowledge:

(Professionalism) means in the end that appropriate mix of the science and the art. In
politics - and I’ve also run commercial companies - what you do about the future is always
a matter of judgement, and invariably the CEO who has to make those judgements has to
have gone down every dry gully. It’s often a matter of how much experience that person
has got … I learned that through my time. I was more concerned about the science to start
with, I suppose (Robb).

Q: Professional skills – what does it take? A: Judgement and character (laughs). … You can
be technically equipped in a ‘what do you look for in a good advertisement’ sense, but
these other demands can be very – that’s where the rubber hits the road (Loughnane).

In some contexts, the source of this personal skill-set is unknown or attributed to natural causes.
For Combe, the requisite skill was ‘having good antennae’; Hogg suggests he may have had:

one of the best political brains around that the party’s had. A lot of it’s instinct. Where did
I get that from? I’m buggered if I know!

A consequence of emphasising the importance of technical skills is a conceptualisation of the

political contest as commensurately less about values and passions. In this sense, the party official
may see himself as a dispassionate technician rather than an emotional partisan; again, the
professional living ‘from’ politics may be at odds with those living ‘for’ politics. Crosby’s distinction
between the professional wing and the ‘excited’ amateurs who play the game of politics has
already been noted. Here, Crosby returns to the theme, describing the professional as a ‘quality
controller’, developing an understanding of voter behaviour in a rational or ‘clinical’ or ‘rigorous’
way, instead of the more emotionally charged or anecdotal approach of the politicians:

One of the problems of politics - it’s a bit like religion – (is that) everyone has their view
and a theory. All too often 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
– (about) 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.

Likewise Hogg insisted that professional conduct included rigorous analysis rather than prejudice:

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

41
Walsh put it in similar terms. Describing the review of Labor’s organisation after the heavy defeat
of 1977, he said the party’s raw political character was hindering its ability to perform the more
technical aspects of campaigning:

It was felt that the party needed people who could bring professional communications and
research skills to the organisation – which had raw politics in abundance but it wasn’t
proving to be the answer to winning elections.

Moreover, this combination of technical skills, disciplined resource allocation and clinical
understanding of voter behaviour creates a sense that campaigning has become a scientific
exercise; inspiration has given way to method and guesswork has been eclipsed by effectiveness
measurement:

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 (Robb).

Objectivity and professional skill, not having your own theories, knowing about research ...
It’s understanding what motivates voters and being able to measure and respond to it. Q:
That is in fact a scientific exercise. The measurability and in a sense the replicability is
critical in what you’re saying? A: Yes, and having an established methodology. 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 (Crosby).

The ultimate implication of all this is that professional campaign management may be used, as
Bitar reluctantly conceded, in a way that transcends party boundaries:6

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 … I think he did a brilliant job in the last (2010) campaign despite us changing
leaders weeks out after he’d put his whole campaign together … 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.

Even in these unlikely circumstances, technical competence (being a ‘professional at campaigning’)

is presented as deliverable to the other party only if it does not involve responsibility for the
political relationship with the party (‘dealing with the National Executive’). In typical

6
See Mancini (1999: 234) for example: ‘Today, the political professional, at least in the United States, is
bound to the marketplace of abilities, not to political commitments. The new professional can change fronts,
offer services to a party and candidate today and to their opponents tomorrow. The new professionals do not
have an exclusive relationship with one party or leader; like all members of modern professions, they offer
their technical knowledge to whomever needs it and has the resources to pay for it. They are part of the new
labour market’

42
circumstances, the party officials can deliver technical competence while also handling the political
aspects of the role. This political ability in fact emerges as a third critical aspect of professionalism,
under the guise of client service.

An Ideology of Professionalism: Serving the Client

Professionals serve their client. Party officials see their work as beneficial to their party by helping
it achieve power in government. They view service to the party as a defining hallmark of their
professional behaviour. In Australia, this sense of campaign professionalism operates strictly
within party lines. These party officials campaign to win, but they are exclusive in their partisan
attachment; they have never crossed party lines to help the ‘other’ party win. Commitment to the
party is affirmed by Labor and Liberal officials, ranging from the 1960s to the present day:

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. Q: On whose
behalf were you working? The party? The leaders? The members? A: Oh the party always.
Q: as opposed to the leader? A: Oh no: he was part of the party (Wyndham).

I saw the role of state and national secretary as roughly akin to being a good 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. That was part of
my philosophy (Hogg).

As the Federal Director you are a steward of the party’s interest. Well so is the (party’s
federal) president, but you are the professional. You are there every day. 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
(Crosby).

Q: As professionals, doctors provide their services for patients. Who are you doing this for?
A: You’d hope you are doing it for the party and the country. I mean most people on both
sides - it can be quite dormant - but there is quite a streak of patriotism in their own funny
way (Loughnane).

All these metaphors used to describe the campaign professional’s service to the party - a ‘business
with a cause’, the ‘service duty’ of a ‘good public servant’, the ‘steward’ who protects the enduring
party while its leaders come and go – contain an element of altruism: the professional is
understood to be motivated by a higher cause. This cause is represented as ‘the party’s interests’
or as ‘the organisation, its growth and betterment’ or, simply, as ‘the party’. This higher cause is
understood to transcend the interests of any individual official, parliamentarian, or faction within
the party. In organisations divided along factional lines or by leadership rivalry in the
parliamentary party, the professional – at least ideally - takes no sides and works across
boundaries to ‘bring all the sections of the party together’:

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… If ever
any member of my staff showed any tendency to take a critical position on a politician, a
member of our parliamentary party, I came down on them like a ton of bricks. It wasn’t
our job (in the Head Office) to engage in personality politics (Eggleton).

The best thing about being the National Secretary was you’re not necessarily playing any
factional games; you just focus professionally on your job. Q: It’s become defactionalised
over time, this role? A: Yes, it has - which is good and bad. The good aspect is you don’t
have to – sorry, you’re not supposed to – worry about the factional games as the National
Secretary. But unfortunately what you appreciate is that factions still run the party, so

43
 you’ve got to deal with both factions. You’re still spending a lot of time with the factions
(Bitar).7

For the party officials, then, their work is professional work because it is directed to promoting a
higher cause: the electoral interests of their party. These interests are not harnessed to any
individual party leader or faction; they encompass the organisation as a whole. Nor are they
defined in any ideological sense arising from the beliefs, values or platforms of parties on the Left
or the Right; instead they are defined in an instrumental purposive sense of achieving the specific
outcome of electoral success. On the basis of electoral success the party can form government and
implement its policies – tasks which are implicitly understood as the responsibility of the
parliamentarians in the party ‘in office’. Getting there – winning the election – is the task of the
party officials in ‘central office’. This ideology of client service thus constitutes the third theme or
cluster of professional criteria that emerge from the research interviews, and it powerfully
connects the previous two themes. Client service transforms the economic relationship between
the official and his party, from that of an employee-employer to that of a professional-client; it
legitimises the official’s distinctive economic status within the party – his capacity to be paid for
providing professional services – by specifying that those services are to applied to promoting the
interests of the client. Likewise, the party official’s technical competence is legitimised as
professional since it is deployed in the interests of the client.

Discussion

It is clearly not true that the profession of campaign management has attained a level of formal
organisation comparable with the traditional professions of law and medicine (Scammell, 1997).
Campaign management has no body of scientific knowledge, no formal educational or training
path, no peer-assessment, no code of conduct and no disciplinary procedures against behaviour
deemed unprofessional. Yet the party officials interviewed here embrace the description of
themselves as professional. Moreover, notwithstanding the diversity of their expression and
experience, they have articulated core elements of campaign management’s claim to
professionalism in the Australian party context: they are paid; they are highly skilled experts with
long experience; and they are solely committed to the interests of their client. These economic,
technical and ideological claims to professionalism are broadly consistent with those of the
traditional professions. Stripped down to its essential elements, professionalism can be defined as
a livelihood, derived from possession of scarce specialised skills, and practiced according to a code
of client service.

This definition applies with equal validity to party officials of both major parties. Labor and Liberal
Party officials share fundamentally similar views about the professional character of their work.
Greater differences can be discerned between officials of different eras; notions of professionalism
have changed over time. While making due allowance for the small numbers of officials in each
decade, the earlier officials such as Wyndham, Pascoe and Combe do speak with more hesitation
about the role of the professional in politics than the officials from the 1990s onwards, for whom
this topic is a familiar one on which they articulate well-developed and multi-layered views.

And yet the definition raises a number of problems. These relate to the complex relationship
between the professional and the party. Gray put his finger on the problem when he expressed
reservations about applying the term to himself. He rejected it because it made him sound like a
‘gun for hire’ – someone for whom the economic aspect of the job was more important than its
political content. To the contrary, Gray insisted that getting paid was irrelevant as a motivation
compared to his passion for the party cause. A good professional, he insists, is a partisan one.
Thus the economic aspect of professionalism – necessary to the definition since Weber – is not a
sufficient criterion of it. The definitional problems are amplified to the extent that partisanship also
challenges the technical aspect of the term. Technical competence is implicitly based in science
rather than the emotions: professionals perform work that is expert, rational and even measurable

7
Likewise, James Walter (1986: 104) says of Bob Hogg that, despite his roots in the ALP’s Socialist Left, his six
years as state secretary had made him ‘more strategist and tactician than ideologue’.

44
in its effect, and it is their scarce and distinctive ability to perform such work that underpins their
claim to economic reward. Partisans however cannot be dispassionate or emotionally neutral. Their
distinctive work must inevitably be tinged by subjective affiliation with, rather than emotional
distance from, the object of their work, their client.

These problems over the economic and technical aspects of the definition are resolved to some
extent through its ideological aspect. Campaign professionals are not ‘guns for hire’ and will not
provide their services indiscriminately – for example, to a client merely offering them economic
reward. Instead they are motivated by the altruistic concept of client service. They apply their
technical expertise to promoting the interests of the party to which they belong, and which they
support – the party in which they acquired and developed their expertise. Their professional
service does not seek to promote their own economic interest but to advance the true and best
interests of their client – which they rationally define, without exception, as electoral success.

This analysis inevitably raises further questions. How confidently can we accept the claim of party
officials to understand the interests of their client? For a medical or judicial professional, the
interests of the patient-client or accused-client might be patently clear. But in a collective
organisation of political actors, the interests of the party-client are likely to be harder to discern
and subject to greater contest. Is the superordinate goal of electoral success identified by the
campaign professionals in Head Office truly shared by party actors ‘on the ground’ and ‘in elected
office’? Can indeed such a ‘client’ speak with one voice about its interests? More likely, within an
organisation dedicated to political contest, there will be more than one authoritative voice about
the interests of the party. Thus in seeking to impose their electoral priority on the party, the
officials are likely to set the scene for tensions and conflicts with other party actors. Yet they do so
as partisan adherents of the party, devoted to promoting what they regard as its best – that is, its
electoral - interests. These tensions will be further explored in the following chapters.

45
 Chapter Four

‘A Highly Contested Ballot’ and ‘Lines of Succession’: Professionalisation and Party

Structures

‘I drove around the countryside, literally talking to all members of the National Executive. It was a
highly contested ballot.’

‘But the lines of succession in the Liberal Party – I think Eggleton was pretty clear, Andrew (Robb)
was pretty clear, Lynton (Crosby) was pretty clear, I was probably the least clear of those four.’

‘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.’

‘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’.

A
s a process of institutional change, party professionalisation occurs, as we shall see, across
a broad range of actors, structures and processes. At the very least, it involves a sweeping
change of personnel, as the party’s traditional bureaucratic hierarchy is replaced by a new
cohort of professionally-trained technicians (Panebianco, 1988: 221-32). The emergence of these
individuals, introducing new behaviours, attitudes and identities, generates what Panebianco
describes as ‘conspicuous alterations … in power relations within parties’. Amateurs and volunteers
are displaced. Traditional rules and decision-making prerogatives – derived from the party’s
foundational cleavages in class, region and federalism - are challenged and modified to
accommodate the new professional style. Campaign practices are scrutinised and new disciplines
imposed. Yet this disruptive change encounters resistance, as the structuring force of party
institutions continues to exert influence on the actors within it. The new actors remain anchored
within their party organisation. Despite their economic and technical characteristics of
professionalism, they remain reliant on the party for providing the skills and experiences on which
their technical competence is based. They are not external contractors offering their services to
the highest bidder in the marketplace; to the contrary they are partisans, devoted to promoting
their party’s best interests by providing the professional services needed to win election
campaigns.

To examine these problems further, it is necessary to develop a better understanding of the

relationship between the officials and their parties. This chapter sets out to explore this
relationship by examining four points of interaction between the campaign professionals and the
institutional context of party:

 First, it considers the party officials as party members, to understand the character and
intensity of their activities as members;
 Second, it considers the party officials as campaigners and campaign managers, to understand
the skills and experience they acquired in these roles that qualified them as professional
campaign managers;
 Third, it considers the party officials as candidates for selection as National Secretary/ Federal
Director of their respective party, to understand how selection practices operated to shape the
role of the party official and how they were in turn shaped by the emergent professionals;
 Fourth, it considers the party officials in relation to the leaders of the parliamentary party, to
understand the contested terrain between the emergent campaign professionals and the
parliamentary wing.

46
These four sets of party activities can be considered as a chronological sequence, tracing key
points in the career development of a campaign professional. In proceeding, the chapter draws on
two Appendices which provide more detailed background information, summarising the biographies
of party officials in narrative form (Appendix One) and presenting key characteristics and party
experiences of party officials in tabular form (Appendix Three).

Lifelong Party Members

Party membership is the necessary entry point for participation in the affairs of an Australian
political party, whether in the party ‘on the ground’ as a branch member or conference delegate,
or in the party ‘in office’ as an endorsed candidate or elected representative. For employment in
Head Office, too, membership is an essential pre-requisite: though party officials are not formally
required to be members under the rules of either the federal Liberal Party or the ALP, membership
is universal among the officials in this study.

A striking feature of these party officials is the early age at which most of them joined the party. A
clear majority of them became a party member as a teenager or young adult (Appendix Three,
Table 4). It is inherently hard to know what combination of factors - family background,
enthusiasm for the policies and personalities of the party, or a more cold-blooded plan to secure
career progression within the party – motivated these individuals to join the party. Family
background provides some cues for this partisanship, but they are few and sometimes
contradictory in direction (Gray did, but Combe and Gartrell did not, come from Labor families).
Some were mentored or inspired by party leaders such as Dunstan (Combe) and Fraser
(Loughnane). Stronger still is evidence of formative political influences from society at large
(McMullan and Hogg were motivated by the Vietnam War, Loughnane by the Whitlam years). But
there is no dynastic element about these individuals; this is not a case of sons following fathers
into a line of work (though McMullan’s father was a union organiser). The important point is that
there is no evidence they joined with the intention of becoming party officials. Instead, most of
these party recruits set about engaging in party activities as rank and file members at the grass
roots. More than half of the interview group became actively engaged in the affairs of a branch
(Combe, McMullan, Hogg, Gray, Bitar, Crosby and Loughnane), faction (Hogg), or youth wing
(McMullan, Crosby, Gartrell, Bitar). Of course there is also evidence that, for some (Walsh,
Eggleton and Robb) party membership was deemed incompatible with larger career aspirations –
though party sympathy persisted.

At some point however these individuals outgrew branch level activity and began to locate other
and higher levels of party engagement and career advancement within the party. Two (Hogg and
Crosby) contested elections as candidates in unwinnable seats – a sign they were trying to
establish their credentials in the party (Walter, 1986: 104). Many more worked in the ‘party in
office’ as parliamentary staff members which, while not requiring party membership does imply
partisan attachment and commitment as well as new opportunities for career advancement
(Walter, 1986; Tiernan, 2007). This opportunity was seized by no fewer than nine members of this
group (Appendix Three, Table 4). Willoughby was an early pioneer of this new route of career
advancement, joining the staff of a Senator, then of the Opposition Leader Menzies and, after the
Liberals’ 1949 election triumph, of the new Prime Minister. Eggleton, Crosby and Loughnane all
followed in his wake while on the Labor side Wyndham, Combe, Gray, Hogg, Walsh and Gartrell
did likewise.

Another path of engagement led through the party organisation8, especially via the state branches.
Thirteen of the individuals in this group, including 11 of the 14 Labor officials, had been employed

8
In another, now obsolete, form of career advancement through the party organisation, three early party
officials - Willoughby, Kennelly and Wyndham - began their working lives as teenagers in junior administrative
roles in the party organisation. Willoughby and Wyndham remained as party employees or parliamentary
staffers for their whole careers. Willoughby had fourteen years in the South Australian organisation (1924-
1938) after answering an advertisement for an office boy and, after his thirteen years as a parliamentary
staffer (1938-1951) served another eighteen years as Federal Director. He retired to suburban Canberra in
1969 and died in 1993 aged 85. Wyndham began thirteen years in the British Labour Party (1944-1947),

47
by their party as the secretary or director of a state branch or division (Appendix Three, Table 4).
Stewart, McNamara and Kennelly, all from Victoria, Schmella from Queensland, Chamberlain from
Western Australia, and Young from South Australia were all serving as state secretary of their
respective branches when they became Federal Secretaryship and all of them held the two roles
concurrently. Wyndham resigned his post as Victorian state secretary to become the first full-time
Federal Secretary; likewise Hogg from Victoria, McMullan from Western Australia, Combe from
South Australia9, and Bitar from New South Wales all had served as state secretary before
becoming National Secretary. This capacity for promotion from the state branches to the national
Head Office is perhaps the oldest tradition among ALP officials. In nearly a century, the only
exceptions to this enduring practice occurred in a 15 year span covering Gray, Walsh and Gartrell,
none of whom had managed a state branch; all instead were employed and promoted through the
federal office.10

For most of their history, the Liberals adopted a different policy. Only the two most recent
appointments, Crosby (in Queensland) and Loughnane (Victoria) have experience of running a
state division of the Liberal Party. By contrast, Willoughby came over from the parliamentary wing
and Hartcher was promoted to the Federal Directorship from within the Federal office. But from the
1970s through to the end of the 1990s, the Liberals appointed Federal Directors who were
outsiders. Pascoe, Eggleton and Robb were unlike any of their Liberal predecessors or Labor
counterparts: not early party members, not former candidates, not state party directors or
organisers and indeed not party employees at any level. None of the three had managed an
election campaign for the party. Pascoe was an academic and management consultant, Eggleton a
journalist and public relations specialist who had handled Prime Ministerial communications
through turbulent times, and Robb was a rural industry activist. All of course were partisan
sympathisers but they do not fit the mould of party members building careers through the
organisation.

Seasoned Campaign Practitioners

Many party members have no interest in party activity beyond their local branch meetings. Many
ministerial staff do not progress to employment in the party organisation. Many state party
officials are not selected for work in the national office. Some members, some staffers and some
state officials however did progress to the national head office. What skill or experience did they
gain within the party that pushed them in this direction? Table 5 (Appendix Three) suggests
experience working on campaigns, and especially in managing campaigns, is a critical
distinguishing feature of the national party officials.

The table shows every state and national election campaign in which the interviewed party officials
participated prior to becoming national secretary/ federal director, and the capacity in which they
did so.11 Campaign experience is classified according to whether the individual was working with
the party ‘on the ground’, ‘in office’ or in the central office. In total, more than seventy state and
federal Australian elections, including by-elections, were reported.

followed by four years in Australia as a parliamentary staffer before returning to employment as state
secretary and Federal Secretary for eight years (1961-1969). In addition to these three, Hartcher – though he
spent some early years with the NSW Railways - was a Liberal Party employee for 27 unbroken years (1947-
1974). These four individuals were all roughly contemporary; with Wyndham’s sudden departure in 1969,
Willoughby’s retirement in 1969, Kennelly’s resignation from the Senate in 1971 and Hartcher’s ouster in 1974,
this uniquely protracted mode of career relationship with the party has disappeared.
9
Technically, Combe was acting state secretary.
10
The most recently appointed National Secretary, George Wright, also has no experience as a party office
holder at either state or federal level.
11
Table 5 covers interviewed party officials. Evidence about the campaign activities of evidence about earlier
party officials is patchy. Strikingly however, Labor’s first secretary Arch Stewart served as campaign manager
during the 1906 Federal elections. As Ballarat secretary of the Australian Workers Union, he provided the
campaign headquarters for James Scullin’s attempt at unseating Prime Minister Alfred Deakin and marshalled
‘over fifty canvassers’ (Robertson, 1974).

48
Campaigning ‘on the ground’ provided important formative campaign experience. Many officials
(Wyndham, Hogg, Walsh, Crosby, Gartrell and Bitar) recall early campaign experience in which
they performed the basic electioneering tasks described by Bitar as ‘foot-soldier stuff, mainly
letterboxing, a lot of doorknocking’. These ‘on the ground’ experiences provide valuable insights
into effective distribution of campaign messages. But they do not provide management
responsibility or strategic insight. Campaigning with the party ‘in office’ – for example, travelling
with the national party leader as a staff member or a Head Office secondment - provides high level
experience in campaign management, as part of a broad campaign leadership group. Labor
officials Wyndham, Hogg and Walsh worked for a Federal Labor leader during a campaign, as did
Eggleton and Robb worked with Opposition Leader Peacock in 1990.

But it is only by campaigning with the party organisation that an individual can acquire experience
as a campaign manager – that is, can exercise ultimate responsibility for the conduct of the party’s
campaign activities. Short of being a national campaign director, this high level experience can
only be gained at the state level: state secretaries and state directors act as campaign director for
state campaigns; they are also responsible during federal campaigns for activities within their
state. The widespread practice of selecting Labor’s national officials from its state secretaries
suggests that the national officials will have had substantial experience as campaign managers.
Table 5 (Appendix Three) confirms this. Wyndham, Combe, McMullan and Hogg had all managed
campaigns at the state level. Among the Liberals, only Crosby and Loughnane had equivalent
experience.

A lower level of campaign management responsibility is carried by those who work in senior
assistant roles in the national Head Office. While not involving full responsibility for a campaign
strategy, this work entails responsibility for significant activities such as fundraising, marginal
seats strategy, communications and war room management. Labor’s Walsh, Gray and Gartrell and
the Liberals’ Pascoe and Crosby reported this level of experience. Outside these relatively high-
level campaign experiences, the officials reported several other campaign management
experiences, including working in the state office as deputy (Bitar), as ‘organisers’ responsible for
intensive grassroots campaigning in a specific electorate or region (Hogg, Gray, Bitar), in a state
or territory’s leader’s office (Combe and Gray); in managing by-elections (Wyndham, Hogg,
Loughnane); and in managing local campaigns (Loughnane).

A related set of evidence (Appendix Three, Table 6) suggests that Labor’s National Secretaries are
getting younger, relative both to their predecessors and to their Liberal counterparts. This carries
the implication that they are entering Head Office with less experience of campaigns and perhaps
also with more narrowly-based, party-specific experience. For the first five decades (1915-1963),
Labor officials were selected at an average age of 50; most were in their 40s though Joe
Chamberlain, in his 60s, was the oldest in either party. Since 1963, from the mould-breaking
appointment of the 33-year old Wyndham, Labor has only appointed one man (Hogg) at this
‘average’ age. Most of the post-1963 secretaries were selected in their 30s12 and the average age
of national secretaries for this second five decades (1963-2011) is 37. The average age at
selection of all Labor officials from 1915 to 2010 is 41. The Liberals display a different pattern. At
43, Federal Directors are on average slightly older than their Labor counterparts (notwithstanding
the significant exception of Pascoe). Nor is there any discernible trend over the decades towards
younger Liberal appointments; at 50 the present incumbent Brian Loughnane was above average
and in fact older at appointment than all bar one (Hartcher).

Taken together, two conclusions can be drawn from this evidence. First, experience in managing
election campaigns appears to be a critical factor in the selection of national party officials. To
head their national Head Offices, parties are selecting seasoned campaign practitioners. If parties
are considering candidates with other skills – such as policy experts, skilled administrators, or
former MPs experienced in representation or legislation – they are certainly not appointing them.
The days of a McNamara, with a lifetime in party administration, or a Cleland, with a background

12
Though not included in the sample, Bitar’s successor George Wright was elected at age 43.

49
in military logistics, being selected appear long gone. Likewise, skilled outsiders such as Pascoe,
Eggleton and Robb are no longer being appointed. From Combe and Crosby onwards, the ALP and
the Liberal Party have both searched their own ranks to promote those with significant campaign
experience.

A second conclusion follows. Labor officials have brought more experience in campaign
management to the national Head Office than their Liberal counterparts. As Table 4 below
indicates, Labor officials recorded more than two dozen prior campaign management experiences
compared to just eight by the Liberal officials. Of course there are more Labor officials in this set
than Liberal, a function of the higher rate of turnover in Labor’s Head Office. Yet Labor’s practice of
promoting campaign managers from the state branch has provided a bountiful source of
management expertise. This reached a high-point between 1969 and 1980 when three ALP officials
(Combe, McMullan and Hogg) managed a total of 15 state-wide campaigns. Labor however
appears to have abandoned this practice: since 2000 no Labor national secretary has arrived with
campaign experience from the state level. Meanwhile, on the Liberal side, both Crosby and
Loughnane share what used to be this exclusive Labor attribute of state campaign management
experience, suggesting Labor’s superiority in campaign management experience derived from
state campaigns may even out over time.

Table 4: Prior Campaign Management Experience (summary)

ALP Liberal
State Head Office, campaign director 17 3
Federal Head Office, senior assistant role 8 2
Federal Leader’s Office 6 4

This has implications for our understanding of the professionalisation process. The preference of
both parties – first the ALP and more recently the Liberal Party – to select seasoned campaign
managers is likely to reinforce those who argue, as the campaign professionals do, that campaigns
are of central importance for parties. By appointing from within, both parties are underlining the
importance of party membership as a qualification for selection as a party official. Likewise, they
both appear to have developed clearer paths of career progression for their campaign managers.
As professionalisation proceeded, the national Head Offices expanded: Federal Directors and
National Secretaries were joined by deputies, assistants and specialist campaign organisers. Many
of these deputies (Gray, Gartrell, Robb and Crosby) were promoted into the top job; indeed three
of the last four ALP national secretaries were groomed within the national head office and had no
state campaign management experience. But the state branches continue to provide both a talent
bank and a testing ground for up and coming campaign practitioners. Rates of change with each of
the parties have differed, but any advantages that different practices may have provided - for
example to the ALP by drawing on its deep reservoirs of campaign expertise in the states or to the
Liberals by appointing qualified outsiders – have been eroded by catch-up and emulation. Both
parties want seasoned campaign practitioners and the paths of party engagement they construct
to promote that expertise now broadly resemble each other.

Elected or Appointed Officials

A similar story of eroding party differences can be discerned in the methods used by each party to
select their campaign professionals. Analysis of these methods reveals the complex interactions of
the professionalisation process as noted at the outset of this chapter. The parties recruit, select,
employ, remunerate and manage the campaign professionals, yet these professionals, nurtured
within the parties, operate as a disruptive force on the parties’ structures and practices. Yet
contrasting practices of each party, which predate the professional campaign model, have
gradually changed to accommodate these officials within their ranks. Employment practices shaped
the professionalisation process but, as that proceeded, were in turn shaped by it.

50
The contrasting methods of selection between the parties can be simply stated. The rules of the
ALP require the National Secretary to be elected. The rules of the Liberal Party require the Federal
Director to be appointed. These rules date respectively to 1915 and 1946 and remain in force,
reflecting contrasting philosophies about internal democracy and managerial authority. In the
Liberal Party, the rules underpinned the development of a consensus appointment model; in the
words of Brian Loughnane, Liberal federal directors have been appointed in ‘lines of succession’. By
contrast the Labor Party traditionally used a contested election model which produced, in Gray’s
words, ‘highly contested ballots’; in recent years, a more professional or pragmatic approach has
seen a consensus election model emerge. On two significant occasions within the
professionalisation process, Labor abandoned election altogether and made consensus
appointments with highly disruptive consequences.

The Liberal Party: a Consensus Appointment Model

Despite Menzies admiring public statements about the Labor Party’s effectiveness, the Liberals
created a very different regulatory environment for its Federal Secretariat. Adopted in 1946, the
Party’s constitution formally created a Federal Secretariat – unlike Labor, which did not originally
acknowledge its head office - and granted its Federal Executive the power to ‘appoint all officers’ of
the Secretariat including its Director (Liberal Party of Australia, 1946a: Sections 54c, 61, 62). The
Executive was also empowered to ‘fix their remuneration and the terms of their employment.’

In practice however, the Executive appears to have played only a formal part in the appointment
of Cleland as the first Federal Director. This was procured instead by the joint efforts of Menzies
and the Party’s federal president Malcolm Ritchie. Cleland’s war record, political loyalty and legal
and administrative qualifications – along with his status as a representative of a smaller state
whose appointment would not exacerbate Victorian-NSW rivalries - made him a compelling
candidate. There is no evidence Ritchie or Menzies considered any other candidate, and their
nominee was appointed by the Executive in October without demur (Hancock, 2000: 64). This
method of appointment - a single candidate formally brought for confirmation to the Executive by
the party president, with the support or acquiescence of the parliamentary leader - set the trend
for future appointments of the Federal Director. After Cleland’s resignation in 1951, 13 Willoughby
was ‘personally selected by Menzies and Ritchie to succeed Cleland’ (Hancock, 2000: 126). For
Hartcher’s promotion, newspaper reports make it clear he had the unanimous support of the
Executive and of Willoughby (Juddery, 1968). Following defeat in 1972, Federal President Robert
Southey restructured the Federal Secretariat and secured the appointments of both Pascoe and
Eggleton. In the late 1980s, it was Federal President John Elliott who identified Robb, then at the
National Farmers Federation, as a potential future party official:

I was approached by John Elliott … and Tony Eggleton … and I was asked to come on as a
deputy to Tony Eggleton and to set up a campaigning unit in the Federal Secretariat. Elliott
had said to me that Eggleton was likely to retire after the 1990 election and if I performed
I’d be well placed to replace him. There were no promises, but the opportunity was
presented (Robb).

Likewise, Crosby was nominated to succeed Robb by Federal President Tony Staley and ‘endorsed’
by Prime Minister Howard:

I don’t even think there was even a recruitment process. I certainly didn’t apply for
anything. … There was a federal executive phone hook-up ... it was unanimous, and that’s
the way it happened.

Loughnane was reticent about describing his appointment process, confirming only that ‘very
senior’ people including Federal President Shane Stone approached him to apply for the position;

13
After his resignation, Cleland returned to Papua New Guinea as Administrator until 1967. He was knighted in
1961. He remained in Port Moresby, active in the University of Papua New Guinea and the Anglican Diocese of
Papua New Guinea, until he died in 1975 (Nelson, 1993).

51
he was formally appointed by a sub-committee of the executive. Contemporary press reports make
it clear he also was supported by Prime Minister Howard (Gordon, 2002). But he is clear that
selection in the Liberal Party does not take place on a contested basis and forms instead a clear
‘line of succession’:

As a general proposition, there (are) usually not ten real candidates. There’s usually a
clear possibility. There may be two or three clear possibilities. But the lines of succession
in the Liberal Party – I think Eggleton was pretty clear, Andrew (Robb) was pretty clear,
Lynton (Crosby) was pretty clear. I was probably the least clear of those four.

This unanimity at the Executive level should not be mistaken for an absence of competition for the
post; alternative candidates do exist and are considered, but they are eliminated before the
recommendation is made to the Executive. The long-serving NSW state director John Carrick was
reportedly Hartcher’s ‘chief rival’ for the federal post but was passed over before the issue reached
the Executive (Juddery, 1968). Crosby’s appointment was also unanimous despite, as he recalls it,
efforts at one stage by ‘the Victorians’ to push their state director Petro Georgiou into the role. The
most serious dispute arose in the lead-up to Robb’s appointment in 1991. Robb had performed
well as Eggleton’s deputy, setting up a specialist marginal seats unit within the Secretariat and
then joining Peacock’s office during the 1990 campaign proper. But Eggleton’s retirement triggered
interest from another highly regarded party official Nick Minchin, who had worked in the Federal
Secretariat under Eggleton from 1977 and had been promoted as his deputy in 1983. Minchin had
subsequently moved to Adelaide where he had been appointed the party’s state director in 1985.
But he remained, according to Eggleton a ‘logical successor’. Robb too acknowledges Minchin
‘could justifiably have felt that he was more qualified’ to be federal director. Eggleton recalls that
Minchin’s desire to return to Canberra as director caused ‘a fair bit of argy-bargy’ in the
organisation and that ‘John Elliott was probably the deciding factor in appointing Andrew rather
than Nick’. Here the dispute about the next organisational head was fought out as a sub-set of the
leadership instability in the parliamentary wing, where Peacock and Howard continued to compete
for supremacy and where Elliott himself was considering a run (P. Kelly, 1992: 399-417); Minchin
was seen as a Howard supporter and opponent of Elliott. The dispute also centred on the rival
attractions of an insider with campaign experience (Minchin) against an outside with fresh skills
(Robb). Even in this situation, the Liberals’ consensus appointment method prevailed. The Federal
President sorted it out; Minchin did not run; Robb was appointed unopposed, as he recalled:

It wasn’t contested. It wasn’t advertised. It does require the leader of the day to be
supportive. John Hewson had just taken over as leader so he was supportive, but I don’t
think he knew me that well. But Elliott was still President.

In every Liberal case, then, a consensus model of selection prevailed. Its key elements are that
powerful party presidents, including Ritchie, Southey and Elliott, played central behind the scenes
roles to manage the succession process. They identified potential recruits, smoothed over rivalries,
put deputies in place and held out to them the promise of succession. The Executive’s powers to
appoint were effectively exercised on its behalf by the President, who sought the formal ratification
of his selected candidate. While it is clear that the party leader is consulted and provides tacit and
sometimes active support, this is a decision for the organisational side of the Liberal Party not its
parliamentary leader. As recently as 2011, this consensus method was criticised internally for
having turned the Federal Secretariat into ‘something of a fiefdom’.

It has been this way for many years. The appointment/election of the two top jobs, Federal
Director and Federal President, has been a process involving the Parliamentary Leader, the
Federal Executive and sometimes the Federal Council. It is a fairly limited group (Reith,
2011; P. Williams, 2011c).

The ALP: a Contested Election Model

In contrast to this consensus model, the evidence covering the selection of the fourteen Labor
Party secretaries suggests frequent adoption of a contested election model.

52
The ALP was structured on democratic lines, with the election and instruction of delegates ensuring
that as far as possible the views of the rank and file determined the party’s policy (Crisp, 1955: 4).
The Federal Executive was accordingly composed of elected delegates of the state branches, who
were themselves elected delegates of the rank and file; the Executive in turn could ‘elect and
control’ its own officers’ (Rule 5c, Australian Political Labor Executive, in Weller and Lloyd, 1978:
4). At its first meeting in May 1915, two Federal parliamentarians, Queensland Senator Tom
Givens and NSW MP Billy Hughes, were elected unopposed as President and Vice-President. But
when it came to filling the post of Secretary, there were two nominations from among the state
branch delegates seated at the executive table. A ballot was necessary in which a South Australian
delegate J H Olifent was defeated by Victorian Archibald Stewart.

Stewart was required to face regular re-election as Federal Secretary; this usually happened
unanimously but on one occasion required a contested ballot. Of Stewart’s twelve successors, half
of them had to win hard-fought elections to become Federal Secretary. Schmella, Young, Combe,
McMullan, Hogg and Gray all won an Executive ballot, either by a majority or by a unanimous
decision after the withdrawal of rival candidates. Schmella was elected by a 8-4 majority over the
NSW delegate Bill Colbourne in 1954, the contest a manifestation of the broader party Split then
starting to engulf the party (Weller & Lloyd, 1978: 579-80). Schmella’s opponents contemplated
taking the fight to Conference, in Hobart in 1955, and seeking to have Schmella’s election
overthrown there; but that Conference degenerated into a formal party Split and Schmella was not
challenged (Murray, 1970: 54). An even fiercer contest took place in 1969. On one side was the
formidable Western Australian, Joe Chamberlain, the Party’s former President and Federal
Secretary and a member of the executive for twenty years; on the other was South Australian
Mick Young, who had been a member of the executive for twelve months. Young recalled later that
he only decided to stand for the position when informed, over dinner during the Executive
meeting, that Chamberlain had manoeuvred himself into contesting the position:

I was quite alarmed by this turn of events, which I had not been party to, especially
knowing the feeling that existed between (party leader) Gough Whitlam and Joe
Chamberlain. I 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. I (said) I would stand for the
position if nominated, as a token of protest (M. Young, 1986).

Both Young and Chamberlain were nominated, but Chamberlain had miscalculated the vote of one
of the Tasmanian delegates and in two ballots the vote of the Executive was tied. Chamberlain
withdrew and Young was elected unopposed (Barnes, 1969; M. Young, 1986: 96).

Combe’s succession to the secretaryship in 1973 was complicated by the ambitions of the NSW
branch for its state secretary Peter Westerway, who had played a big role in the 1972 campaign.
Combe had the support of Whitlam and Westerway withdrew from the contest before the vote;
even so, there were seven other candidates. Combe was elected unanimously. McMullan was
elected by a majority over two other candidates, assistant federal secretary Ken Bennett and
future MP Alan Griffiths. Hogg’s election came only after protracted factional manoeuvring. He had
the – somewhat qualified – support of the Left faction, while the Right wanted Geoff Walsh to
return from his posting with the International Labor Organisation to take the position (Cockburn,
1987). The Centre Left, which had initially supported Hogg, then ‘started to wobble’, with some
prominent faction leaders including former secretary Mick Young and former leader Bill Hayden
backing assistant federal secretary Ian Henderson (Logue, 1988). After a confrontation with the
faction leaders at Melbourne airport, Hogg boldly told the press he had received their support;
when the executive voted, Hogg was the only candidate. He recalled wryly:

It was unanimous, by the time I finished.

Gray also had to battle Henderson for the secretaryship in 1993. He recalled that when Hogg
announced his intention to resign:

53
 ‘Hendo’ and I immediately then announced that we would contest the position, and we
both resigned from our positions (in the federal Head Office) 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 and the ballot was due on the 30 th April. Although I had not
been endorsed by (Prime Minister) Keating I was elected unopposed.

In Labor’s contested model of selection, then, rival candidates emerge to engage in lobbying
exercises and factional negotiations inside the executive and the broader party, pressing their
claim as far as practical. The contests are settled by the surrender of the weaker candidate to
permit a show of unanimity or, where necessary, by a vote of the executive. Differences are not
resolved in advance. Labor’s Federal President apparently has no greater influence on the outcome
than any other voting member of the executive. As the elections of Hogg and Gray suggest, the
parliamentary leader’s preferences, though never without influence, can be overridden.

The ALP: a Consensus Election Model

Yet Gray’s election was the last to take place under this contested model. In more recent years
Labor has reverted to an earlier practice of consensus elections. McNamara and Kennelly had both
been elected by consensus and without opposition, though in both cases they had already served
in an acting capacity when their predecessors died (Stewart 14) or fell ill (McNamara15).
Chamberlain also smoothly filled the vacancy left by the death of Schmella 16, making the
transition – unprecedented then and since – from the presidency to the secretaryship. More
recently, all of Gray’s successors - Walsh, Gartrell and Bitar17 - were elected not just unanimously
but without opposition. Walsh’s candidacy had been promoted by the outgoing secretary, Gray,
and was supported by the party leader, Kim Beazley. His successor, Gartrell, found himself the
only candidate in ‘a freaky moment when no one had the numbers on the National Executive’ and
was elected with Left and Centre-Left support. Bitar was also the beneficiary of a smooth and rapid
promotion and was elected unopposed, less than three weeks after Gartrell announced his
resignation:

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. … All the factional people said, ‘Yep, we
back you’ and even (Gartrell’s preferred candidate, former Beazley staffer and party
campaigner) Jim Chalmers called and said, ‘If you’re running Karl, I’ll withdraw. I won’t
even run’.

Bitar also sought the ‘blessing’ of the parliamentary leader, Kevin Rudd:

I didn’t really know Kevin at the time, so I did this walk around Kirribilli, having a chat with
him, getting to know him, him getting to know me, him asking me a whole heap of
questions, and 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’. During
this whole period 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.
There is a lot of respect for the leader still.

14
Stewart died in office in May 1925 from tuberculosis. Federal Executive carried in silence a motion of deepest
regret following ‘the excellent and faithful services rendered to the Movement by our late Comrade’ (Weller &
Lloyd, 1978: 88, 89; Love, 1990).
15
McNamara resigned through ill health in early 1946 and died in December 1947.
16
Stress and the effects of heavy drinking took their toll on Schmella, who died in office July 1960 (Murphy,
Joyce, & Hughes, 1980; Chamberlain, 1998; Cross, 2002).
17
Bitar’s successor George Wright was also elected by consensus in 2011.

54
The contested election model undoubtedly produced a formidable cast of long-serving and
successful national secretaries: every one of Labor’s electoral campaign victories under Whitlam,
Hawke and Keating were directed by National Secretaries who had won contested ballots. Their
ability to read and respond to the political, personal and factional dynamics on the Executive
underscores their political skills. Yet these skills are perhaps more characteristic of the partisan
than the professional. The demise of the contested election model suggests a pragmatic
recognition by the party of the cost and disruption of internal democracy and a growing awareness
that National Secretaries should be selected on their technical competence as campaign managers
rather than their electoral appeal in the Executive.

The ALP: a Consensus Appointment Model

Whether by contest or consensus, all these National Secretaries were still formally elected, as the
party rules require. There are two examples however where Labor abandoned election and instead
appointed its national secretary. Both occasions occurred when the ALP was contemplating the
appointment of a Secretary on a permanent or full-time basis. As described in the Introduction,
Labor had discussed setting up a federal secretariat in 1945 in response to Cleland’s appointment.
Pat Kennelly had stepped in as acting Secretary when McNamara fell ill and was confirmed by the
Executive as the party’s third secretary in November 1946. In 1949, the Executive finally
determined ‘to establish a Federal Secretariat on a full-time basis’ from 1 January 1950, with a
£750 annual salary for the Secretary. As the national party’s first salaried employee, the Secretary
was to be appointed, not elected. Kennelly accordingly relinquished the secretaryship in Victoria
and ceased being a delegate to the executive (Weller & Lloyd, 1978: 5-6, 405; Love, 2007).

Conference confirmed Kennelly’s appointment in 1951 but rejected the description of him as a ‘full-
time’ officer and instead called him ‘permanent’. The change recognised that Kennelly combined
his role as Federal Secretary with another form of paid employment as a member of the Victorian
Parliament. This arrangement lasted until Kennelly’s departure in 1954. Amid the bitterness of the
Split, Kennelly was forced to choose between his organisational role as Federal Secretary as his
representative roles in the Victorian and then Commonwealth Parliament (Weller & Lloyd, 1978:
9)18. Inadvertently perhaps, his forced resignation from Head Office strengthened the autonomy of
the post by eliminating any question about a conflict of interest between the two wings of the
party. Kennelly was the last secretary to combine the Secretaryship with a parliamentary position;
thus the party’s ‘permanent’ administrative role was no longer subsidised by a Parliamentary
salary, nor could it be distracted from national campaign responsibilities by accusations – like
those directed against Kennelly – that personal political aspirations were placed ahead of the
party’s interests in a campaign.

But in 1963, again no doubt inspired by the continued success of the Liberal Party’s Secretariat,
Labor ‘belatedly’ (McMullin, 1991: 304) revived the experiment once again, and posted
advertisements for a ‘full-time’ national secretary. At the time Chamberlain was Federal Secretary.
In his posthumously published autobiography, Chamberlain wrote that his experience in this role
had taught him that a part-timer was not able to give the party either the administrative continuity
or the research skills it needed to develop national policy. As a result he claimed to have been the
‘author’ of the plan to revive the full-time secretaryship (Chamberlain, 1998). This claim overlooks
both Kennelly’s earlier experience and also Schmella’s success in winning the Executive’s ‘in
principle’ approval of a national Secretariat in 1958, endorsed by Conference in 1959 subject to
funding by the States (Overacker, 1968; Cross, 2002).19 Yet Chamberlain’s voice was influential in

18
Kennelly resigned in May 1954; his Federal Executive colleagues voted him a farewell present of ‘an
inscribed wristlet watch’ (Weller & Lloyd, 1978: 517-8, 538-539, 578-579). He served in Senate until 1971.
19
In his account, Chamberlain also acknowledged he had been accused of advocating the full-time plan to
‘feather my own nest’, and did own up to ‘some interest in occupying the position’, but denied this was the
reason he had advocated it. Besides, he said, he ‘finally … lost the desire to sit in the cold corridors of power in
Canberra’. This claim too, is somewhat self-serving. His distaste for the cold corridors of power overlooks not
just his protracted service on the federal Executive but also – as we have seen – his active candidacy for the
secretaryship in 1969 (Chamberlain, 1998). After his stint as Secretary, Chamberlain remained a member of
Federal Executive and Western Australian state secretary until 1974, during which he continued to justify the

55
the Executive’s appointment, from a field of five, of Cyril Wyndham. Wyndham was the first
individual to serve as Federal Secretary without being simultaneously employed as a state
secretary or Member of Parliament. That is, as the ‘full-time’ secretary Wyndham was fully and
solely devoted to the performance of duties at the federal level, free of any encumbrances or
allegiances arising from other employment.

Table 5: Methods of Selection: Consensus and Contested models

Type Contested Model Consensus Model I Consensus Model II

Method of Election by Federal Appointment by Election by Federal
selection Executive Federal Executive Executive

Where and when ALP 1954, 1969-1993 Liberal Party 1945- ALP 1925, 1946, 1961
used present 2000 - present
ALP 1949 and 1963
Secretaries/ Stewart, Schmella, Cleland, Willoughby, McNamara, Kennelly
directors Young, Combe, Hartcher, Pascoe, (1946), Chamberlain,
McMullan, Hogg, Gray Eggleton, Robb, Walsh, Gartrell, Bitar
Crosby, Loughnane
Kennelly (1949),
Wyndham
Key features Rival candidates Single candidate Single preferred
emerge, presented to Executive candidate emerges
Candidates ‘campaign’ for approval, early, no significant
by lobbying Executive Significant role for rival,
members, Federal President in Factional considerations
Winner determined by identifying candidates overlooked,
majority or by and managing Suitable to fill
withdrawal of succession planning, unexpected vacancy
candidate to allow Party leader consulted (eg 1946, 1961, 2007),
unanimity, and supportive Federal President can
Factional play influential role,
considerations can be Party leader likely to
prominent, support
Party leader opposition
can be irrelevant
Duration of Fixed term, Open-ended term Fixed term,
employment Eligible for reelection Eligible for reelection

In summary, the methods of selection used by the ALP and Liberal Party reveal three broad types
(Table 5). For all types, the final decision is made by each party’s executive body. Appointment of
the Federal Director in the Liberal Party has generated a consensus model. In contrast, the ALP
has generated a contested election model in which rival candidates compete for the votes of
executive members in determined and protracted campaigns. The contests are settled only when it
is clear that one candidate has a majority of the executive’s support: an unsuccessful candidate
may withdraw to provide a unanimous vote for the winner, but not infrequently a vote by the
executive has been necessary. In two critical cases – that of Kennelly and Wyndham – Labor
abandoned elections in favour of appointments. These were critical because they were the first
occasions on which Labor selected a full-time national secretary and thus represented a watershed
in the professionalisation of its campaign management, though its faltering steps meant it was
nearly two decades behind the Liberal Party. More recently, Labor’s elections have taken place on

description of him by Labor historian Ross McMullin as Labor’s ‘most significant backroom powerbroker
nationally’ (McMullin, 1991). Chamberlain battled Western Australian Premier Hawke over proposed
negotiations with the Democratic Labor Party and also challenged the reformist aspirations of Gough Whitlam,
whose commitment to parliamentary supremacy was entirely at odds with his own militant reliance on ‘the
book’ – the party’s rules which underlined the supremacy of the party organisation. Forced by illness to
relinquish the secretaryship in Perth, he died in 1984.

56
a consensus election model where a single candidate has emerged without contest and has
received unanimous endorsement by the executive.

ALP and Liberal Party: Duration of Employment

A consequence of the parties’ different methods of selecting their party officials was the
emergence of different practices for setting the duration of the officials’ term in office. In line with
their preference for appointment by consensus, the Liberal Party’s rules left decisions about
‘remuneration and the terms of their employment’ to the Executive (Liberal Party of Australia,
1946: Section 54c). In Labor’s case, the election of officials posed vexed questions about their
term in office requiring, in turn, numerous revisions of the party’s rules. (These are summarised in
Appendix Three, Table 7.)

From its establishment, the full-time salaried officers in the Liberals’ Federal Secretariat were
engaged on an open–ended basis. Once appointed, they were implicitly able to hold the job until
removal or retirement, subject to satisfactory performance defined in equally implicit fashion by
the Federal President. This open-endedness complements the consensus model of appointment,
permitting great flexibility in the duration of the official’s term, with terms ranging from twelve
months (Pascoe) to eighteen years (Willoughby). Eggleton recalls that at the time of his
appointment:

No one was talking about terms. I didn’t think about it very much. After three or four
years, by which time Sir John Atwill was federal president and Sir Robert Crichton-Browne
was federal treasurer, we had an informal chat about the ongoing nature of the Federal
Director’s appointment and salary. Annual reviews were initiated but it all remained pretty
flexible for my 15 years.

Crosby likewise recalled:

I don’t think I even had a contract. No term and no contract. There was just a letter of
offer about salary, and that was it.

The Liberals’ rules concerning the appointment and role of the Director have remained largely
stable, and Directors have in most cases – Hartcher being the sole exception - served long terms
and have timed their own departures. In contrast, the ALP Federal Secretaries served under
conditions of uncertainty and frequent rule changes. Even Stewart and McNamara, who held the
post for ten and twenty years respectively - in effect, for the remainder of their lives - were
nominally limited under the 1915 Rules to a twelve-month term; their annual re-election was
normally a formality but it served to underline their control by the Federal Executive. In 1951, the
rules were substantially revised by Federal Conference with the introduction of performance
indicators: as the ‘permanent’ Federal Secretary, Kennelly’s appointment was ‘subject to good
conduct, satisfactory performance of duty and adherence to the Policy and Objectives of the Party’.
This rule stayed on the books even as Labor’s actual employment practices changed regularly.
Schmella and Chamberlain were elected as permanent part-timers (i.e. they were both full-time
state secretaries). Wyndham was appointed as a permanent full-timer - he was not employed in
any other capacity. Then Young was elected as a permanent part-timer since he too was a state
secretary; the 1969 Conference reconciled Young’s status with the 1951 rules by passing an
‘administrative’ decision permitting Young to stay in office pending further consultations. Then with
Combe, elected as a permanent and full-time national official, that ‘administrative’ decision was
repealed in 1973. It was not until 1986 that the 1951 rules about permanency and good conduct
were deleted.

In their place, Conference simply asserted its power to elect the Secretary. This 1986 revision
made another, critically important, innovation by specifying that the secretary would be ‘subject to
re-election at every second conference’. The effect of these changes, which were introduced under
McMullan, was to strengthen the position of the Secretary relative to both the Executive and the
Conference. The new rules rendered the Secretary immune from frivolous or vexatious exercise of

57
the executive’s power, and for the first time guaranteed a minimum term: with conferences held
on a triennial schedule, the secretary could usually count on a term of six years. Underpinning the
autonomy of the Head Office and permitting the secretary to undertake longer-term campaign
planning and strategic development, these rules represented a breakthrough in the
professionalisation of Labor’s election campaigning.

The Secretary’s role was further strengthened by a rule change in 1994 on the apparently trivial
subject of casual vacancies. The 1963 Conference had permitted the Executive, if the Secretary
resigned, to appoint an acting Secretary until the next Conference, which would elect a
replacement. This was deleted in 1975 but in 1994, under Gray, Conference returned to the
problem by permitting any such vacancy to be filled by the ballot of the Executive. By smoothing
the impact of a casual vacancy, the rule effectively allowed Secretaries to choose their time of
resignation. Rather than waiting for the expiry of their two-Conference term, they could go when
they wished; Conference’s role was reduced to ratifying a fait accompli. Under this rule, National
Secretaries now routinely resign at a time of their own choosing; the two-Conference six-year
term is observed only in the breach.20

The upshot of these contrasting approaches by the two parties is that Labor’s recent national
secretaries are serving for shorter periods, both compared to their predecessors and to their
Liberal Party opposite numbers (Appendix Three, Table 6). Labor’s first two Federal Secretaries
Stewart and McNamara held office for more than three decades between them, spanning the entire
inter-war period from nearly the start of the First World War to the end of the Second. Since then,
no Labor National Secretary has served for longer than 8 years, while four have only served for
three years. From Kennelly’s appointment in 1946 to Bitar’s resignation in 2011 the average term
of service is less than 5.5 years. Moreover, Labor’s length of service appears to be becoming
shorter: the three most recent officials served terms at or below this Labor average. In contrast,
Liberal terms are on average longer; the average from Cleland’s appointment in 1945 to 2011 is
more than 8 years. There is no evidence of Liberal terms becoming shorter: Loughnane’s term, still
incomplete, is only just below the Liberals’ long term average 21. Labor’s turnover is much higher
than the Liberals’ and seems to be increasing: Eggleton saw three Labor National Secretaries in his
seventeen year term (Combe, McMullan and Hogg); Loughnane in his eight year term has already
seen three (Gartrell, Bitar and now Wright).

In summary, the Liberals’ practice of a full-time Federal Director appointed through consensus and
enjoying stable long-term tenure, allowed the Director to get on with the job of managing the
party and running the campaigns – a powerful driver of the Liberals’ move to a professionalised
campaign model. In strong contrast, the ALP was reluctant to cede autonomy to its employed
staff, insisting on electing them and on limiting their terms in office, but refusing for decades to
employ them on a full-time basis. Having embarked in 1945 on an effort to match the Liberals in
creating a full-time federal secretariat, Labor did not employ a ‘permanent’ officer until 1951, a
full-time officer until 1963, or an officer with a fixed minimum term until the 1980s. The inherent
uncertainty and inefficiency thus hampered and delayed Labor’s capacity to adopt a professional

20
Thus when Hogg chose to resign following the 1993 election, Gray was elected by the Executive to the
balance of Hogg’s term, which was not due to expire until the forthcoming conference. When that conference
rolled around in 1994, Gray was confirmed as Secretary in his own right for a six-year term. Likewise, Gray
resigned in 2000, a few months short of his complete term, and the Executive elected Walsh to fill the casual
vacancy and to serve out the balance of Gray’s term. Walsh was confirmed by the Hobart conference in 2000,
which gave him a new 6-year term. But the process started to unravel when Walsh resigned after only three
years: Gartrell, elected by executive in 2003 to the casual vacancy, spent most of his time as secretary
completing Walsh’s term; he was not formally elected by Conference until 2007. Then Gartrell’s resignation in
2008 compounded the problem, bequeathing a balance of five years to his successor Bitar which the latter did
not in fact serve out before resigning in 2010. The two-conference rule is thus quite out of kilter with the actual
terms of the Secretaries.
21
The pattern of service differs in the parties’ state offices. In the immediate post-war years, several state
officials from both parties held office for very long periods, led by the Liberals’ McConnell (Victoria, 26 years),
Labor’s Chamberlain (WA, 25 years) and the Liberals’ Carrick (NSW, 23 years). In all, seven state officials have
held terms for more 15 years, with all terms completed by the mid-1970s. Since that date, no official in either
party has reached double figures, and terms of two and three years have become common (Mills, 2010).

58
model of centralised campaign management. Labor’s frequent revisions of its rules demonstrate its
struggle to reconcile its democratic impulse with its emerging recognition of the requirements of
campaign professionalism. Ultimately, the rules were pragmatically engineered to grant the
National Secretary a timetable driven by campaign necessity rather than by internal democracy.

Contested Relationships with Party Leaders

In considering the impact of professionalism on party structures, the most contested terrain
undoubtedly lies between the party’s Head Office and its parliamentary leader. If party officials are
selected with little formal regard for the preferences of the parliamentary leader yet it is also true
that, from the perspective of the party official, the most important and potentially difficult
relationship is with the party leader. Professionalisation, manifested as tensions among the three
faces of the party structure, has increased the likelihood of trespass across this contested terrain.
As partisan professionals, the Head Office officials are devoted to the best interests of their client,
the party. Yet within a political party, with its many cross-cutting ambitions and tendencies, those
interests can never be entirely clear or definitively agreed upon: is the goal electoral success,
ideological purity or personal ambition? Moreover, there will be dispute about whose voice provides
the authoritative articulation of those interests: the parliamentary leader or the officials in Head
Office? The campaign professional, devoted to the party as a whole, must negotiate these
contentious issues without favour, creating a relationship with the parliamentary leader of mutual
dependence troubled by tension and asymmetry.

At face value, the research interviews suggest that party officials recognise the importance of a
respectful and trusting relationship with the parliamentary leadership. The two faces of the party
had to ‘be seen as one team’ with a ‘mutually respectful relationship’ - though ‘brutal’ words could
be spoken behind the scenes; party officials should not get involved in ‘caucus politics’ and should
support the leader, however ‘tricky’ this might be to negotiate:

He (Whitlam) was the party leader, so I had to work with him (Wyndham).

I never got involved in caucus politics. … 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. That
wasn’t always easy (Combe).

My job as I saw it was to have good relations with the parliamentary leader, no matter
who he was. … Andrew (Peacock) saw John (Valder, the party president) as a strong
supporter of John Howard. So I had a parliamentary leader who, at one stage, was at
daggers drawn with the organisation leader. And then John Howard had a difficult
relationship with John Elliott when John Elliott was (president), and again 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 (Eggleton).

Having my office and the leader’s office almost as one - you had to be seen as one team
really. If that’s not the case it’s really dysfunctional - especially in Opposition (Robb).

If you don’t have a strong mutually respecting relationship with the leader, then one of
you is in the wrong job. So that’s foundational in my view. It doesn’t mean you have to be
best friends, or regard each other as the two smartest people in the room. But it does
mean you need to have confidence that both of you are good at what you do, that you’ve
got sound judgement and maturity to deal with the fairly – sort of – volatile situations that
arise, … to keep a cool head, to keep things calm, to the extent that that’s possible
(Walsh).

59
 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 (Crosby).

The relationship has got to work. You’ve got to trust each other. You’ve got to be able to
speak very brutally, frankly (Loughnane).

These expressions of respect and neutrality are based on the reality of electoral politics and
professional campaign management. On one hand, the party leader is the focus of centralised and
televised campaign communications and the ultimate authority for statements about party policy
and campaign promises. On the other, the party official is the campaign director22, the repository
of the market research which drives campaign strategy and the recipient of the public funding
which enables it to be delivered. The campaign director must accommodate the public profile of
the parliamentary leader, while the parliamentary leader cannot practically dispense with the
expertise and organisational support of the Head Office. At its most effective, the relationship
between a professional campaign manager and a skilful and committed parliamentary leadership
has produced enduring electoral success and policy reform. As McMullan recalled of the early
Hawke years:

I hope I contributed to the view that we, the party, (were) entitled to consider ourselves
as the Government equally (with the Liberal Party). 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.

Gray likewise recalled of Labor’s 1987 election win:

It actually demonstrated not just a victory of a campaign framework, it was more

important than that: it was a victory of a political philosophy, of a political capability, a
prodigiously capable cabinet, and a political machine that matched it.

Loughnane likewise recalled of the Liberals’ repeated electoral successes:

One of the great strengths of the Howard Government was that it was able to … put good
government ahead of good politics. … There is no use (for Head Office) trying to impose a
strategy or develop a strategy if the senior parliamentary team don’t want to go in a
particular direction. That’s one of the areas where in Government there may be things that
are electorally appealing but from a governmental point of view are difficult to do. It’s a bit
easier in opposition.

However, this idealised synergy between campaigning and governing is in practice liable to give
way to a less balanced relationship. Strong parliamentary leaders tend to dominate the central
office and extract active support from party officials. Cleland engineered support for Menzies’
leadership against his party doubters (Martin, 1999:66-8); Willoughby was a deferential loyalist
who routinely took Menzies’ side ahead of ‘activist presidents and unruly executive members’
(Hancock 2000: 126). Wyndham supported Whitlam in his daredevil strategy against Cairns’
leadership challenge (Freudenberg, 1977: 131-2). Eggleton, too, with his long career at the side of
Prime Ministers, bound the Secretariat closely in behind Fraser’s leadership and unswervingly met
the Prime Minister’s requests for organisational support: Fraser required Eggleton to travel with
him during election campaigns, established on a direct telephone link, insisted on memos from
Eggleton being on a blue paper for easy identification and included Eggleton in pre-Question Time
briefings. He also insisted on Eggleton buying more TV advertising in the final week of the 1983
election campaign, though the campaign director regarded this as too late to stave off defeat. 23

22
This important term is discussed in the next chapter.
23
‘I remember the latter stages of the 1983 election campaign, with the outlook already bleak. Senior Liberals
were attending a special dinner in Sydney to celebrate Malcolm Fraser’s achievement in becoming Australia’s
second-longest serving Prime Minister. Anxious to keep Malcolm as PM, there were suggestions that we should
pour more money into campaign advertising. Not surprisingly, Malcolm responded enthusiastically to this idea.
It was not a climate in which a campaign director could credibly demur, even though I doubted whether extra

60
Eggleton regards his close relationship with Fraser as having been ‘a great asset to the
organisation’ but concedes that some critics felt:

I was too close to Fraser, that I was almost as much involved as a personal adviser to
Fraser as I was in running the organisation.

In the ALP, electoral success has sufficiently empowered the parliamentary leader to move against
the party official – unfairly, perhaps, given the campaign has just delivered victory. Keating
dispensed with Hogg’s services after winning the ‘unwinnable’ election in 1993 (Williams,
1997:38), Gartrell moved on after delivering victory to Rudd in 2007, and Hawke moved against
McMullan after the 1987 campaign:

One of the consequences of the ‘87 campaign is something that I think is one of the great
truisms of effective campaigns, and that is the need for tension between a leader and the
organisation. McMullan had tested that too often, and Hawke resolved to remove McMullan
(Gray).

I don’t want to rehash it too much because I am an unabashed Bob Hawke fan. ... But
somehow or other the relationship, which had been terrific - we’d been friends a long time
before he became Prime Minister, and we worked very close together and we’re friends
now - but it just professionally wasn’t working any more. Maybe it was my fault, maybe it
his, maybe it was intermediaries, I’m not sure. So it wasn’t proper for me to continue
(after the 1987 campaign) (McMullan).

The ‘87 campaign had been very acrimonious and Bob (McMullan) had been knocked
around a bit. … He and Hawke fell out over a number of things. And (on) the things he fell
out over …, Bob (McMullan) was correct. (That’s) my view as a good organisation person
(Hogg).24

If strong parliamentary leaders can trespass on the central office, then the reverse is also true.
Against weak parliamentary leaders, there are several examples of party officials intervening in
parliamentary affairs to play a less supportive role. As parliamentary leadership itself has become
more liable to challenge, the party official has negotiated ever more difficult terrain, determining
whether and how to maintain or withdraw support for a leader under fire. When Snedden’s
leadership was under threat in 1974, Pascoe deftly positioned Head Office for a change:

I briefed Malcolm (Fraser) when it was obvious the challenge was coming. … I met with
Malcolm in Melbourne, separately, and said, ‘Look, we can’t be seen to do anything, but
we’re here’ and so on.25

McMullan supported Hawke against Hayden as Opposition Leader in 1980 (P. Kelly, 1984):

I don’t pretend that my relationship with Bill (Hayden) was as good as my relationship with
Bob Hawke, it wasn’t. But it was professional. 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.

advertising money was the answer. I believe in advertising but there are times and circumstances when last
minute spending per se is not a solution. Sitting next to me was (party Federal Treasurer Sir Robert) Bob
Crichton-Browne. He said, ‘Tony, how much more do I need to raise for this extra advertising? I said, ‘I guess
we’ll need another three quarters of a million if we are to make the kind of effort envisaged here this evening.’
He was never one to be deterred, but said, ‘Christ, this is the most expensive dinner I’ve ever attended’
(laughter). He stumped up, and the surprised agency embarked on this final campaign blitz. It was frustrating
because in my heart I knew it was highly unlikely to save our bacon’ (Eggleton Interview).
24
Hawke describes in his memoirs (Hawke, 1994: 389-400) having to ‘insist’ on the appointment of John
Singleton Advertising to manage Labor’s 1987 campaign advertising over McMullan’s objections.
25
Pascoe also acted to protect Eggleton, then still on Snedden’s staff, from being tarnished by too close an
association with the soon-to-be-former Opposition Leader, arranging for him ‘to be out of town so that he
couldn’t get caught in the middle.’

61
More dramatically, Hogg supported Keating against Hawke as Prime Minister 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, 1994: 502)

Gray regarded this move by Hogg as a significant point in the development of the National
Secretary’s role:

He (Hogg) is himself a national political figure by the time he becomes national secretary,
and as a national political figure … the role that (he) plays in the public space is very
different to that that McMullan had played. … I would never have taken, and … McMullan
would never have taken (but Hogg) unashamedly took, a position on the leadership. He
prosecuted that. He took an active view that Hawke’s time had run out and he actively
pursued that outcome.

In the Liberal Party, Robb faced an Opposition leadership severely weakened by electoral defeat in
1993. Market research commissioned by Robb was leaked to the media from the Secretariat and
was influential in the dumping of Hewson; his replacement Downer was also brought down thanks
to the Secretariat’s market research which Robb personally communicated to Downer and others
within the party (Williams 1997: 15-21, 55).

Thus strong leaders can dominate the officials, while weak leaders can be undone by them. This
asymmetrical relationship arises in the first instance from the structural autonomy of Head Office –
exemplified, as we have seen, by the practice of selecting party officials with little formal regard
for the preferences of the parliamentary leader. In the Liberal Party, the consensus model of
selecting party officials yields few overt struggles between the Secretariat and the parliamentary
wing; even so, there is a deep awareness of Head Office autonomy. In contrast to the British
Conservative Party, where the organisation is a ‘creature’ of the parliamentary leader, Crosby said
the role of the Liberal Party organisation is more independent:

You’re not an employee of the leader, you are a representative of the party who’s charged
with the responsibility of advising and supporting the leader, but you’re not the employee
of the leader.

In the ALP, structural autonomy – which under the contested election model has produced a series
of savvy political operators to run its organisation - appears even more forcefully related to the
repeated struggles between Labor’s Head Office and its parliamentary leadership. It seems no
coincidence that the two Labor officials who took sides in parliamentary leadership challenges,
McMullan and Hogg, were both elected under the contested model – as was Gray, who clashed so
fiercely with Keating.

Moreover, given this degree of autonomy, party officials have developed a sense of
professionalism which emphasises their service to the party as a whole. As discussed in Chapter
Three, this client service is understood to transcend the interests of individual party leaders who
after all, as Crosby noted, may ‘come and go’. Thus as technically skilled and experienced
campaign professionals, campaign directors can certainly develop campaign strategies to maximise
the electoral appeal of the parliamentary leader and hide their blemishes. But equally, a
parliamentary 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. A professional campaign director is likely to prefer fewer blemishes and
more campaign strengths. As Combe put it, where the campaign professional believes he has
special expertise, he has a special responsibility to ‘stand up’ to the leader:

62
 You’re not always going to be right. I think you’ve got to be prepared to stand up for what
you believe in. 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.

Thus McMullan explained his decision to support Hawke against Hayden as a ‘professional’ one,
built around the relative electoral appeal of the two parliamentary rivals:

I don’t think he (Hayden) ever accepted it, but it was my view that it was my professional
responsibility to say this is a change we need to make.

The potential for conflict on this contested terrain was never more explosively realised than in the
battle between Gray and Keating in the 1996 election campaign. Keating and his staff
unpredictably second-guessed campaign management decisions, wanting to retain flexibility in
campaign itineraries and rejecting research-driven advice on campaign messaging and advertising;
exasperated, Gray and his team came to refer to the Prime Minister as ‘Captain Wacky’ (Williams,
1997: 260-1). The clash came to a head in the final week of the campaign when, like Eggleton in
1983, Gray was pressured to lift TV advertising spending; unlike Eggleton, Gray did not acquiesce.
Keating replied with a scorching letter which insisted 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 (Keating, quoted in Williams 1997: 275-6).26

Professional campaign management, as defined by the party officials, of course specifically rejects
political ‘instincts’ or ‘intuitive play’ for research-based knowledge; last-minute ‘flexibility’ on
campaign logistics likewise offends a professionally managed campaign. It is the professional
campaign manager, not the party leader, who appears more capable of making dispassionate
judgements about the prospects of electoral defeat and, thus, about conserving the party’s
resources towards the end of a losing campaign.

It is a truism of election campaigns that parliamentary leaders claim responsibility for success,
while losses are attributed to the anonymous professionals in the organisation.27 In Bitar’s view,
this practice reveals that, on the Labor side at least, the party:

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

26
Don Russell, who had returned from his post as Australian Ambassador to Washington to serve as Keating’s
chief of staff, rightly summarised the structural distinctiveness of the Australian campaign management
system. Praising the US system where ‘the President appoints the campaign manager’, he said Australia has
‘this weird system where the party secretary, who gets the job by some process known only to the party, runs
the campaign for five weeks, At the end of the day the leader doesn’t have an advertising campaign that backs
up what he wants to say’ (Williams,1997: 277).
27
Claiming victory on election night in 1993, Keating’s ‘true believers’ speech failed to thank Hogg or even
mention him, describing himself as the boy alone on the burning deck; delivering his own farewell speech a
week later, Hogg rebuked him: ‘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’ (Williams, 1997: 38). After the 2004 defeat, Opposition Leader Mark Latham also took
the trouble of publishing, at some length, his critique of Gartrell’s performance as campaign director: ‘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.’ (Latham, 2005: 338, 359-60).

63
 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. …

His own experience in the 2010 election provided another example of the finger-pointing
syndrome:

As an observer you look at the way I was treated after the (2010) Federal election
campaign despite all the circumstances - despite three years of pretty average government
in the lead-up to the 2010 election campaign, despite home insulation, and the asylum
seekers, and the broken promises. There were probably about 150 variables in that
election campaign. Post the election campaign, a lot of people (said), ‘Well, let’s just blame
the campaign director’.

Given the contested terrain between campaign professionals and parliamentary leaders, such
questions may continue to be asked.

Discussion

The evidence presented reveals some important differences in the professionalisation processes
that occurred within each Party. These are most apparent in the different ways they selected their
Head Office professionals. The Liberal Party operated from the outset with a corporate and
managerial mindset. The Federal Director was regarded as a Chief Executive Officer, often
recruited from outside the organisation by a powerful chairman leading a supportive board in a
consensual process. Appointed on the basis of professional skills rather than political ambitions,
the Federal Director works full-time in a stable organisational environment; typically there are
smooth ‘lines of succession’. If professionalism involves a financial aspect, this managerial
approach allowed the Liberals to professionalise their Head Office – in the sense of introducing
paid officials – much earlier and more smoothly than Labor. In contrast, Labor’s preference for
internal democracy created a pattern of electoral contest and instability, producing officials who
were savvy political actors capable of assembling a majority of supporters on the National
Executive. Labor’s officials were also seasoned campaign practitioners who emerged from, and
operated within, the tectonic plates of the party’s power struggles: centralists against the states,
modernisers against traditionalists, left and centre and right factions against each other,
organisational wing against parliamentary wing. If professionalism involves an aspect of technical
competence and experience, then Labor in this sense professionalised earlier than the Liberal
Party.

More striking however than these differences between the two parties are the similarities. As
campaign professionals, Labor and Liberal party officials have come to resemble each other.
Whether appointed or elected, they are increasingly selected as seasoned campaign practitioners.
They share and articulate the same characteristics of professionalism, in its economic, technical
and ideological aspects. They are located in Head Offices that enjoy a similar autonomy, not
selected by, and owing little accountability to, members ‘on the ground’ or parliamentarians ‘in
public office’. They are partisans of rival causes locked in electoral battle, each identifying electoral
success as their principal priority and seeking to impose this superordinate goal on their party
organisations. Challenging and disrupting existing relationships and practices in both parties, they
bring about a gradual process of institutional accommodation to the practical requirements of
professional campaign management. The three forced departures of Kennelly, Wyndham and
Hartcher served as disruptive exclamation points in the protracted and contested process of
professionalisation but such brutal reversals have, like the ALP’s contested elections, been shed.
The sequence and timing of professionalisation within each party differed, but as party differences
eroded, the finished products look similar. Liberal officials are acquiring greater campaign
management experience at the state level; Labor is becoming more pragmatic in its selection
process yet by producing younger officials with narrower campaign skills and higher turnover it is
further reducing its advantage in campaign experience.

64
Significantly, neither party has surrendered control of election campaign management. External
consultants have not replaced party officials as campaign directors. Nor have the organisational
wings surrendered control over the selection of officials to the parliamentary wing. Campaign
professionals are the creatures of party. As this chapter has shown, they are typically party
members from an early age, seasoned managers of the party’s election campaigns, and selected
under party rules to manage the party’s organisation. They are deeply committed partisans,
devoted to achieving for the party its goal of electoral success. In the eyes of Scammell (1997),
Johnson (2001) and others, staunch partisanship disqualifies campaign workers from classification
as professional. But this does not square with the Australian experience where as we have seen,
the party officials identify partisanship as one of the defining features of their status as campaign
professionals. Thus there seems little reason to abandon the term professionalisation in the
context of party change, despite the impatience of scholars such as Lilleker and Negrine (2002)
with its complexity and contested nature. The concept of professionalism has been part of political
discourse since Michels and Weber; the research presented here suggests it retains contemporary
utility. But any discussion of campaign professionalisation is inconceivable without the campaign
professionals. The party officials interviewed here have provided distinctive definitional elements of
campaign professionalism. It remains to add flesh to those definitional bones by considering in
more detail the evidence they provide about their professionalising work within the Australian
parties. This evidence is presented in the next three chapters, which describe the centralising,
strategising and funding imperatives of campaign professionalism.

The next chapter introduces this theme by broadening the discussion beyond its current focus on
the national level of party organisation. We have examined the attitudes of the national party
officials about professionalism, we have reviewed the evidence of national party rules and
practices relating to the selection of these officials, and we have considered the relationship
between the officials and the national parliamentary leadership. Yet political parties are not unitary
national actors single-mindedly pursuing agreed national goals behind unchallengeable national
leadership. Rather, they are arenas of conflict in which ideas and ambitions compete for primacy;
created on federal lines, parties’ organisational authority is distributed among multiple locations.
In Chapter One, it was suggested that processes of disruption and change within parties can be
understood through the ‘three-face, two-level’ framework derived from Katz and Mair. The
framework suggests the professionals in the national Head Office were not simply granted
authority over campaign management; they had to win it. In particular, they had to win and
secure it at the expense of the state officials in the state branches.

65
 Chapter Five

‘The Left Hand Never Knew What the Right Hand Was Doing’: Head Office and the
Centralising Imperative

‘In those days the left hand never knew what the right hand was doing.’

‘‘‘Don’t say anything to anyone about anything, until you’ve rung Fred at the Head Office.’’’

‘We imposed more of a national pattern because we could. The technology made it possible.’

‘We were progressively trying to impose ourselves on all these autonomous organisations.’

I
t was not until 1963 – nearly half a century after the creation of the Federal Secretary’s
position in 1915 - that Labor finally appointed a full-time official in its national Head Office.
Cyril Wyndham recalls that his appointment was designed to ‘coordinate the campaigns’ on a
national basis. The existing practice, where the party’s state branches managed election
campaigns, led to fragmented and disorganised campaigns. In Wyndham’s exasperated words, ‘the
left hand never knew what the right hand was doing’. Wyndham was never able to follow through
on his aspiration to overcome such inefficiencies. But for every one of his successors in the national
Head Office, centralisation of campaign management was an imperative to be pursued, achieved
and secured. In the Liberal Party too, from around 1974, the national Head Office accepted the
same imperative for the same reasons: organising, coordinating and directing campaigns from the
centre permitted consistent and unified campaign communications and efficient usage of campaign
resources. These are core characteristics of the professional campaign model.

The campaign logic of centralisation arose in opposition to the federal structure of the Australian
party system. The federal character of Australian parties introduces a layer of organisational
complexity and internal tension absent from British and many European parties (Crisp, 1955: Ch1;
Epstein, 1977: 12; Holmes & Sharman, 1977: Ch4; Sharman & Moon, 2003). In Glyn Davis’s
evocative phrase, Australian parties are made up of ‘not one gang, but several’, allied on issues of
external competition while aggressively pursuing their own interests internally (Davis, 1992). Both
the ALP and the Liberal Party are structured on federal lines in which the fundamental units of
party organisation are the ‘branches’ (ALP) or ‘divisions’ (Liberal) based in the six states of the
Australian Commonwealth (and latterly in the two mainland territories). For the best part of
seventy years from Federation, these state units had primary responsibility for the conduct of
election campaigns not just for their own state elections but also for national elections. They also
dominated the national executives of both parties. Campaigning was further decentralised and
fragmented with policy emanating from the parliamentary leadership, while much of the campaign
activity was typically performed at the electorate level by parliamentary candidates and local party
members.

In experiencing these centrifugal tendencies of federalism, political parties were no different from
many other institutions of Australian political, commercial and social activity. By the 1960s
however - a time, in Donald Horne’s words, of ‘perceived crisis in national identity’ - both the
Liberal Government under Gorton and the Labor Opposition under Whitlam articulated and
championed a new national agenda over the heads of parochial or dilatory states (Freudenberg,
1977: Ch5; Horne, 1980: 166; Hancock, 2002: Chs9, 12). A burgeoning national consciousness
was further fuelled by a media industry that was itself transcending state boundaries in covering
public affairs: 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. In this context, parties were
increasingly rewarded for mounting centralised, coordinated and consistent campaigns, particularly

66
through national television broadcasting. The parties’ national Head Offices accordingly moved to
seize responsibility for national campaign management. They established campaigning as a
responsibility of the national office, conducting campaigning on a national basis and progressively
extending the reach or intensifying the influence of the national office while disempowering or co-
opting the party state branches. This process of centralisation was occasionally achieved in sudden
break-throughs. The 1970 decision of the Federal ALP to ‘intervene’ in the affairs of its recalcitrant
Victorian branch – that is, to abolish and replace it with a federal administration – immediately
removed many impediments to centralised campaign management (Blewett, 1973). More typically
however, centralisation was achieved through patient accretion of influence and resources in the
national Head Office; fraught with internal tensions arising from the structural fragmentation of
federalism, this process was slow and frequently contested.

In exploring this process, we are shifting from considering the vertical relationships contained in
the three-face two-level framework – that is, relationships among the various elements of the
national party - to considering the horizontal relationships between central offices at the national
and state levels (Jaensch, 1994: 120-1). This chapter first describes the decentralised campaign
structures which prevailed in both parties up to the 1970s. It then draws on the research
interviews to explore how the party officials themselves explain their centralising imperative in
relation to the state branches, before proceeding to outline the principal methods used by the
party officials to establish and extend centralised control of campaign management. Interviews
with the party officials, supplemented by a review of the historical record, reveal six principal
techniques or mechanisms employed by the party officials to transform and centralise campaign
management:

 appointing a campaign director,

 strengthening the Head Office,
 building national cooperation,
 imposing consistent internal communications,
 engaging specialist agencies and
 building a national party.

These are discrete themes but they are arranged here to describe an expanding circle of influence,
centred on the Head Office to embrace the larger party organisation. Presented on a thematic
basis, they also fall into a rough chronological series, with a particular emphasis on the critically
important work performed in the 1970s.

The Chapter concludes by reviewing the main themes of the centralisation process and assessing
its relevance to the professional campaign model.

Decentralised Campaign Management pre-1970s: the ALP

For more than twenty years after its creation in 1891, the Australian Labor Party was content to
operate with neither head office nor national secretary. ‘Australian’ Labor was organised as a
state-based party, and this arrangement persisted long after Federation. The few national
administrative responsibilities, such as organising the triennial Commonwealth Political Labor
Conference, were handled by the secretaries of the state branches on a rotating basis. Nor was the
decision to set up a Federal Executive made in haste; it was twice considered and twice deferred
by Conferences in 1908 and 1912 because of the implied weakening of state branch authority; in
1908 William Holman, a NSW delegate, had asserted that ‘the centralisation of executive authority
was, as far as Labor was concerned, a fundamentally mischievous exercise’ (Crisp, 1955; Weller &
Lloyd, 1978: 3). It was not until the 1915 Conference that the state branches sufficiently
overcame their ‘jealous attachment to ‘home rule’’ (Crisp, 1955: 49) to form a Federal Executive.
‘With its formation’, McMullin observes, ‘Labor’s organisational structure was complete’ (McMullin,
1991: 98). Yet the rules devised by the state officials for the new Australian Political Labor
Executive did not encourage any expansive view of its operations. It was granted power only to
organise the triennial conferences and to act as the ‘administrative authority’ carrying out

67
conference decisions; Labor essentially replicated at the national level the arrangements that
existed in each state where the supreme but infrequent party conferences delegated executive
authority to smaller administrative bodies. The new Executive was entirely reliant on the states for
its funding, agenda and membership; on principles of federal equality, each state branch
contributed two delegates to the executive regardless of size and wealth. All the federal office
holders, were elected by and from the twelve state delegates and they continued to act as state
representatives while also performing their federal duties; Stewart, the first Federal Secretary,
continued his more substantive role as state secretary of the Victorian branch. As Crisp observed,
the Federal offices were at this time ‘in most cases secondary or incidental responsibilities’ relative
to their principal preoccupations at the State level; the Federal Secretary’s authority was ‘severely
circumscribed’ and, without any secretariat, he handled ‘little cash and less patronage’ (Crisp,
1955: 7, 67).

During its early decades the Executive was repeatedly exposed as lacking the power to enforce its
decisions upon recalcitrant states; at times, its very existence was in jeopardy (Weller & Lloyd,
1978: 10, 13). As a delegate in his own right, Stewart was actively involved in these policy and
political disputes; he was a prominent anti-conscriptionist, and also helped negotiate between the
warring factions in New South Wales (Weller & Lloyd, 1978: 47; Love, 1990). But in his role as
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 receiving the meagre
sustentation fees the states paid each year to sustain the operations of the executive. From time
to time Stewart was voted an ‘honorarium’ of ten pounds or fifteen guineas, underlining his
honorary and part-time nature of this post and recognising the reality that his full-time job lay
elsewhere (i.e. as the Victorian state secretary).

After Stewart’s death, the Victorian branch quickly selected McNamara as his replacement both as
delegate to the executive and, in an acting capacity, as the Federal Secretary. Federal Executive
confirmed him as secretary – he was elected unopposed - but not before a debate about the
appropriate status of its honorary official. Must the Secretary be elected ‘by and from’ the
Executive, or could a secretary serve without also being a delegate? On the Executive’s
recommendation, the 1927 Conference changed the rules to allow ‘a Secretary to be appointed
who may not be a delegate member of the executive, a Secretary so appointed to have no vote’.
From 1931, McNamara ceased being a Victorian delegate and attended executive meetings solely
as the Secretary: by separating the secretary’s administrative and representative functions, the
ALP took a small but notable step towards as autonomous secretaryship. But the lowly status of
the Federal Secretary can be gauged by the meagre resources the states provided for him.
McNamara was granted honoraria from time to time (ten guineas in 1925, £25 in 1931, £100 in
1943) but he authorised no expenditure and was supported by no staff; an occasional payment
was made to a minute secretary. The full apparatus of Head Office consisted, to judge from the
Executive’s startling bare balance sheet in 1930, of nothing more than a typewriter and filing
cabinet (£20). Indeed, for its first fifty years, the national Labor Party had no national Head Office
as such – no ‘distinct room or office’ (Crisp 1955: 78) in which the party’s national business was
performed. Instead it was accommodated in a series of state branch offices, shifting to a new
capital city with the election of each new Federal Secretary: from Melbourne to Brisbane (under
Schmella) and Perth (Chamberlain) pausing in Canberra in 1963 as a genuinely national office
(under Wyndham) before heading off again to Adelaide (Young). Only in 1973 under Combe did
the Head Office become anchored in Canberra.

This subordination to the jealous and thrifty states helps explain why, for many decades, the
Federal Executive’s role in election campaign management, and that of the Federal Secretary, was
sporadic and limited (Crisp, 1955: Ch5). The state branch officials organised the party members,
controlled the party’s funding and effectively ran the Federal Executive; ‘since they paid the piper,
they liked to be able to call at least a few variations on the federal tune’ (Crisp, 1955: 84).
Centralising initiatives were repeatedly blunted or thwarted. Before the 1925 federal election, for
example, the Executive put up £20 to prepare campaign literature ‘of a uniform character in the

68
different States’ – but, lacking authority to act on this inspiration, the Executive had to couch it as
a recommendation to Caucus (Weller & Lloyd, 1978: 92, 104). In 1937 the Executive considered
appointing Federal Secretary McNamara ‘campaign director’ for the forthcoming elections but -
again uncertain of its powers – suggested the appointment be made by Caucus. In 1938, debating
the idea of a ‘general survey of the political situation with a view to preparing plans for the next
federal election’ due in 1940, 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 idea (Weller & Lloyd, 1978: 221). In 1943,
the year of Labor’s greatest electoral triumph, the Executive scarcely met and contributed little to
the effort which was led by the parliamentary party and the state branches. In the lead-up to the
1946 election, the Executive again tried to improve campaign coordination. It called on Caucus and
the state branches 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 where state campaign managers would liaise with a designated Federal MP to
coordinate local campaigning by candidates and branches. But even with this lead from Caucus,
the Executive could only ‘recommend’ that the states appoint their campaign directors
‘immediately’ (Weller, 1975: 359-60; Weller & Lloyd, 1978: 281, 299). In the event, apart from
Prime Minister Chifley’s initiative in meeting with state branches, there was little of a coordinated
nature in 1946; and 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 (Weller & Lloyd, 1978: 320,323). In a blunt reminder of who was running the
campaign, the Executive also resolved that:

in all future elections the Federal Members 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 (Lloyd and Weller 1978,
p323).

The Secretaryship gained influence during the early 1950s, due in part to the personal skills and
networks of the Federal Secretary, Pat Kennelly. 28 Kennelly pioneered the concept of the marginal
seat campaign (see Appendix Two). After Kennelly’s forced departure from Head Office, lack of
resources and capacity forced the party to revert to state-based part timers in Schmella and
Chamberlain for the best part of the next decade. The 1958 campaign, documented by Rawson,
portrays a Labor Party held back by a ‘serious’ lack of personnel at the federal level. Campaigning
was funded by the ‘Special Publicity Fund’ established by Curtin in the late 1930s and used to pay
for the services of the Hansen Rubensohn advertising agency; the fund received contributions from
many sources including state branches ‘in the belief that it would be used more effectively from a
central source’ – but this did nothing to strengthen the federal Head Office (Crisp, 1955; Rawson,
1961: 75).29

In his posthumously published recollections, Joe Chamberlain provided a telling insight into Labor’s
prevailing decentralised, state-based system of campaign management. His long list of campaign
duties as the Western Australian state secretary included 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

28
Like his two predecessors, Kennelly was a Victorian and a career party administrator, hired as a 16-year old
clerk in 1916. Renowned in Labor folklore for his stuttering insistence that ‘he didn’t care who won the
argument, just so long as he got to count the votes’, Kennelly elevated the Secretaryship to the first rank of
party political manoeuvring. Through influencing candidate pre-selections – or, as he termed it, choosing
‘horses for courses’ – and through cultivating a personal relationship with the party leader (John Cain in
Victoria and then Prime Minister Ben Chifley), Kennelly became, in Weller and Lloyd’s phrase, ‘the one federal
officer before 1955 who gained considerable influence from his federal role’; but they caution that this was due
to his personal skills and networks rather than from any power bestowed on the secretaryship itself (Weller &
Lloyd, 1978, p. 9; Love, 2007).
29
Rawson clearly indicates the state contributions were directed to the federal leader’s fund not, as reported in
S. Young (2004: 83) the Federal Executive.

69
inaccuracies; providing media commentary on campaign matters; and negotiating preference
deals, ‘ad nauseam’. As a self-described ‘jack-of-all-trades’, Chamberlain was obviously satisfied
with his local know-how and campaign expertise, based in the state capital where he had built his
political career and where his real power base lay. But considering his term as state secretary ran
from 1949 to 1974 and spanned nine or ten Federal elections, his failure to mention any form of
coordination or even consultation with the Federal party seems a significant assertion of state
authority. Indeed, when Chamberlain eventually advocated the establishment of a full-time
secretariat, his reasoning was based not on any need for campaign centralisation but to assist the
party research and develop national policy (Chamberlain, 1998: 64, 80). As we have seen the
subsequent appointment of Wyndham as a full-time national officer did little to break the
dominance of the states over the ALP Federal Secretary. By the early 1970s, Blewett (1973, p9)
describes Labor’s electoral activities as ‘sporadic and individualistic, often haphazard or even
accidental, and lacking any overall coherence’.

Decentralised Campaign Management pre-1970s: the Liberal Party

Problems of federalism also plagued the Liberal organisation. This was apparent from the time of
the establishment of the Federal Secretariat in 1945. Menzies had called for ‘unanimity and
cohesion on the organisational side’ and ‘a concerted force under one command and with one
staff’. Yet when it came to putting this principle into action, the Liberal Party baulked at any such
single ‘command’ structure, creating instead a Head Office that was, like its ALP counterpart,
hamstrung by federal power struggles.

Laying down the party’s organising principles, the Albury Conference determined on a federal
structure ‘in which the maximum autonomy would remain with each State organisation’. The
Federal Secretariat would provide ‘co-ordination, research, publicity and assistance to the Federal
Parliamentary Party’ (Starr, 1980: 80). The party’s constitution enforced these principles. True,
the Secretariat was recognised from the beginning as a separate unit of the new federal structure
with distinct responsibilities and this was a departure from the Labor Party model. But these
responsibilities were to be exercised in a condition of dispersed federal authority. The major
organising unit of the party was the state division: individual party members were affiliated at the
state not national level, state delegates dominated the Federal Council and Federal Executive; the
state divisions could employ their own officials such as a General Secretary (Liberal Party of
Australia, 1946a, Sections 22, 24-31, 39, 53). Where Menzies had invoked the military analogy of
a general staff, and Ritchie the business analogy of a Chief Executive Officer, the reality was that
Cleland’s executive powers were limited. Unlike in the early Labor Party, the Director was not a
voting member of the Executive and he was enjoined by the Constitution to ‘coordinate the
activities of the State Divisions on a federal basis’ and to control and organise Federal publicity ‘in
cooperation with’ publicity committees in any State division (Liberal Party of Australia, 1946a,
Sections 63, 64). But the divisions carried no counterpart responsibility; functions of ‘coordination’
and ‘assistance’ imply persuasion rather than direction. This lack of clarity about the powers of the
Secretariat - even, perhaps a deliberate ambiguity about them - suggests a complex authorising
environment in which the federal parliamentarians on the one hand, and the state divisions of the
federal party organisation on the other, have different and unresolved perspectives on the proper
scope of the new body. The Secretariat was founded with a job to do, but amid uncertainty and
tensions about how to do it. This was the point of Cleland’s and White’s report after their
inspection tour: theirs was a national project, which inevitably and immediately challenged the ‘six
separate entities’ at the state level.

As Hancock has noted in his invaluable account of the federal Liberal organisation, the new party
embraced ‘two conflicting understandings of the concepts “federal” and “national”.’ For Ritchie, a
federal outlook and a national outlook meant the same thing: a willingness to place the party’s
nation-wide interests above sectional concerns. To the state divisions, that sort of federalism was
centralist and unificationist: a truly federal perspective acknowledged their right to remain
autonomous’ (Hancock, 2000: 63). The federal Head Office, excluded from policy making by a
parliamentary party that was not interested in sharing this role, increased its efforts in the

70
campaign sphere. Having delivered electoral victory through a centralised and professional
national election campaign in 1949, the national office built a successful campaign strategy
through promoting the image of Prime Minister Menzies (Hancock, 2000: 120). Yet the party only
narrowly survived close shaves in 1954 and 1961, and the state branches continued to resist
national incursions onto their electoral turf. Two long-serving state officials in particular – John
Carrick, general secretary of the New South Wales branch, and his Victorian counterpart John
McConnell – are described by Hancock as the ‘real enemies’ of Federal Director Willoughby in the
1950s and 1960s. According to Hancock, they strongly resisted any expansion of the Federal
Secretariat’s authority, treating it as little more than a central post office which supplied
propaganda literature, organised meetings, and assisted contacts with the federal government.
Carrick and McConnell were also the ‘shrewd’ authors of ‘Political Appreciations’ which were
influential in forming the party’s campaign strategies. Hancock further 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.’ Willoughby wrote in 1954 of the
‘growing recognition of the need to speak with one voice’, but he could never issue a command to
that effect. These tensions between a centralising Federal Head Office under Willoughby and a
centrifugal state structure exemplified by Carrick and McConnell were, as Hancock points out, still
unresolved after twenty years. ‘Ritchie’s goal of a truly national organisation, in spirit and
structure, had not been realised’ (Hancock, 2000: 74-5, 126, 129, 147, 248). Carrick, like
Chamberlain, took personal responsibility for writing copy for advertisements; his individualistic
understanding of campaign strategy and his hands-on approach were described by Kaldor (1968).
In Queensland, the influential state director Charles Porter took the view, as director of federal
campaigns in that state, that advertising and other campaign material was ‘all a waste of money
and effort’ and polling of leaders was a ‘prime piece of pointless nonsense’; he championed
campaigns fought with the ‘sweat of the brow’ and the ‘gut feeling’ of experienced campaigners (C.
Porter, 1981).

In this system, the Federal Director played a linkage role that, while it achieved some degree of
coordination, did so largely on the states’ terms. In an interview Bede Hartcher gave after his
appointment – one of his rare public statements – he reflected on his previous experience as a
federal official rotated through several state divisions to broaden his experience, including helping
the Victorian Liberals to victory under Bolte in 1954-7:

They (the state divisions) just regard you as a person with a lot of experience, and you can
be helpful just being able to sit there and say, ‘we have had this problem in Queensland
and this is an effective way of handling it’. This sort of linkage is an effective way of
getting unification of policy (Juddery, 1968).

By Hartcher’s time, however, the Liberal Party’s problems were deeper than his laid-back style
suggested. The party organisation that had so ably supported Menzies could do little with the
leadership turmoil and rivalries in the parliamentary party and coalition and its committee
structures and personnel had atrophied. Australian campaigning in 1969 was regarded by a visiting
British scholar as ‘dated’:

The image makers had not been at work. The stilted formality of TV presentations,
especially by the government coalition parties was astonishing (Butler, 1974: Ch14).

In 1972 Hartcher took the party to its first campaign defeat in more than two decades and was
subsequently ‘brutally removed’ (Hancock, 2000: 248-9, 269). But finding itself in opposition for
the first time since Cleland, the party’s Head Office which had outlived Menzies and had outlived
the Liberal Government, once again began a process of regeneration.

Centralised Campaign Management in a Federal System

Against this background of decentralised campaign management, the national party officials set
about transforming campaigning from a state-based to a nationally-based activity. This centralising
imperative only emerged in the face of deeply entrenched and intransigent state interests. In

71
speaking of his frustrations with the party’s ‘left hand’ not knowing what its ‘right hand’ was doing,
Wyndham gave two examples of this ‘ridiculous’ dysfunctional decentralisation:

Western Australia could say one thing and New South Wales the other. There was no
coordination of the leader’s campaign. 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?’

Both problems would be remedied through a coordinated approach which would permit consistent
campaign communications and efficient usage of campaign resources. These solutions had not
been implemented because of personal antagonisms but more deeply because of the institutional
problems of federalism, which permitted sectional interests to be put ahead of national interests:

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.

The ‘nuisance’ factor was illustrated when, immediately after Wyndham’s appointment as Federal
Secretary, Prime Minister Menzies called an early election in November 1963. Having sent
Wyndham to Canberra, the Victorian branch found itself undermanned and asked Federal
Executive to defer Wyndham’s start date so that he could remain in Victoria as the state campaign
director (Australian Labor Party, 1964). The Executive’s agreement meant that Labor in effect
conducted its national campaign for the 1963 elections without a national secretary – an
unprecedented circumstance even for this decentralised party.

That the London-born Wyndham should decry the lack of ‘Australianism’ in the ALP is perhaps
ironic. But the lack of an ‘Australian’ approach to national campaign management was of course
the very problem. As Freudenberg notes of this period, it was the state branches that by definition
had the ‘deepest vested interest in the fragmented federal structure’ and would be weakened, both
within their own states and nationally, by a strong national organisation that transcended state
interests (Freudenberg, 1977: 92). Achieving electoral success at the national level required the
new federal Head Office to secure the cooperation of the states in a nationally-focussed campaign
effort. After the failure of Wyndham’s efforts to reduce the power of the state branches, a critically
important stage in this transformation was reached by his successor Young, for whom the party’s
decentralised structure, with its associated ‘jealousy and suspicion’, had been the principal cause
of Labor’s electoral failures:

There was no doubt in my mind that one of the grave deficiencies in the Labor campaigns
of the (pre-1972) 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 (M. Young, 1986).

In turn Combe recalls the vulnerability of the federal office to the better resourced state branches:

Federalism implies powerful states’ rights, and at the time (1973) the states felt enormous
influence over what you could do, because they paid sustentation fees. If a state branch,
New South Wales or Victoria, chose not to pay sustentation fees, then you had a hell of a
problem paying your own wages, let alone the wages of any staff member. … 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.

The illogical nature of decentralised national election campaigning was underscored by McMullan
who identified instead a ‘logic’ in which the national party was pre-eminent:

72
 We have a Westminster system. That means that a key choice for voters is, ‘Who do you
want to be the government?’ (It is) not, ‘Who do you want to be the local member?’ … At
the core, the overwhelming majority of Australians go to the polling booth to decide who
they want to be the Government. That’s a perfectly rational judgement for them to make.
Once you come to that conclusion, the logic is that a major campaign is about the party not
the candidate. That leads to a centralisation of campaign resources and the acquisition of
campaign skills. That just follows.

Liberal officials of the era also recall a party organisation that was decentralised and lacking
national coordination. Pascoe found the party in 1974:

(It was) all pretty untidy and independent. Everyone did their own thing.

Eggleton recalled that prior to 1974:

We’d run elections on a state basis, managed by each state division. There’d been some
national coordination and input, but there’d not been a truly national campaign.30

None of the party officials interviewed for this research speaks of national campaigning as being
other than a responsibility of the national office. They all accept the need, in Loughnane’s words,
for ‘someone’ to take charge of campaign management – and for that person to be based in the
national office. Discussing a hypothetical situation of state-based control of the party leader’s
itinerary – the same problem Wyndham had condemned as ‘ridiculous’ – Loughnane said:

Politically my view is, it would be politically disastrous. You can’t (have) the leader turn up
interstate and being told … I’m saying, ‘Go here’, and someone else is saying ‘Go there’. It
doesn’t work that way. Somebody’s got to make the call.

It was under Combe’s secretaryship that Labor made a symbolic switch of names, exchanging the
adjective ‘federal’ with ‘national’. Combe, elected as Federal Secretary in 1973, was retitled
National Secretary from 1975; the party’s ‘Federal’ or ‘Commonwealth’ conferences became
National Conferences. The switch marked a turning point in campaigning:

It just became entrenched that the federal campaigns were run as national campaigns. …
When I came in, there were national campaigns in name only (Combe).

McMullan likewise acknowledged that by his time in the 1980s:

The authority of the national office had been pretty firmly established as people who ran
the campaign and with whom the states cooperated, rather than the other way around.

Robb noted the same outcome in the Liberal Party, where

The Secretariat (under Eggleton in the 1970s) had run the national advertising campaign,
and had developed themes and messages.

Crosby, later, agreed that

The Liberal Party in particular was a very devolved organisation. … (But by the late 1990s)
no one would dispute that the Federal Director and the federal organisation would have
centralised campaign responsibilities – which was quite a change.

Loughnane is even more definite:

On the campaigning side, the states are if you like an extension of my campaign unit. …
Each state doesn’t go and run its own campaign in a federal election. They’re about the

30
Former Liberal official Martin Rawlinson wrote in 1983 of the Liberals’ ‘introduction of national campaigning’
in 1974 – that is, centralised control of the TV advertising campaign in the Federal office (Rawlinson, 1983).

73
 implementation of the strategy in their individual states. If you like they’re an extension of
my campaign apparatus. … I think everyone accepts you can only have one strategy.

Appointing a National Campaign Director

The centrality of the Head Office to campaign management is captured by the title ‘national
campaign director’, which from the 1970s has come to be routinely attached to Labor Party
National Secretary and Liberal Party Federal Director. Young in 1972, and Eggleton in 1975, were
the first national campaign managers. Prior to 1972, only state secretaries had carried the title of
campaign director. Chamberlain for example noted that as state secretary he was ‘automatically’
campaign director for state and federal elections in Western Australia (Chamberlain, 1998). The
arrangement meant in effect that for national elections, each party campaigned with six campaign
directors, each responsible for efforts within state boundaries with minimal central coordination. It
was to eliminate the duplication and inefficiency of this system that the parties – first Labor in
1972 and then the Liberals in 1975 – appointed their federal party official as national campaign
director. This represented a very clear transfer of authority for campaign management from the
periphery to the centre and permitted a uniform, top-down and centralised direction to national
campaigning.

Campaign directors embody the centralised coordination and direction of all the party’s campaign
resources, including the parliamentary leadership and candidates, state party divisions, party
employees, members. Campaign directors also engaged and controlled the specialist consultants –
the market researchers, advertising agents, direct mail providers and media communications
advisers – and thus could apply an ever-expanding repertoire of marketing techniques to the
disciplined pursuit of electoral advantage. Beyond this, the campaign director also performs the
higher task of formulating the party’s overall strategy. To an extent that would perhaps have
surprised Cleland and McNamara, their successors in their party Head Offices from the 1970s
onwards became key advisers to their respective Prime Ministers and Opposition Leaders and
decisive voices in shaping the political strategy of Governments and Oppositions. Thus
empowered, the campaign directors exert influence over policy formation, over the recruitment
and preselection of candidates, and in certain cases even over the choice of party leaders.
Meanwhile, campaigning itself became an increasingly protracted function. From Young’s ‘mini-
campaign’ in late 1971 (Blewett, 1973: 9), electioneering expanded beyond the formal intensive
campaign period prior to polling day to take place on a virtually continual or in Blumenthal’s word
‘permanent’ basis, throughout the political calendar (Blumenthal, 1980).

Young’s 1986 account of the 1972 campaign mentions his appointment as campaign director only
in passing. Blewett however noted that once appointed as campaign director, Young established
his ‘mastery’ over campaign planning ‘almost immediately’ and became Labor’s ‘organiser of
victory’. The position carried little ‘directive’ power, and relied for its authority on Young’s previous
campaign experience in South Australia and his position at the nexus of the three groups critically
involved in campaign planning and execution: the Secretariat, the party leader and the advertising
agency (Blewett 1973: 10-11). As campaign director, Young implemented his stated vision of a
nationally integrated election campaign, including a national television advertising campaign based
around the research-tested, mood-oriented, celebrity-sung slogan and anthem, ‘It’s Time’. Not
since 1949 had there been such a conspicuous example of the professionalised campaign model.

The Liberals matched this arrangement before the 1975 elections, appointing Eggleton as national
campaign director with the support of parliamentary leader Malcolm Fraser. Fraser required the
new campaign director to take an unprecedentedly ‘hands-on’ campaign role, travelling with him
to all his election events during the campaign. Eggleton also had to ‘slip back’ to Melbourne
regularly, to supervise the advertising agency and attend the campaign headquarters. He further
took on a coordinating role in relation to the Liberals’ coalition partner, setting up a regular
morning telephone conference ‘bringing the two parliamentary leaders together with me’ for a
briefing to have ‘both coalition leaders … hopefully taking a similar stance’. Underlining the
essentially transient nature of such arrangements, however, Eggleton had to reaffirm his authority

74
as campaign director after Fraser’s departure. The new party leaders, Howard and Peacock, did not
require him to travel with them during election campaigns in 1984, 1987 or 1990, with Peacock’s
‘independently-minded’ staff deciding during the 1984 campaign on a different itinerary from that
determined by the Head Office. Again, the problem of the leader’s itinerary, as old as Wyndham,
was revived:

We (in Head Office) designed the programs for the leader - but they (the leader’s staff)
started to decide where he (Peacock) would go and what he would do differently from what
we wanted.

That issue was resolved with the leader reaffirming the need for one campaign, led by Eggleton:

And (we) also increasingly determined that there should be one person 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 parallel campaign for the leader separately from
the national campaign. These were lessons that we were very firm about. The
parliamentary leaders of the day all supported me on this saying, ‘OK Tony, my team
becomes part of your team for the campaign’.

But after the 1987 campaign, Eggleton again had to reassert his authority, appealing 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 (Ramsey, 2009).

Such problems indicate that campaign directors need constantly to maintain the centralising
pressure. Yet the innovation of a national campaign director quickly became completely entrenched
in both parties. All national secretaries and federal directors following Young and Eggleton have
also been appointed campaign director. These appointments take place automatically as they are
regarded as inherent in the party official’s role. As noted earlier, the party officials themselves
regard it as an essential and increasingly central part of the role:

The Federal Director is the campaign director. … It’s not a formal resolution that you get
appointed campaign director. By virtue of being one, you are the other (Crosby).

It’s always been the tradition. There is no reference to it in the rules. I know in the lead-up
to me being appointed there was some view about maybe there needs to be – basically
when it became clear that I’d got the numbers, some dissenters in the right said, ‘Let him
be secretary, but we’ll have a separate campaign director’. I said, ‘I’m not going to do it -
you’re not going to get anyone to just be secretary and not campaign director’ … It was
only floated by one person who was being mischievous. But the interesting thing was very
strongly, people said, ‘No. It’s an important job to have both in, you can’t really split it’
(Gartrell).

Despite the title, the campaign director’s directive powers are limited. The real source of influence
lies in the director’s centrality in the campaign machinery and the use of his personal authority to
induce the cooperation of state officials and parliamentary leaders. This point recurs frequently in
the research interviews. Combe described himself as a ‘consensual’ leader, with his own sphere of
responsibility which he did not seek to expand. Crosby described the federal director as the ‘senior
peer’ of the state directors. Eggleton carefully managed state sensitivities:

75
 This is how we made it work. I made sure they were all an integral part of the Federal
campaign team. They knew I had this Federal campaign job to do and they wanted to
cooperate. I wanted to avoid them feeling overshadowed by the federal campaign director
and the new machine.

Eggleton described campaign management as using personal experience and judgement to

assemble a ‘puzzle’ of diverse pieces:

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. … You can’t just walk in the door and do it.

Thirty years later, in the other party, Gartrell described his role in similar terms:

My experience was, to make sure you’ve got all your ducks lined up, to get all the best
competing egos, creative minds, technical people, configured into a functional team. That’s
what I prided myself on. The same thing with the management of the party - to get all
those factions and people lined up. To me I never saw it as me trying to be the preeminent
political operator or the preeminent strategist, but more that your job was to get out of
that lumpy system, to get the best out.

Less like a commander and more like an impresario, then, the campaign director coordinates from
behind the scenes the diverse talents of party officials and external consultants into a single
concerted campaign effort.

Strengthening the Head Office

Both parties aspired to base their national Secretariat in purpose-built premises in the national
capital, but until this aspiration was fulfilled, the national Head Office remained physically based in
the states. The Canberra Conference of the nascent Liberal party had recommended the formation
of a permanent Secretariat in Canberra (Starr 1980, p79), but the organisational blueprint drawn
up by federal president Ritchie had recognised that until a site was found the Secretariat should
share accommodation in Sydney with the New South Wales division (Hancock 2000, p56).
Willoughby had opened a part-time office in Canberra soon after he was appointed Federal Director
in 1951. But it was not until 1965, marking the twentieth anniversary of its founding, that he was
able to preside over the opening of the Party’s national headquarters – ‘Menzies House’ - in a
purpose-built brick building in Canberra (Hancock, 2000:1-2). For the ALP, as noted earlier, the
national Head Office was merely a notional concept rotated among the state capitals. Nothing
came of a ‘long discussion’ at the Federal Executive in 1945 – no doubt inspired by the Liberals’
planning - about setting up ‘a Federal Secretariat’ in Canberra ‘as early as possible’ (Weller &
Lloyd, 1978: 298). As the full-time secretary, Wyndham operated out of rented premises in the
national capital from January 1964, albeit in ‘a small, ratty office suite at the top of the world’s
most ancient lift’ (Ramsey 1996). Young, Adelaide-based had ‘carried the federal secretariat
around in his briefcase for several years’ (Brenchley, 1973) but under his successor Combe, the
ALP finally matched the Liberal Party, opening its own national headquarters – John Curtin House –
in 1974.

The Liberal Federal Secretariat had been staffed from inception with a substantial professional
team. The tripartite staffing structure of the Secretariat established under Cleland – in which the
Federal Director was assisted by a Public Relations Officer and a Senior Research Officer - was
retained, though White had been replaced by Edgar Holt in 1950, and Bengtsson resigned to join
British Tobacco in 1955 to be replaced by his deputy Bede Hartcher (Hancock 2000; Griffen-Foley
2003). Willoughby boasted to the state divisions about the ‘splendid condition’ of the Federal
office, with its ‘three top-ranking men’ (Hancock 2000). Each of these senior officials was paid
£2000 a year; by 1961 Willoughby’s salary was reported to be ‘something over £4000’ with Holt
and Hartcher on ‘about £3500’ (Whitington 1961; Hancock 2000). All of them routinely complained
about inadequate resourcing, but the Head Office appears to have enjoyed a comfortable level of

76
support: six staff members in the Research team, a prolific publications budget, and international
travel to observe political developments in the UK and USA (Whitington 1961; Hancock 2000).

Certainly the contrast with Labor’s minimal resources was striking. In 1961, Labor’s campaign
publicity effort relied entirely on a journalist attached to the New South Wales branch and to
media-savvy MPs such as Leslie Haylen (Whitington 1961). Even after Wyndham had become
Labor’s first full-time national officer, he lacked administrative support and resources; while every
other socialist party in the world had an effective national organisation, Whitlam told a party
conference in 1967, the ALP had just ‘one man and two typists’ (Anon, 1967a; McMullin, 1991:
304-5). Young’s appointment as national campaign director, however, was accompanied by a
significant strengthening of Labor’s Head Office. Three professional staff members and consultants
were engaged - David White, Peter Martin and Eric Walsh – all of whom had backgrounds in
journalism and publicity (Blewett 1973, p10). The party was quickly convinced of the value of
national Head office staff devoted single-mindedly – that is, without the distraction of state
priorities – to the task of winning national elections. Combe’s Head Office was strengthened with
the creation of a senior role as assistant national secretary (initially filled by former Collingwood
premiership player Ken Bennett) and, following the electoral debacle of 1977, an internal party
review recommended further resources be added, with directors of communications (Tony
Ferguson, then Geoff Walsh) and research (Geoff Prior, assisted by Gary Johns). In a fine
articulation of the centralising imperative, Combe’s successor McMullan observes that his priority
was not to make the Secretariat bigger:

We didn’t need to make it bigger. I didn’t want to take on more things. I just wanted to be
more in control, more in charge, of the way the campaign was conducted.

Even so, Geoff Walsh replaced Ferguson as communications director and in 1986 national
organiser Kate Moore was joined by two more national organisers, Gary Gray and Ian Henderson.
Gray was later appointed as assistant national secretary under Hogg and, as National Secretary, in
turn appointed Candy Broad as his assistant secretary. Walsh’s election as National Secretary was
accompanied by Gartrell’s move into the assistant secretaryship.

Eggleton was supported by a larger cast of senior executives. He inherited and retained the
tripartite structure of a director supported by professionals in research and policy (initially, Ian
Marsh, then Martin Rawlinson and Keith Richmond) and media and communications (John Leggoe,
who went on to become the state director in Queensland, then Press Gallery journalists Bob
Baudino then Graham Morris). There were also officers tasked with parliamentary relations
(Graham Wynn and Al Kinloch) and international relations. He also briefly experimented with a
professional fundraiser, though this function soon reverted to the party treasurer. Eggleton also
initiated the appointment of deputy directors, first appointing Nick Minchin and then Andrew Robb.
Robb as director in turn appointed Crosby as his deputy. As well as his media role, Morris went on
to play a permanent campaign role as Eggleton recalls:

Graham (Morris) has probably run more campaigns than anyone because he was the
officer on my team who contributed to state campaigns. When they wanted help it was
Graham Morris. If the Liberal Party had campaign medals, they’d cover his whole chest.
He’d go off and spend three or four weeks with the campaign teams in each of the states
and also became the key person with Masius and other agencies. He was the day-to-day
liaison person with the agencies and that was one of his quite specific roles.

Likewise Gray says his role as organiser was ‘to do the campaign work’. Robb also says he was
hired ‘to set up a campaigning unit’. Crosby was hired as Robb’s deputy to do ‘a lot of the on-the-
ground campaigning stuff’.

In addition to these enhancements to the Secretariat’s campaign resources, many of the

interviewed federal officials spoke of a cyclical process of staffing up the Secretariat in advance of
elections. Eggleton said he ‘worked on the basis of building up to maximum staff leading up to the
election campaign’. Gartrell said his core full-time staff of 8 to 10 officers was expanded ‘really

77
strongly in the election year’ to as many as 100 staff for the short period of the campaign.
Loughnane agreed that ‘typically staffing wise we tend to staff up the closer we get to an election
and then drop off’. As Eggleton and Crosby both noted, victory at the ballot box allows Head Office
to shrink, as staff move into ministerial or other positions with the Government. This cyclical
staffing underlines that - for all the focus on the ‘permanent campaign’ – party managers must still
be able to mount an effective effort in the sharp intense few weeks of the campaign proper.

Building National Cooperation

An obvious organisational response to a problem of dispersed and autonomous units is to create

forums in which all units can participate and collaborate. Such forums build habits of trust,
promote information sharing and pool expertise; they can serve flexibly as vehicles for collective
decision making or for centralised command and control. In both parties, Head Office created such
forums, bringing the central officials together the state secretaries, parliamentary leaders and
external campaign consultants. These forums became a critical method for the federal party
officials to, in Combe’s words, get the state secretaries ‘on board’:

You had to have them on board, to do the things that you wanted to do in a campaigning
sense … by cultivating (them), involving them in what was happening federally, trying to
get them on board.

In the Liberal Party, Robb echoed the need for rapport with the state directors:

They’ve got to be your generals. They’ve got to have confidence in you, and you’ve got to
have confidence in them. … If you’ve got a good rapport and trust it can make a hell of a
difference. State directors are critical.

Labor’s first joint national-state forums operated in a specific campaign context. Wyndham had
worked with a National Organising and Planning Committee (NOPC) of the Federal Executive,
which formulated ‘the broad national lines of the campaign’ based on the leader’s policy priorities
and the advertising agency’s outline of ‘the best method of utilising to maximum advantage the
funds available’. State branches ‘grafted’ their own campaigns on to this national framework
(Wyndham, 1968). Given this limited mandate, and against the backdrop of the antagonistic
internal relations in Wyndham’s time, the NOPC not surprisingly failed to achieve much by way of
coordination. In January 1972, however, Young’s appointment as national campaign director was
accompanied by the creation of a National Campaign Committee (NCC) which he headed. The NCC
brought together in a single, campaign-focussed, forum, the national secretary, the party leader
Whitlam, and the six state secretaries; present ‘by invitation’ were representatives of the
advertising agency, parliamentary staff, and other state and federal officials (Blewett, 1973).
Blewett describes the NCC as the instrument Young used to gather information and gain formal
authorisation, and through which he ‘imposed his concept of a national and professional campaign
on the state organisations’ in the lead-up to the December 1972 election (Blewett 1973 p10). The
NCC’s last meeting was in October, more than a month before the beginning of the campaign
proper; that is, the committee exercised a planning not implementation role (Blewett 1973 p10).
Having been such a critically important vehicle for Young in 1972, by 1974 the NCC under Combe
became bogged down with ‘a cast of thousands’; coordination forums once established do not
necessarily endure. Victory in 1974 came only after Labor’s ‘disjointed and dispirited campaign’
was ‘rejuvenated’ by a mid-campaign change of strategy; Mick Young had to be drafted in to assist
(C. J. Lloyd & Reid, 1974: 409; Souter, 1976; Richardson, 1994).

Combe was responsible for ‘instituting’ a new forum with the state secretaries which operated
outside the campaigning periods with a more general focus:

We’d ask them to share what they were doing in terms of their state campaigns. We would
get people like (market researcher) Rod Cameron to present.

78
This forum has endured as a vital means of ensuring the cooperation of the powerful state branch
officials, as Gartrell noted:

There’s a state secretaries’ forum called the State Secretaries Meeting. They also attend
the (National) Executive. They also form the Finance Committee of the party. So having
the state secretaries at best on side, at worst neutral, is the goal. That worked pretty well.
I didn’t have too many problems. I may have had one or two guys who were problematic
but on the whole the cooperation was good with that bunch. But they’re very important.

Q: Why important? A: Because 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.

Or, 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.

Labor’s state secretaries’ forum is a relatively late blooming version of a much more long-running
forum developed in the Liberal Party in its earliest days. In preparing for the 1949 campaign, the
first federal director, Cleland, had convened and chaired an officials’ forum which brought the
general secretaries from the state divisions together with the Federal Secretariat. In two campaign
planning meetings, the officials discussed and determined issues such as roll cleansing, Speakers’
Notes, advertising, and the relationship between research and public relations. This organisational
innovation quickly established itself as a principal focal point for national co-operation.
Institutionalised after the 1949 victory as the Staff Planning Committee (SPC), it is thus the first of
what was to become a key tool in both parties to achieve a nationally consistent and centralised
campaign effort. The SPC became in Hancock’s phrase the party’s ‘brains trust’, increasingly relied
upon by the federal executive and Menzies himself for strategic and tactical advice and planning
(Hancock, 2000: 7, 93).

Defeat in 1972 had come as an unprecedented shock for the Liberal Party and yet, just as in the
1940s, this presented opportunities for electoral revival through radical organisational reform – not
least, the ouster of Hartcher. The Liberals also emulated and indeed leapfrogged Labor in
adopting a national campaign approach, developing coordination forums to drive their agenda of
campaign centralisation. The key was a Federal Campaign Committee consisting of the
parliamentary leaders, federal president and federal and state officials - ‘a group of about a dozen
people altogether; then we seconded research and advertising people as required to brief us
(Eggleton Interview). Eggleton attributes to Fraser the decision to ‘stop running these separate
divisional election campaigns’ and ‘to have a truly national campaign’, though there is plenty of
evidence that this was happening earlier (Starr 1980, p284, 292). Eggleton’s description of its role
– again reminiscent of Labor’s NCC - emphasises its authorising rather than implementation role:

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. I had fairly frequent
meetings with the state directors. The Federal Director chaired a Staff Planning Committee
which met every month, two months. During the campaign we didn’t meet personally but
we’d certainly talk frequently on the telephone so they could keep me in touch with what
was going on around the place in the states and the reactions to the campaign.

Robb described the SPC in similar terms, confirming that Hancock’s judgement about the utility of
this forum in the Menzies years endured through to the Howard years:

79
 We had quite a lot of (Federal) Executive meetings, probably six a year, every two
months, and we would have a full day with the state directors and myself before. We
would go through a lot of campaign stuff, and then on to the business that the federal
executive was going to talk about the next day. As you got closer to a campaign you’d be
talking about advertising, your presentations. (It is) still a very important forum, probably
one of the most important. In the latter Howard years they didn’t have as many
executives, so probably didn’t have as many meetings of Staff Planning.

The success or failure of these coordinating forums depends in part then on the willingness of the
state officials to cooperate. Getting the state secretaries ‘on board’ was a lot easier when they
wanted to climb aboard. It’s significant that for both the Liberal and Labor parties, the creation of
these forums coincided with a period of generational change at the state level, in which long-
serving state officials were replaced by a new cohort less inclined to oppose central initiatives.
Thus Combe’s officials’ forum had the willing cooperation and support of key state branch officials.
The state secretary of Victoria at the time was Bob Hogg, who recalled attending, as Victorian
state secretary, the ‘first ever national officials meeting’, in 1976:

We had a very interesting seminar up in Port Stephens. I started arguing about sharing
assets: if we’re going to win federally we need to win seats in Tasmania; Tasmania’s
broke; so we need to be subsidising it and helping. We used to send organisers to help out
– that was the first time that happened – to Tasmania and Queensland.

McMullan was also a member of that group, having replaced the aged Chamberlain in Western
Australia, and he too had adopted national campaign initiatives at the state level:

When I became acting secretary in Western Australia, prior to that (i.e. when Chamberlain
was state secretary) there’d been a separate Western Australian advertising campaign
from the national one. There wasn’t from my time on. I didn’t do that in WA and to my
knowledge it hasn’t happened since. So I think we were a bit more national.

McMullan in turn acknowledged that he was ‘lucky’ with the ‘key people that I had to work with’ at
the state level. Richardson and Hogg:

were both competent but also committed to the party at the federal as well as the state
level. Sometimes you have to fight to get that priority because people are focussed on
their state issues and their internal power struggles and everybody gets diverted on to that
from time to time. … There was Peter Beattie (state secretary in Queensland) … Chris
Schacht (South Australia) … Michael Beahan (Western Australia) … were all people who
wanted to win the federal election. Now that sounds like a statement of the bleeding
obvious, but it isn’t.

On the Liberal side, the long-serving McConnell had resigned in Victoria in 1971 after 26 years as
state director; he was replaced by Leo Hawkins, a former advertising agent, and in turn by Pascoe
in 1975; Victoria became a much more willing supporter of the federal Head Office. Likewise in
New South Wales Carrick had also resigned in 1971, after 23 years as state director, to take up a
Senate appointment. He was replaced by Jim Carlton who, like Pascoe, was a McKinsey alumnus.

Pascoe was able to make good use of the relationship:

He (Carlton) and my staff worked on getting it so we led from the centre, both in election
campaigns and in a lot of other stuff.

Another Head Office approach to winning the cooperation of state divisions was to offer them
inducements. Robb, as already noted, found himself trying to ‘impose’ federal direction on the
autonomous divisions of the Liberal Party; he found his task in the Liberal Party similar to his
previous role as director of the rural industry lobby, the National Farmers Federation (NFF), in that
both were federal structures that combined numerous autonomous groups and sections. His

80
strategy for securing the cooperation of the state divisions was inspired by the competition policy
being pursued by the-then Hawke Government. Robb described this as a progressive process of
central imposition on the decentralised party organisation:

I’d had twenty-two autonomous organisations at the NFF, so I understood the psychology
of working with (states and territories) who were autonomous. So the Liberal Party had all
its divisions …, and we were progressively trying to impose ourselves on all these
autonomous organisations. … 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. I
thought the Hawke Keating competition policy, where they provide an incentive to the
states – it was one of the big periods of micro-economic reform - but it was bought, so I
sought to do the same thing: to buy cooperation.

Robb’s particular goal was to extend Eggleton’s achievement of federal campaign control of
national television advertising to secure federal influence over ‘on the ground’ campaigning in
selected seats. To secure this new influence, Robb convened pre-election meetings for each of 30
federal electorates that had been identified for special attention to defend or win from Labor:

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’. And if we agree with this – it was not something I came in and
imposed, you’d work through it, because they would have a lot of local experience … - but
we had to make sure that that occurred. 31

The resultant effort prescribed specific campaign activities directed at particular target groups,
identified by market research as being ‘the ones that had to shift to win the seat’:

If the swing voters were a certain group they (the local campaigners) spent most of their
time with that group, whether it was just doorknocking or getting involved with different
organisations or whatever it was. If families (aged) 29-45 were the target group, they
were the ones that had to shift to win the seat, (we had to ensure the local campaigners)
spent 60 per cent of their time, and their budget, going there (and actually doing that).

Imposing Consistent Internal Communications

Head Office’s efforts to centralise campaign management took place against a backdrop of the
rapid transformations taking place in communications technology. Alongside the many other
effects of their widespread application throughout society, these technologies served to assist and
promote the campaign centralisation process. They did so in three ways. They made it easier for
Head Office to communicate with and control the campaign apparatus – candidates, leaders,
frontbenchers, party officials - dispersed as it must be during a campaign. They provided practical
means of disseminating from the centre a single set of authorised political communications to
voters and to the media. And they provided a way of tracking and monitoring the activities of the
opposition party, especially their media statements. This centralisation of communications
permitted consistency of communications. By coordinating internal communications, Head Office
could ensure candidates avoided statements that were inconsistent with each other and with the
leadership group; centralised tracking of opposition statements allowed Head Office to discover
and exploit inconsistent statements by its opponent; and coordination of external communications
ensured only one, authorised, version of the party’s views were disseminated to voters and the
media. Thus Head Office was able to position itself at the centre of the party’s communications

31
Crosby, who was then deputy Federal Director, believed the influence of the Federal Liberal Party in
individual local campaigns had increased through the early 1990s. ‘This means influence in terms of providing
support and resources to ensure that essentially we achieve minimum standards of performance’ through an
‘agreed’ campaign program by the Federal, State and local campaign organisations (Bathgate, Crosby, &
Henderson, 1996).

81
systems and to impose a disciplined consistency on the party’s messages to the electorate. As
these various communications systems were progressively superseded by new technologies and
devices with broader reach or speedier application, Head Office became adept at exploring and
exploiting their possible applications to election campaigning, creating new opportunities for
centralised control - as well as a new arena for competition between the two parties.

The most striking example of this process was provided with the adoption of national television
advertising campaigns by the Head Offices in the early 1970s. For the first time, parties were able
to project the same advertising message to homes across the country. It should be emphasised
however that the logic of campaign consistency predates the advent of, and is not dependent on,
any particular communications technology. Print-era campaign communications such as pamphlets
were prone to inconsistency when produced by different state branches, as Labor’s Federal
Executive noted as early as 1925; it ‘recommend(ed)’ Caucus appoint a publicity officer to prepare
pamphlets ‘in order that campaign literature may be of a uniform character in the different States’
(Weller & Lloyd, 1978: 92, 104). Likewise, as noted in the Introduction, Menzies had wanted a
‘nexus’ between the parliamentary party and the workers ‘in the field’. At a time when the new
party needed urgently to establish its policies and formalise its critique of the Labor Government,
Cleland’s Secretariat provided that linkage with the production of Speakers Notes for Liberal
candidates in the 1946 elections. Produced on a scale and quality not previously seen in Australian
elections, the leather-bound two-ring binders included contained Notes on seventy-six current
issues, each designed to provide candidates with a factual background, as well as lines of attack,
for use on the podium or in meetings with constituents. Underlining its methodical work habits, the
Secretariat issued updates on developing issues; the revised sheets could be easily inserted in the
binders. Each booklet carried the instruction that they were to be returned to party headquarters
after the election and in the meantime, ‘every care must be exercised to ensure that these notes
do not come into the possession of the opposition (sic) parties’ (Liberal Party of Australia, 1946b).
On a less lavish scale but with the same intent, Wyndham was writing Speakers’ Notes in the
1960s:

The purpose of that was to see that everyone was speaking the same language in Western
Australia and New South Wales.

By 1974, Pascoe saw the requirement for a campaign ‘war room’ to centralise the Liberals’
campaign logistics and communications:

I set up the war room in (Opposition Leader) Bill Snedden’s offices in Westfield Towers on
William St (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 everyday
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 candidates on how to communicate during the
1977 elections; on one occasion, urging them to focus on unemployment and on another, advising
a ‘no comment’ on the selectively leaked report of the Evatt Royal Commission on Human
Relations (Cameron, 1990: 775, 813). In the 1980s, McMullan recalled that:

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 say to
people, so that the candidate in the most remote part of Australia knew 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: doing old things in new ways.

Later still, Walsh reflected on the campaign application of mobile telephony and text messaging:

82
 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 checked his phone
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 was 30 shadow ministers in 30 parts of the
country saying word for word the same thing.

It is notable of course that whether the generic ‘Fred’ is using broadcast faxes or SMS messaging,
and whether he is issuing no-comments or a lengthy approved ‘line’, he is doing so, not from the
leader’s office or the state branch, but from the national headquarters.

The counterpart of this capacity to achieve consistency of communications on one’s own side was a
capacity to exploit inconsistency in one’s opponent. Labor in the 1980s developed sophisticated
techniques for media monitoring to track comments of opposition spokespeople and to exploit
inconsistencies. In his list of campaign responsibilities as a state secretary, Chamberlain describes
researching opposition statements for inconsistencies and inaccuracies. But through the 1980s and
1990s, media monitoring had developed into a technology intensive process which involved
monitoring radio and television broadcasts around the nation, including the voluminous talk-back
radio, transcribing relevant interviews with opposition politicians, scanning them for potential
inconsistencies and, once discovered, exploiting them by circulating them as ‘gaffes’ in real time to
news reporters. This is a task for the national Head Office not only because of the cost involved
but also because, by definition, opposition inconsistencies can best be detected and exploited on a
national scale. Interviewed by David O’Reilly, Gray described media monitoring as part of the
campaign ‘skills-set’ that Labor had mastered from 1983:

(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
(O'Reilly, 2007: 75).

Crosby agreed:

And with the media the way it is now you can’t say something in Cairns and think you’ll never
be found out. It’s taped. It’s broadcast.

Engaging Specialist Agencies

In taking over television advertising from the state branches, the national Head Offices also took
over the relationship with the external advertising agencies while also building new relationships
with market research firms. These agency relationships are detailed in Appendix Three, Table 8.
They made significant contributions to the federal office’s centralising agenda in at least four ways.

First, by taking on the agency relationships the federal office effectively disempowered the state
branches which had previously managed them. From 1972 (ALP) and 1975 (Liberal Party), it was
the federal Head Office that was responsible for selecting, engaging and commissioning an
advertising agency for federal campaigns. In New South Wales, for example, the Liberal Party (and
its UAP predecessor) had a four-decade long relationship with the Goldberg Advertising Agency
(Kaldor, 1968; V. Lawson, 1996), while the Labor state branch had built the initial relationship
with the Hansen Rubensohn agency. (Rubensohn’s work at the national level had, at least until
1963, been conducted through the parliamentary leadership rather than through the federal office
(Wyndham, 1968; Goot, 2002: 144-146). Within a short space of time, the national offices of both
parties moved to terminate these long-standing agency relationships and to seek new sources of
external advice. Young banned Hansen-Rubensohn from any spending without his written
authorisation, and by 1975 Combe had broken the relationship entirely -

83
 We put ourselves in a position where for the next election campaign we were able to
conduct a selection process to appoint our advertising agency.

- and secured the services of Mullins, Clarke and Ralph for the 1975 campaign. Eggleton identified
Masius Wynn Williams as the federal party’s new agency for the 1975 elections; this British-owned
firm had in 1968 acquired the Sydney-based Goldberg Advertising Agency which had conducted
advertising for the Liberal Party and its UAP forerunner (Braund, 1978:312; V. Lawson, 1996).
Several other party officials speak in the research interviews about the process of hiring
advertising agencies. Eggleton replaced Masius with the George Patterson agency before the 1990
campaign:

No-one was sacked; it was a matter of agreement that the time had come for a change.

Robb in turn replaced that agency with a ‘cherry-picked’ team of individuals from separate
agencies, assembled on a contract basis for the duration of the campaign:

‘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.

Walsh also speaks of supplementing Labor’s existing relationship with the Saatchi agency by hiring
a smaller agency for the 2001 campaign so as:

to get a menu of things rather than being a sole package: this is the campaign that we
have to buy through you.

The general conclusion that party officials are responsible for agency engagement is necessarily
qualified by exceptions where strong parliamentary leaders made it their business to get involved
in this area of campaign management. For Labor’s 1987 campaign, Prime Minister Hawke wanted
to replace the party’s existing agency Forbes Macfie Hansen with the untested and controversy-
seeking John Singleton Advertising agency. In Hawke’s recollection, he insisted upon the change
despite the arguments of the campaign director:

Labor Party campaign director Bob McMullan particularly, feared party reaction should
Labor switch its account to Singleton. Upsetting the party in this way, he reasoned, would
detract from running the most effective campaign. In addition, he worried at the new
agency’s capacity to organise the necessary media outlets in the same way as our existing
agency, with whom he had an easy and well-established relationship. These were
legitimate concerns on Bob’s part but I had a totally contrary instinct. This together with
personal knowledge of Singleton, made me insist upon the change (Hawke, 1994: 399).

Market research, too, was quickly shifted to the centre from the states. The first professional
market research was conducted by the South Australian branch of the ALP in the lead–up to the
1968 elections in that state. The branch commissioned the survey work from Marplan, the
research arm of the Hansen-Rubensohn agency (Blewett & Jaensch, 1971). Young carried this
relationship with him to Canberra when he became Federal Secretary and used Marplan and
another agency, Spectrum International, to conduct research for the 1972 ‘It’s Time’ campaign
(Blewett, 1973; M. Young, 1986). Young also identified Rod Cameron’s Australian National Opinion
Polls (ANOP), which began qualitative research work for federal Labor in the mid-1970s under
Combe; this relationship with ANOP was to last for some two decades. On the Liberal side, too,
Eggleton realised the party needed ‘a stronger link’ in market research and ‘established a close
rapport’ with the Melbourne-based pollster Gary Morgan of the Roy Morgan Research Centre; this
relationship, too, was to last for two decades.

McMullan is definite in affirming that Head Office controls the relationship with the external
research and advertising consultants:

84
 It is the party organisation that drives things, and the consultants work to the party
organisation … In a Westminster system the party people are supposed to be the
professionals … and what you do is hire the skills. They’re either skills of advertising
agencies (or of) pollsters and (of) other communications experts, to carry out the task that
you decide.

Second, in forging these agency relationships, the national office was recognising that advertising
and market research constituted a specialised form of work, with techniques developed and refined
in the commercial marketplace; it was not work that could adequately be undertaken by the
party’s existing internal resources. Thus the days of party officials writing advertising copy - as
state officials Carrick and Chamberlain had done, and Wyndham had done in 1968 - were gone;
the party-dominated ‘propaganda’ committees of media industry volunteers passed their use-by
date32. Likewise, there was an end to state branch experiments in survey work using volunteers;
these had produced predictably disappointing results. In their place, external specialists were
engaged by the national party officials on commercial terms to perform this work. This represented
a decisive moment in the professionalisation of election campaigning in Australia, marking the
emergence of a distinctively Australian style of professionalisation. Unlike in the United States,
where external specialists are retained by political candidates directly, the Head Offices of
Australia’s political parties continued to control the hiring and firing of external agencies and
thereby secured a pivotal continuing role in campaign management.

Third, the advent of professional market research into the election campaign environment had the
effect of empowering the national office at the expense of the states. Previously, local candidates
and MPs and state branches claimed to understand voter sentiment, arising from their day-to-day
contact with party members and voters and with state-based media and providing a bottom-up
flow of political information from the electorate to the centre. This kind of intuitive, experiential,
‘gut feel’ about the public mood was superseded by the advent of apparently reliable,
authoritative, testable data about public opinion acquired through commercial research methods.
Ownership of the information shifted from the members ‘on the ground’ and MPs ‘in office’ to the
party officials in Head Office who commissioned the research and interpreted its meaning.
Importantly, this new data was privileged and confidential where previously it had been by
definition in the public domain; market research reports were tightly held by party officials and
disseminated with care. The rise of professional market research then empowered the centre at
the expense of the periphery, creating a ‘tendency to concentrate information in the hands of party
leaders, who may have few incentives to distribute findings widely through the organisation’ (J. K.
Smith, 2009).

While state branches did in some cases continue to conduct their own market research, they were
more typically brought under the sway of the national Head Office in this regard, encouraged to
engage the same researcher for their state campaigns as well. It was the national office, too, that
invited the external research and advertising agencies to participate in the new internal party
forums such as the national campaign committees, reinforcing the utility of those coordinating
forums for information sharing. Combe recalls:

At one stage (after 1980) we pretty well had ANOP involved with everyone everywhere, at
some stage involved in every campaign and … (the federal advertising agency) Forbes
Macfie Hansen became the advertising agency for a number of states. So there was a
common thread between the states in campaigning.

On the Liberal side, the Masius-Wynn Williams and d’Arcy McManus agency served the same
purpose, providing advertising for every Liberal campaigns at the state and federal level from 1975

32
See for example the ‘Publicity and Public Relations Committee’ – later, the ‘Propaganda and Public Relations
Committee’ – established by the Victorian ALP state conference in 1964. The committee included media
personality and Labor MP Doug Elliot, the future advertising executive Phillip Adams, a TV producer, a solicitor,
and a raft of party officials; media appearances by ALP members had to be authorised in advance by the party
executive. (Australian Labor Party, 1965:11-14; 1966: 5-6)

85
until at least 1979 (O'Toole, 1979). On the research side, the qualitative research firm Brian
Sweeney and Associates, engaged by the Federal Liberals for the 1984 campaign, was also
progressively taken on by state divisions for their election campaigns (Neat, 1987). This ‘common
thread’ was occasionally broken, as states retained the capacity to choose their own agency
relationships; Hogg recalled that in 1993 Queensland and New South Wales branches opted not to
engage the federal office’s preferred agency, Australian Community Research. But the ‘common
thread’ also provided benefits to the party apparatus as a whole, providing economies of scale
while creating opportunities to accumulate campaign expertise through shared research data and
advertising strategies – and thus building the campaign coordination desired by the federal Head
Office.

Building a National Party

National campaign management had proven itself to political parties in the 1970s as a feasible and
effective means of winning office from the opposition benches; just as in 1949, that was the lesson
of Young’s 1972 campaign and Eggleton’s campaign in 1975 (Oakes & Solomon, 1973; Penniman,
1977). The same formula of organised disciplined campaigning by an opposition, against a
changing backdrop of campaign technologies and of strategic circumstances, was rewarded with
electoral success in successive decades - 1983 (P. Kelly, 1984) and 1996 (Williams 1997) and
2007 (Jackman 2008). Moreover, the successful parties learned to retain and apply the skills of
national campaigning in the more challenging and complex environment of government, with
incumbents successfully securing re-election by harnessing a nationally directed organisation to
skilled and focussed political leadership. McMullan, Labor’s national secretary at the time,
describes such a combination of factors in Labor’s re-election in 1987. In his post-election report,
McMullan wrote:

This was the most researched and the best researched election campaign the party has
ever conducted. … Cooperation and discipline of the ministers in this campaign was
probably the best of any with which I have been associated (Hawke, 1994: 412).

Gray, who had worked on the 1987 campaign in Labor’s secretariat as an organiser, was even
more enthusiastic:

(Labor) established in ‘87, I would argue, the best political communications framework we
had had, which was the combination of the Singleton agency driving the overall message,
the focus that Bob (Hawke) had as leader, the hunger that Paul (Keating) had as Treasurer
and (his) destructive capacity at his best, and it was the first time anyone had seen
anything like the campaign machine that we put together. It resulted in the complete
restoration of the party’s political position … we actually increased our vote and increased
our number of seats. It actually demonstrated not just a victory of a campaign framework.
… It was a victory of a political philosophy, of a political capability, a prodigiously capable
cabinet, and a political machine that matched it.

Gray came to occupy a special place in the centralisation of national campaigning. As the first
Labor national secretary selected from outside the cohort of current state secretaries, Gray was a
creature of the national office. With seven years’ experience working under two national
secretaries Gray’s promotion recognised that for the first time the national office had become a
primary locus of relevant campaign expertise.33 He commented that his appointment:

reflects the changed nature of the party. By the time I’m there (as national secretary) the
party had a genuine objective of becoming a national organisation. I think I reflect that,
both in terms of my aspirations and my work in the job.

33
The candidate Gray defeated in the election for national secretary, Ian Henderson, had likewise worked
solely at the national office level.

86
His ‘work in the job’ marked a high point of the centralisation of Labor’s Head Office, and his
aspirations he described as ‘my idea of building a national organisation’. Under Gray’s
administration the national Head Office reached a high point in its influence within the party as a
whole. He strengthened the capabilities of the national organisation – its assets, personnel and
campaign abilities – and its influence over the state branches – especially through funding state
election campaigns and putting state offices on sound financial grounds:

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’.

Structural reform of the party organisation under Gray included an expanded national conference
and new affirmative action provisions. The opening pages of Labor’s 1994 Platform assert that the
organisational changes ‘mark the transformation of the ALP into a genuinely national Party’ and,
while maintaining the autonomy of the state branches ‘improve the national operation of the Party’
(Australian Labor Party, 1994). Gray also launched a national party newspaper. Behind these
public developments, Gray was pursuing a broad agenda of internal changes aimed at
strengthening the national organisation and the National Secretariat:

The language of being able to project the national secretariat, to project Labor’s footprint
wherever you wanted to be, were critically important to us.

Building on the state secretaries’ forum, Gray purchased and installed a national videoconferencing
network to link all the state offices, and created a national finance committee, including state
secretaries, which monitored all aspects of the party’s finances transparently. Reflecting the
financial success of the federal party’s fundraising efforts after more than a decade in office, which
he had led, Gray used national funds to bolster campaign efforts in state elections in South
Australia and Western Australia and in the territories – a reversal of the traditional flow of funds,–
and also offered capital intervention to support the weaker state branches:

I’d also, with my economic surpluses, begun underpinning the state branches. I’d
purchased in 94 the new offices for the Tasmanian branch, at Constitution Dock, a really
good location. I would look at it and say it’s a good building for us to be in: convict built
building, signature address, a location where people see it every weekend, a respectable
visible part of town, not a dingy office.

Gray’s ambition was to lift the party’s physical infrastructure so as to improve its campaigning
capacity. The new Tasmanian building was:

built and designed along my kind of campaign lines, which was (to) build your secretariat
for campaign capability, not for the day to day running of your party membership but your
peak load events … (with) prodigious capacity to project yourself. So you didn’t have to
worry about. ‘How are we going to get in 3 television sets to monitor the 3 TV stations?’
‘Where are we going to locate the computer printers?’ You had them all set up ready to
roll.

But Gray’s centralising initiative was to reveal the limits to national control, and the resilience of
the state units, in a federal organisation. His centripetal pressure triggered a centrifugal reaction;
the states pulled back. Not all the states, he notes, ‘allowed’ him to make substantial investments
as he had in Tasmania:

because when I stepped in to do the fiscal repair of the branch, I took over the branch as
well. The Tasmanian branch was the first one and everyone realised that the Tasmanian
branch had become a clone of the national secretariat.

Gray’s centralising initiatives were opposed in particular by New South Wales and Queensland,
seeing the national drive as a threat to their own autonomy; as the largest state, New South

87
Wales in particular was most threatened by any general reduction in the autonomy of states
branches. After Labor lost office in 1996, many of Gray’s initiatives were contested or duplicated:
the New South Wales branch banned the circulation of the Labor Herald in favour of its own Labor
Times, and campaign coordination was likewise threatened. As his later successor Gartrell recalled:

Gary was, in style early on, he very much wanted to create a national party, to have the
national secretariat – I think he would have liked membership of the national party. I know
he was keen on a national data base, national newspaper, a lot of those things. Towards
the end they became flash points in the opposition to him, which was run really by (New
South Wales state secretary) John Della Bosca and (Queensland state secretary) Mike
Kaiser. … Towards his end Gary had a very antagonistic relationship with New South Wales
and Queensland. It was open warfare.

Walsh acknowledges that after succeeding Gray, he:

did work very hard on trying to have better relations with the state secretaries than Gary
was considered to have. So there weren’t doctrinal squabbles at critical moments. That is
less a lesson about the last campaign than about the dynamics between state and federal
officials … As with any organisation in this country, there were the traditional tensions
between the national office and the NSW branch of it.

Walsh, himself a Victorian, notes that these ‘dynamics’ were complicated by Victoria, the second
largest state, playing the ‘role of friend of the national office as a way of countering New South
Wales’ oppositionist position’ or ‘Victoria barracking for the centre as a counterweight to New
South Wales calling the shots’.

Gartrell says that following Walsh’s ‘rapprochement with the states’, he continued that process:

I did it under the framework of no duplication: what do you do and what don't you do. … I
dropped off any idea of a national member data base and I also ended the national Labor
Herald as a printed publication; we then put it online.

In a reversion to the practice of rotating the Head Office depending on the state affiliation of the
National Secretary, the day to day operations of the party have increasingly shifted out of the
national capital. Bitar largely operated the national office from his home base of Sydney leaving a
skeleton staff in the national capital – a setback for the centralising initiative.

McMullan acknowledges there has been:

a reassertion of the authority of the states vis a vis the national office. I see that more
reflected in things that happen here, around the parliament, but I think that is so. … A
combination of things going back to be more state-based, and factions being a bit more
tightly disciplined - for good or ill, and sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s not – have
combined perhaps to weaken the role of the National Secretary.

In the Liberal Party, state rejection of the centralising imperative took a less dramatic but not less
deep-seated form. As is frequently the case in Liberal Party disputes, it dealt with fundraising.
Robb saw the opportunity to apply centralised data base management to generate funds from
members, but despite ‘several attempts’, this effort to ‘centralise’ low-donor fundraising failed
because of opposition from the state divisions. His plan required the states to provide the national
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 data base and used for an expanded nation-
wide phone bank/ direct mail effort. Robb believes this plan - the idea had its roots in fundraising
practices by political parties in the United States which Robb had visited - would have ‘turbo
charged’ party fundraising and political communications, because ‘we could have run state and
federal issues, all off the same data base’. But the proposal failed, because:

88
 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 critical stumbling block was the nature of the data Robb sought. The existing federal data base
concentrated on swinging voters in marginal seats; in the 1996 election Robb said the Liberal Party
had identified and called 10 per cent of the households in 30 marginal seats. The states’ data
however represented the party’s strongest supporters – those who were prepared to donate to
support party fundraising drives. As will be discussed in Chapter 7, funding has long been a point
of tension between federal and state offices in the Liberal Party, whether corporate or individual;
access to donors is jealously protected by the states as it provided them with independent
resources to conduct their own activities including campaigning for state elections. The states
refused to cooperate with Robb, even though he offered to return 90 per cent of funds raised to
the states. He also offered to pay all the fundraising costs, including the ‘political’ staff who were
needed to ‘convert opportunities into outcomes immediately’:

We could have enhanced the political message because people give when they feel there’s
some reason to give. … Once they get engaged, then the money flows subsequently.

He also demonstrated the effectiveness of the idea by trialling it. One trial involved contacting
voters living within a 2km radius of polling booths where the Liberal candidate had received more
than 60 per cent of the vote at the last elections – i.e. voters who were likely to be strong Liberal
supporters. The trial paid for itself in the first mailing.

I was subsequently chairman of the Australian Direct Marketing Association for four years,
and a lot of the members, if they’d paid for a mailing in the first mail out if they were
fundraising, it was a heroic performance. (The state officials) 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.

This ebb tide in the centralisation process does not, on the evidence, indicate any fundamental
rejection of the logic that drives national campaign management. It does underline that in a
federal system states continue to exercise significant influence as discrete bases of power that are
ultimately irreducible and that, fraught with internal tensions, a centralisation project will be
frequently contested. Yet the contrast with the pre-1970s decentralised era is sharp, and there is
no evidence that the campaign centralisation process itself will be unwound.

Discussion

The chapter has reviewed the national Head Office’s concerted effort to centralise control of
campaign management in its own hands. In both parties, path dependent federal practices ran
counter to the centralising logic of the professional campaign model and impeded its adoption; in
both parties, campaign management was transferred from once-powerful state units to the
national office. Path dependent ideological preferences which might, in the ALP at least, have
militated against the adoption of corporate marketing practices were likewise suppressed in the
interests of a professional approach to campaigning. This process was facilitated by the national
reach of the new marketing and communications technologies; centralised management of the
external marketing agencies was an obvious corollary. In this environment, the logic of centralised
campaign communications impacted on all party actors: in Walsh’s description, an anonymous
‘Fred’ in Head Office became a critical gatekeeper of campaign messaging.

The centralisation imperative was pursued within both parties in broadly similar fashion. Party
officials speak of the process without notable partisan differences: the Labor centralisation project
does not differ markedly from the Liberal centralisation project. Differences of timing and degree
can be discerned. The Liberal Party’s national Head Office appears to have centralised campaigning
activities around Menzies as the parliamentary leader increasingly from 1949; but this discipline
was always under challenge from influential state divisions and by the late 1960s was in decline.
Labor’s centralisation occurred much later but, under Young, more rapidly, leaving the Liberal

89
Party to catch up. Gray’s national party initiatives in the 1990s may be examples of centralisation
overreach. But the outcomes in each party look similar: a national campaign director at the head
of a well-resourced national office sits at the centre of a professional campaign model that has
largely co-opted state party branches, that engages external marketing agencies and that imposes
consistent campaign communications across the organisational and parliamentary wings. In this
project the personal skills of the party officials – their professional abilities to coordinate state
branches, adapt to ever-changing technological communications, and manage national campaigns
of increasing logistic complexity and expense – were of paramount importance. Without capable
officials at the centre, centralisation could not have proceeded.

More than by party differences, this centralisation imperative appears to have been driven by
incumbency status. Being in opposition and being in government helped, in different ways, to drive
and impose a centralised campaign. In opposition before 1949, the nascent Liberals were able to
create a centralised organisation and its pioneering John Henry Austral campaign; the shock of
losing office in 1972 catalysed them into emulating Labor’s national campaign apparatus. Likewise
Labor in Opposition also experienced periods of renewal – faintly in the early 1950s, decisively in
the late 1960s and again in the early 1980s – where the national Head Office sought and gained
new resources and central authority over campaigning; another effort to centralise and
professionalise while in opposition, through Wyndham’s appointment in 1963, was stymied by
state parochialism. On the other hand, the experience of government allowed some parties – such
as the Liberals under Menzies, Labor more effectively under Hawke and Keating, and then again
the Liberals under Howard - to entrench centralised campaign management through combining
professional campaigning with parliamentary dominance, access to the resources and prestige of
office, and a commitment to policy reform. Labor in 1987, in Gray’s phrase, had ‘a prodigiously
capable cabinet and a political machine that matched it’.

But these developments did not complete the centralisation project or exhaust the agenda of
possible initiatives; nor was there a clear-cut moment at which centralisation had been finally
achieved. National Head Offices had to continue to maintain and to extend their central
coordinating role against the centrifugal forces in their parties, all the while adapting to the ever-
changing strategic and technological circumstances of campaigning.

90
 Chapter Six

‘What Is Required To Win the Election and What Do We Have to Do?’: Head Office and
the Strategic Imperative

‘What is required to win the election and what do we have to do? Answering that question is the
strategy.’

‘You use focus groups to inform your strategy and your communications, knowing that you want to
achieve something. … It’s a navigational tool. It doesn’t tell you your destination.’

‘Going back as far as I can see, people have always tried to work out where the election
was going to be won or lost and put their effort there.’

‘The campaign has to be run top-down and bottom-up, and completely integrated.’

H
aving established control of campaigning within their own parties, the national Head Office
needed to rise to the challenge of managing the national campaign. National campaign
management involves a welter of discrete tasks: mobilising and coordinating a large and
dispersed party organisation of candidates, volunteers and supporters; crafting campaign
messages and communicating them to voters and interest groups through the ever-present ever-
sceptical channels of the media; raising campaign funds; and handling a host of operational
logistics such as itineraries and events. These tasks must be performed within a changing political
and party environment and in the face of competition from 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 uncertain but, once known,
entirely inflexible. The stakes are high: victory is a great prize and the winner takes all.

In line with Margaret Scammell’s (1992) suggestion that researchers pay attention to the ‘why’ of
election campaigns, the various tasks performed by party officials, important in themselves,
should be understood as manifestations of a broader rationale or strategy. In the research
interviews, the party officials make clear that a campaign strategy forms the essential foundation
of the professionalised campaign model and that strategic planning is the campaign director’s
distinctive and primary task. Campaign directors lead the process of formulating the plan and
oversee its complete and disciplined implementation. Alongside the centralising imperative, this
strategic imperative forms a second major theme of Head Office activity in creating the
professionalised campaign model.

Drawing from the research interviews, this chapter begins by defining campaign strategy as a plan
of action towards a goal. This definition echoes that of Polsby and Wildavsky whose survey of US
Presidential campaign strategies defines them as ‘courses of action consciously pursued towards
well-understood goals’ (Polsby & Wildavsky, 1984). Thus defined, a campaign strategy contains
two critical elements: the identification of the goal and the selection of the action or path towards
that goal. The goal, almost universally, is identified as electoral victory: these are vote-
maximising, catch-all parties. But the prescribed course of action varies according to contingent
factors such as the electoral environment and the availability of campaign resources. At their
simplest, strategies require an integrated process of ‘tracking’ and ‘targeting’: using market
research to gather and analyse intelligence about the electorate and on this basis to formulate a
strategy, and using various forms of communications media to implement the strategy by
disseminating relevant messages back to the electorate (Mills, 1986). In fact the research

91
interviews suggest a strategic process consisting of seven distinct but interrelated elements or
sub-tasks. Four of them - intelligence gathering, identification of strategic pathways, message
development and resource acquisition – constitute the phase of developing the plan of action. Two
more - message dissemination and targeting - constitute the phase of implementing the plan of
action. A final, post-election, task involves reviewing the plan of action and lesson-learning for the
future. The interviews also suggest the campaign director is responsible for all these stages of the
strategic process. They can be thought of as an overlapping sequence, though in practice may take
place in a different order or with some key tasks repeated. They are undertaken over an extended
period, beginning with the outcome of the previous campaign, extending through the entire
electoral cycle; the development and implementation phases culminate in the campaign period
proper, while the reviewing phase extends beyond voting day into the following electoral cycle.
These are outlined in this Chapter, with reference to specific examples drawn from Australian
campaign practice and from the research interviews.

Strategy as a Plan of Action

For the party officials interviewed for this research, strategy forms the foundational element of
campaign management. As Bitar put it, ‘in a campaign, strategy is everything’. Strategy is both
the first and the most important task of campaign management: it is the overarching plan of
action designed to achieve the party’s goal or purpose. A strategy thus incorporates two claims: it
identifies the organisation’s goal and prescribes the necessary course of action to achieve the goal.
Many of the party officials used similar language to conceptualise campaign strategy; in keeping
with the aspirational or contingent nature of planning, this is frequently expressed as a set of
questions:

What is required to win the election and what do we have to do? Answering that question
is the strategy (Loughnane).

Your strategy at its core is: 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. …
Strategy is basically a hypothesis and you keep refining it, that’s what you’re seeking to
do. The overriding objective is to win more seats than your opponent. So you start by
working out where can you win. So, that’s my point about who’s going to decide the
outcome – seats, and voters within those seats - and then driving it from there (Crosby).

Strategy is the high art form. … (It says) this is the problem and this is how we’re going to
get there (Gartrell).

In all these statements, the twin claims concerning the goal and the prescribed action are
inextricably linked. A goal without a pathway would be unattainable; a pathway without the goal
would be pointless. For the campaign officials interviewed in this research, there is complete
acceptance that their appropriate goal is electoral victory. This is not an incidental or temporary
goal, but constitutes the party’s legitimate, inherent and permanent - or at least recurrent – goal;
its commitment to it does not vary. There is of course debate about whether this is a sufficient
statement of the party’s purpose, but there is no quibbling about the necessity of electoral victory
as a precondition for the subsequent implementation of any more long-term goal such as policy
implementation. In McMullan’s phrase, a party ‘should be aimed at changing the society, but you
have to win the election to do it’. Moreover, where policy implementation may be the responsibility
of the parliamentary wing, making it possible by securing electoral victory is unqualifiedly accepted
by the officials as their distinctive responsibility.

In outlining ‘what we have to do’, the strategy lays out a program of actions selected, from a
broader range of potential programs, as offering the best available pathway to attain the goal:

(Strategy) is the base of absolutely everything you do. Everything should be linked to the
strategy. This is where campaigns go off the rails, when they’re not linked back to a core
strategy. So most important thing in a campaign is strategy. I put everything down to

92
 strategy. It doesn’t matter what organisation you’re running, you’ve got to be working
from a strategy if you want to be successful (Bitar).

Thus the plan of action is not only a prescriptive one - a statement of the actions that the
organisation must undertake to achieve its goal and not ‘go off the rails’ – but also an exclusive
one, in the sense that these are the only actions that may be undertaken; anything else will not be
contributing to the goal. It deploys, in the most efficient manner, the available resources of the
organisation to achieve its goals.34

In asserting the centrality of strategy, the party officials simultaneously assert their claim as
campaign director to lead the process of planning the strategy:

(My role) was mainly about getting the broad strategic framework right, around the
research, the parliamentary party’s priorities (McMullan).

I personally – probably appropriate for a Federal Director – but I am personally better, my

strength is more at the strategic side than the tactical side (Loughnane).

They acknowledge that this process is a consultative and collaborative one, where ideas can be
tested from many potential party sources. But while contributions from others may be inchoate
and inadequate, the campaign director has the special insights required to formulate the emergent
strategy and, finally, to document it. A written statement of the complete strategy provides the
campaign director with the authorisation to proceed and forms the basis for internal
communication and coordination of implementation:

My way of doing it was to try to get a discussion going with the best people in the room
and get to a point that way. Hear what everyone had to say. Bring a few of my own ideas.
… Strategy is best done in a conversation, with some smart people with different skill sets
and competing personalities. … Everyone’s got a strategy; it’s all in their head. … It has to
be written down at some point. In ‘04 we never really wrote it down. I actually got an
email from just a party member afterwards (who) said, ‘Why don’t we write our strategy
down? We write everything else down’. I was about to say, ‘Of course you don’t write it
down, because the Libs will get hold of it. Piss off’, but I thought, no, that is actually a
good point for people inside. There is a (British Labour Party strategist) Peter Mandelson
quote, ‘If it is not written down it doesn’t exist’. So out of all that would emerge some one-
or two-page summary. … Sometimes it might just be an email exchange between a few
people and that nails it (Gartrell).

We had a strategy committee chaired by the Prime Minister which I as director was
effectively the person who supported and basically drove, in terms of organising meetings,
organising the agenda, and having different items of business to be discussed … What I
always try to do is write a, work on 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. … So 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 competitively in the campaign. That involves writing a campaign,
constantly monitoring its implementation, working with the … advertising team, … 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 (Crosby).

34
David Plouffe, campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign, makes a similar
comment: ‘In politics, your two main pillars are your message and electoral strategy. What are you offering
voters in terms of vision, issues and biography? What is your most accessible path to a winning vote margin? …
In any organisation, you have to determine your pathway to success and commit to it. There will inevitably be
highs and lows. But you have to give your theory and strategy time to work. Maybe it won’t. Many endeavours
fail. But without a clear sense of where you are headed, you will almost certainly fail’ (Plouffe, 2009).

93
 It’s not a solo thing. The National Secretary starts a draft and consults the assistant
secretary, and consults the leader’s chief of staff and consults the leader and it’s a
collective thing. … You go down to Canberra today and you talk to every minister. Every
minister will tell you in his head how we can win the next election, and every shadow
minister. I reckon you’re lucky if one of them has got it written down. That’s no reflection;
it’s not their role, their role is to think and feed it into the process. That’s where the
national campaign director should be sitting down talking to these people (Bitar).

Having written the strategy, campaign officials must ensure it remains confidential. Confidentiality
is essential for competitive reasons: the campaign plan should not be revealed to one’s opponent.
It is also essential for presentational reasons. In the words of a campaign manual provided by a
party Head Office to local campaign managers for a recent federal election:

If you don’t write it down, you do not have a strategy. Your campaign strategy should not
be discussed with anyone outside the campaign team, especially the media. Any public
discussion of the campaign strategy and tactics takes the focus off your candidate and
detracts from your message to voters (Australian Labor Party, 2007).

While developing a strategy is a long-term project, implementing it will require various short-term
expedients or manoeuvres; these subordinate actions contribute to the strategy as ‘tactics’ or
‘mechanics’:

I’m a great believer that strategy is more important than tactics. … A lot of the mechanics
of the campaign can be tactical (Loughnane).

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
(Robb, 1996b).

The distinction between strategic planning and tactical implementation reflects a temporal
distinction between a long-term process and a shorter, more intensive period which includes the
campaign proper. As Blewett (1973) records in his aptly titled record of the Labor campaign –
‘Planning for Victory’ - Young scathingly dismissed the ALP’s three month campaign for the 1969
elections as ‘virtually a last-minute effort’, and its seventeen-day preparation for the 1970 Senate
election as ‘ludicrous’. His strategic planning for the 1972 campaign began more than a year and a
half before polling day, arguing in a March 1971 memo to the federal executive that:

Victory in 1972 depends on many things, but a properly prepared campaign would give a
huge boost to our chances (cited in Blewett, 1973: 94).

Eggleton applied the same discipline to the Liberal Party campaigns of the 1970s:

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 date –a year in advance. This was
the minimum time to start planning for an election. To activate the advertising agency, to
start our initial thinking, to begin our research and our focus groups and to make sure
everyone in the Secretariat knew what job they would have and how they would be doing
it (Eggleton).

Strategic Development: Intelligence Gathering

If strategic planning involves answering Loughnane’s questions – ‘What is required to win, and
what do we have to do?’ - then the first task must be an intelligence gathering exercise. The
strategic planner requires information about the external environment, in order to design a plan
whereby the party can influence that environment and thus secure victory. This information covers
many elements: the location, strength and intentions of opponents, supporters and the
uncommitted; the nature and trend of opinion; and the relative resources of the opposing forces.

94
The foundational nature of this intelligence gathering process – research – is confirmed by party
officials:

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 (McMullan).

You start out very broad, looking at where we are and where we need to be, then you start
to identify through your research program weaknesses to fix and opportunities to exploit
(Crosby).

It was apparent from the context that ‘research’ here refers to ‘market research’ conducted
through quantitative or qualitative means. But before considering this vital element of intelligence
gathering, it is appropriate first to note that much of the information that campaign organisations
require for strategic planning can be gathered without the use of survey tools and is indeed
publicly and freely available. From media reports and parliamentary records, and from continuing
interactions with members of the public, party officials gain intelligence about their own standing
and that of their opponents – their views, policies and voting records. Before party officials began
routinely to have access to market research in the 1970s, their principal source of information
about the behaviour of voters over time was provided by voting statistics. Head Offices of both
parties spent considerable time and effort gathering and analysing electoral results at a national,
state and electorate level, and comparing them with results of previous years (Wyndham, 1966b;
Burns, 1993). Hancock records the efforts of the Liberals’ research officer Bengtsson to use 1946
voting results to forecast the makeup of the House of Representatives after the proposed 1949
redistribution which expanded the number of seats from 74 seats to 121. Bengtsson concluded
Labor would have a majority of 22, and that more of its seats would be ‘safe’ i.e. with a majority in
excess of 6000 votes (Hancock 2000, p90). Such analyses gave officials vitally important albeit
approximate information about the location and strength of each party’s support, and the support
of significant minority parties such as the Democratic Labour Party. They could estimate the
efficiency with which party support translated into parliamentary seats. They could also track the
shifts or ‘swings’ in voter behaviour from one election to the next.

But the strategic utility of this data was limited. Because it was based on primary votes, party
officials lacked any real capacity to track preference allocation (and electoral officials only
distributed preferences where necessary). Malcolm Mackerras, a former research officer of the
Liberal Secretariat (1960-67) turned academic, provided a breakthrough to this problem in 1972
with the publication of Australian General Elections (Mackerras, 1972). Mackerras correctly
recognised that most electorates were won by one or other of the major parties on primary votes
or with a majority of preference votes. By aggregating primary and preference votes he produced
a single measure of voting strength which he termed the Two Party Preferred (2PP) vote.
Mackerras could then calculate the swing required for any seat to change hands, providing a
reliable means of classifying electorates as ‘safe’, ‘fairly safe’ or ‘marginal’. Further, he ranked
electorates according to the swing required to change hands at the forthcoming election in a
simple tool known as the ‘pendulum’, which has become a staple of campaign journalism and
public comment.

However electoral returns remain by definition retrospective and episodic. Market research
provided party officials with a means of understanding and measuring voter’s opinions in real time,
throughout the electoral cycle. Further, market research allows them to probe behind the voting
decision to consider voters’ underlying opinions, values, attitudes, motives and their future
intentions. From the emergence of the Gallup Poll in Australia in the 1940s, and with greater
intensity from the 1970s, newspapers have published polling data on public opinions in relation to
current issues and attitudes to political leaders and policies (Mills, 1986, 1999; Mills & Tiffen,
2012). The plebiscitary ethos of the Gallup polls was intended to help inform policy makers and
improve standards of governance. But because of this, and because they were made available to

95
 Figure 1: O’Neill, Ward (1997), ‘Liberal Party director Linton (sic) Crosby consulting a map on
his way to the next election, May 1998’; National Library of Australia Ward O’Neill collection ref
nla.pic-vn3564956

This image, by newspaper artist Ward O’Neill and published in the Fairfax press, acutely describes
the strategic role of the national campaign director. Lynton Crosby, dressed in suit and tie, stands
next to his car in a dry outback landscape somewhere ‘Back of Bourke’. The two-door sedan is a
Liberal Director with personalised number plates (‘LC 97’), and it is showing numerous dents from
the potholed winding road; the muffler lies abandoned in the road behind. Crosby has spread a
road map out on the bonnet of the car and is consulting it, pondering. Behind him, a sign on a
fence states ‘Only X months to the next election’.

The image suggests that in conditions of adversity and uncertainty, the campaign director
performs the strategic tasks of locating where the Liberal vehicle is relative to its chosen
destination, and selecting how it needs to proceed to reach that destination. Consulting a map is a
vivid representation of the strategic task described by several campaign directors, including
Crosby. Crosby states that he ‘drove’ the party’s Strategy Committee. ‘I always try to... work on a
document that sets out where we are now, where we want to be, and what we’ve got to change’.

96
all via newspaper publication, they did not satisfy the need of the party organisations for
campaign-specific advice. Intrigued, parties made several early efforts to conduct their own
surveys, thriftily using party members and volunteers (Whitington, 1961; Mills, 1986: 97).
Predictably, these in-house efforts produced misleading results, and the parties came to see the
wisdom of commissioning professional survey organisations to conduct their own polls on scientific
principles including random sampling and independent interviewers. By 1954, the pioneer of the
Gallup methodology in Australia Roy Morgan was feeding ‘private information’ to the Liberal
campaign organisation (Hancock, 2000: 145) and the national Head Office became a regular
subscriber.

From the 1970s, the ‘marketing revolution (Plasser & Plasser, 2002) saw both parties adopt the
techniques of commercial market research to acquire campaign intelligence. Campaign market
research would typically begin with a large-sample survey to establish ‘benchmark’ voter attitudes
to relevant issues and leaders; subsequent waves of ‘tracking’ polls could use smaller samples to
track short-run, typically overnight, shifts in mood. Survey methodology was progressively refined
to improve sampling and weighting and to transition from labour-intensive face-to-face surveying
to the cheaper and faster telephone survey and, more recently, to on-line surveys.

The ‘hard’ nature of survey data has meant it can be readily incorporated into digital databases.
Hartcher was an early convert, hiring mainframe computer time in the late 1960s and early 1970s
to analyse demographic data. 35 Both parties have developed such databases by combining survey
results with voting returns provided by the Australian Electoral Commission, and census data
gathered by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The ALP’s data base, gradually built up from 1986
by Gray, during McMullan’s and Hogg’s terms, was called Polfile (later, Electrac); the Liberals’
responded under Robb with Feedback (the name deliberately echoing the policy platform
Fightback). Since voting returns are linked to voting booths, and census data to local collection
districts, these data bases have highly localised information about electoral behaviour and
demographic make-up. Along with their own quantitative survey results, parties feed in
information about individual voters derived from telephone canvassing, doorknocking, and other
grassroots face-to-face contacts. These data-intensive and location-specific data bases are used to
send correspondence (‘direct mail’) to selected voters in target seats, carrying personalised
messages built around what the party understood as their interests and preferences (Mills, 1993a;
van Onselen & Errington, 2004).

Valued for the scale, precision and comparability of its ‘hard’ data, quantitative research yet
remains expensive, and is limited to a closed-end questionnaire method. It can also be difficult to
see the wood from the trees. Robb recalls when he first arrived at the Liberal Secretariat leafing
through ‘hundreds of pages’ of privately commissioned quantitative market research without being
able precisely to establish why any particular opinion 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 the underlying events).

The emergence and intensification of qualitative market research – in-depth moderated

conversations with selected ‘focus groups’ - marks a transformative moment in intelligence
gathering. Focus groups are not drawn from random samples and remain essentially
unrepresentative of the broader population; critics condemn their lack of methodological rigour,
former Labor leader Bill Hayden reportedly describing them as ‘séances’ (Tingle 2010). Yet they
provide party officials with richly detailed and dynamic ‘soft’ insights into voters’ deep-seated
attitudes and values, expressed in their everyday language. Labor’s focus groups in the 2007
elections asked ‘what kind of fathers’ the rival party leaders Howard and Beazley would make, or
how a ‘Labor factory’ would differ from a ‘Liberal factory’; voters were also asked to describe their

35
I am grateful to Chris Hartcher, NSW Minister for Resources and Energy, for this recollection of his father.

97
hopes and fears for their children’s future, as a way of assessing whether they thought the country
was heading in the right direction (Jackman, 2008: 37, 101). In a 2008 public speech, Crosby said
market research allowed parties to discover ‘not just what people think but how they think’ (Snow,
2008).

The campaign application of qualitative data was exemplified by Robb’s 1996 election campaign
strategy had as its centrepiece two (hypothetical) voters, ‘Phil’ and ‘Jenny’, who had been
assembled by Liberal pollster Mark Textor from his accumulation of attitudinal data. This
‘psychograph’ of typical middle-Australian swinging voters, created more than a year before the
election campaign, was used by Robb to help Liberal candidates in marginal seats identify and
communicate effectively with the voters they needed for victory; he would ask the candidates:
‘Have you spoken to Phil and Jenny lately?’ According to Pamela Williams’ authoritative account,
‘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’ (Williams,
1997: 65).

Robb also pioneered a method of combining the rigour of quantitative polling with the insight of
the focus group – a process he described as ‘quantifying the qualitative’. In the lead-up to the
1996 elections, Textor developed a set of 22 descriptors from focus group discussions, expressed
in ‘the vernacular of the qualitative research’. They covered issues (‘Who’s the best to make the
hospitals work?’) and leaders (‘Who’s the most arrogant and out of touch?’). In weekly quantitative
surveys, Textor measured on a sliding scale the changing responses to each of the descriptors.
Thus when Keating launched his concept for an Australian republic, the Liberals were able to
ascertain with some confidence and precision that the Prime Minister’s ‘leadership’ measurement,
indicating his ‘arrogant’ and ‘out of touch’ measurements, ‘went through the roof’, Robb said. He
was proud that, in developing this technique on their own, they had surpassed their Labor rivals in
an area of critical campaign importance:

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.

Strategic Development: Identification of Strategic Pathways

Having acquired intelligence, from public sources as well as their own market research, campaign
directors are faced with the challenge of interpreting the data, in order to identify and develop the
pathways that lead to a majority of seats in the House of Representatives. The most basic set of
campaign pathways derives from the party’s status as Government or Opposition. Gartrell
suggested that in identifying pathways, campaign directors can draw on their knowledge of generic
strategic ‘prototypes’ or ‘basic strategies’. But these playbooks always need to be modified to meet
the specific circumstances of the current situation:

There are some basic prototypes: opposition versus government; long-term government
versus short-term. State and federal is different. And then there is, 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 play, talk about,
previous campaigns, campaign history, when you’re approaching a problem. But 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.

Of 25 Australian federal elections between 1946 and 2007, only six have produced a change of
government. No incumbent has failed to be re-elected at least once.36 Against this, the ‘normal’
Australian election result sees a swing against the incumbent, though not sufficient to unseat it;

36
In 2010, the incumbent Labor Government failed to secure re-election at its first attempt; it was returned to
power as a minority Government with the support of minor parties and independents.

98
support for minor parties and independents has increased over this period (Tiffen, 2008: 111). Yet
typically, incumbent parties enjoy significant campaign advantages. Their control of the Treasury
benches provides opportunities to implement party commitments, command media attention, and
direct international activities. Having a majority of parliamentarians means they have more
resources, such as staff and communications allowances, which can potentially be put to campaign
purposes. Incumbents also determine – via advice to the Governor-General – the date of the
election and the duration of the campaign, creating the opportunity to seek re-election at a time of
favourable economic conditions or to catch the opposition unprepared; in some circumstances,
incumbents can force recalcitrant Senators to the polls in a double dissolution (Tiffen, 2008: 117).

Yet an incumbent strategy poses several difficult questions. A critical choice is to determine
whether, and if so how, to defend the government’s record. In 1987, for example, Hawke sought
endorsement for, and continuity of, his performance in delivering economic and social reform; his
policy speech sought ‘to kindle emotions of confidence in his government since he had no major
promises’ (P. Kelly, 1992: 350). In 2001, likewise, Howard campaigned as an incumbent not just
on his ‘old’ agenda but a ‘new’ agenda of national security (P. Kelly, 2009: 613). Yet governing
parties can find themselves relatively constrained, compared to Oppositions, by their record and
their incumbent responsibility for national wellbeing. As Loughnane affirmed:

There is no use trying to impose a strategy or develop a strategy if the senior

parliamentary team don’t want to go in a particular direction. That’s one of the areas
where in government there may be things that are electorally appealing but from a
governmental point of view are difficult to do. It’s a bit easier in opposition for example -
Q: So you could have a winning strategy that would not necessarily be acceptable? A:
Yes, and also once you’ve been in government for a period of time you have a history, so
you can’t pretend to the electorate that you can’t do something today that’s different to
what you did yesterday, just because that’s the electorally convenient thing to do.

Further, the apparent incumbency advantage of controlling the electoral timetable through political
calculation has produced surprisingly frequent miscalculations. Hawke’s desire to capture a
decisive political advantage with an early election in 1984 backfired, as 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.

Partly because the election timing included provision for an unusually long (nearly eight weeks)
campaign, the 1984 campaign turned out to be:

the worst campaign I ever ran. … We bloody nearly lost. … We could not get on strategy
(McMullan; see also Kelly, 1992: 137).

Likewise in 1982, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s attempt to finesse the electoral calendar around
an economic upturn was deferred until early 1983, at which time the decision became driven by
desire to take advantage of leadership turmoil in the Labor opposition; this backfired with
disastrous results (P. Kelly, 1984: Ch20). On the other hand, an early election in 1968 to take
advantage of leadership turmoil in the Labor opposition could have saved Gorton’s Prime
Ministership (Freudenberg, 1977: 139); equally, Rudd ignored the opportunity for an early poll in
2010 with terminal consequences for his own leadership (Cassidy, 2010: 76).

But compared to these incumbency problems, the strategic choices faced by Opposition parties are
more challenging still. They may choose a positive strategy of promoting their own policies, as
Whitlam successfully did in 1972 (Freudenberg, 1977). But more typically, Oppositions are
pragmatically cautious about promoting their policies, preferring to attack the incumbent.
Opposition negative campaigns include the Liberals’ long campaign of ‘electronic insurgency’
against the Chifley Government and its bank nationalisation plans in 1949 (Mills, 1986; Crawford,
2004). Hayden’s period as opposition leader combined ‘political aggression and electoral caution’
(P. Kelly, 1984: 146); Robb and Howard embarked on a series of positive but policy-free ‘headland

99
speeches’ designed to ‘keep the Liberals a small political target for as long as possible’ while
launching ‘an all-out attack on the government’s record and on Keating himself’ (P. Williams,
1997); Labor under Beazley in 1998 and 2001 adopted a similar ‘small target’ strategy but without
success (P. Kelly, 2009: 614). Positive Opposition strategies are vulnerable to Government ‘scare
campaigns’ portraying them as risky or inexperienced. Eggleton, with a regretful tone, recalled the
Liberals’ research-driven negative campaign against the Labor Opposition in 1980:

A lot of the basic approaches to television advertising were pioneered in my era, for
instance the balance between positive and negative. We ran some very hard hitting
negative campaigning for the Turn on the Lights campaign (in 1975) - the Dark Days of
Labor and Whitlam and all these kinds of things – while keeping a balance with positive
messages. 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. 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.

Labor’s 1993 campaign stands as an even starker example of a negative-incumbent strategy.

Facing his first election as Prime Minister, Keating was advised by McMullan not to seek
endorsement of the Government’s record (Edwards, 1996: 504). Instead he attacked the
Opposition’s Fightback tax reform policy:

Our major strategy in the campaign was to make the (Goods and Services Tax), 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, we had to turn the rules on
their head. We essentially ran on their policies (Hogg, 1993 (24 March)).

Of Gartrell’s ‘prototypes’, then, strategists in both incumbent and opposition campaigns tend to
choose attack over exposition and to present values and aspirations over issues; ‘programmatic
campaigning’ is in decline (Tiffen, 1989: 140-4).

Further variations in campaign strategy arise from the length of tenure of incumbents. Hawke
(1987, 1990) and Howard (2001, 2004) campaigned as experienced and capable incumbents. But
protracted incumbency carries a progressively greater risk of being seen as tired and out of touch.
Long-serving Governments need to consider pathways of renewal, including through leadership
change: Holt (1966) and Keating (1993) presented themselves as new faces of established
governments. But lengthy incumbents ultimately fall to persistent oppositions pushing for victory
on a ‘time for a change’ theme, as with the Liberal opposition in 1946-49 and the Labor opposition
in 1969-72. Yet Opposition Leaders do not have unlimited time to wear down an incumbent and
are themselves vulnerable to leadership change, as toppled leaders Hayden, Peacock, Howard,
Hewson, Downer, Beazley, Crean, Latham, Nelson and Turnbull can attest since the 1980s.

A further set of strategic pathways is derived from Australia’s system of preferential voting. Just as
the Menzies Government had consistently wooed the second preferences of DLP voters, so in
1990, the Hawke Government made a successful pitch for the second preferences of green-leaning
Democrat and independent voters (Papadakis, 1990). With the ALP’s primary vote declining,
‘devising a strategy wasn’t all that difficult,’ according to Environment Minister Graham
Richardson, the former New South Wales state secretary:

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 (Richardson, 1994: Ch16).

100
 We ran the last part of that (1990) campaign targeting the third party voters, and we got
80% of the preferences of 20% of the voters, which was 16% on top of our 39% (Hogg).

For party strategists, and such ‘prototype’ strategies can only provide a template; they must be
adapted and refined to suit the prevailing circumstances. Ultimately, campaigns involve methods
of persuading individual voters, as Crosby explained:

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 strategists with the critical intelligence to do this. Parties use research to
identify key voter blocs and devise strategies to reach them; in Crosby’s simple phrase (expressed
in a public speech):

In any campaign you have your base, your swing and your enemies. You have to lock in
your base, persuade your swingers and neutralise your enemies (Snow, 2008).

In Walsh’s words, the challenge for Australian political parties was

to get to the people who wish they really didn’t have to vote, and try and give them a
message that might carry them through to polling day (Walsh).

A critical turning point came with the researchers’ discovery and description of ‘swinging voters’.
From the mid-1970s and through the 1980s, Labor’s pollster Rod Cameron is particularly
associated with this development. Cameron’s focus group reports damningly portrayed swinging
voters as the selfish, uninvolved, ill-informed products of mass market commercialism (Mills,
1986: 22-26); their descendants were portrayed in the 1990s by Mark Textor as ‘Phil’ and ‘Jenny’,
doing it tough in the suburbs and resenting special handouts to minorities. The discovery of the
swinging voter had far-reaching consequences for campaigning (Tiffen, 1989: 138; Manning,
2009). Lacking partisan attachments, the swinging voters occupied strategically contestable
ground, yet lacking political interests they were difficult for campaigns to reach and motivate; they
vote because they must (in a compulsory voting regime) not because they care.

The solution developed by parties was to appeal to contestable voting blocs using intensive
emotion-based television advertising. To the extent that this meant parties they no longer
promoted their policies to core supporters, this represents a landmark in the emergence of the
‘catch-all’ electoral strategy. As Hogg has said of Cameron and his business partner Margaret
Gibbs:

(They) played a critical role in transforming the ALP’s approach to campaigning from one
of political instinct and prejudice, to one based on knowledge of the voter. .. They supplied
critical information that assisted us in our many campaigns (Tingle, 2010).

Robb expressed the same sentiment in relation to Textor. He was able to bring ‘strategic insight’
and to ‘translate’ the research into persuasive strategic analysis about ‘points of leverage’:

I think 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. He 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 from most of them, he’s got
an exceptional strategic (mind) – he’s a brilliant fellow.

By contrast, the pre-market research sources of intelligence - informal political intelligence from
branch members and local MPs - could be dismissed as the ‘gut feel’ of ‘wily operators’ (Robb) or
‘instinct and prejudice’ (Hogg). It did not provide party officials with the insights they needed to
select strategic pathways or, as we shall now see, to develop appropriate campaign messages.

101
 Strategic Development: Message Development

Intelligence gathering is central to campaign strategies, not only because it reveals the party’s
strategic pathways but also because it shapes how the parties exploit those opportunities. As
already noted, Crosby defined the electoral challenge as understanding ‘who will decide the
outcome of this election, where are they, what matters to them, how do you communicate with
them?’ The research interviews make it clear that the campaign director’s strategic plan of action
will ensure that the input received from intelligence gathering drives the communications output -
what parties say, to whom they say it and how they say it:

The next stage is communications. You make (the) strategic decision, then you get the
communications task of convincing people that from where you are, the place you want to
take them is where they want to go. That’s it. It’s not very complicated (McMullan).

(My background was in) developing and executing campaign strategies on the basis of
research, that are to be communicated (Walsh).

We did focus groups and that’s how we’d decide on the nature and scope of the
communication, how to pitch the advertising in order to sell this particular product, and
how minimise the potential negatives (Eggleton).

You use focus groups to inform your strategy and your communications, knowing that you
want to achieve something (Crosby).

Strategic planning thus seeks, and has perhaps attained, a very wide mandate to shape, control
and limit electoral discourse. The party officials did not, as noted earlier, describe playing a role in
managing the campaign’s messaging via the ‘unpaid’ (news) media. But they do claim a broad
mandate over campaign communications in general, based on their strategic intelligence. An
example of research-driven campaign communications was recalled by Hogg from his days as state
secretary of the Victorian ALP in the late 1970s. It is atypical only in that the strategic intelligence
is provided by census data rather than market research. Through a contact in a Melbourne
university, Hogg and a group of ALP members were able to access census data, which had hitherto
not been used for explicit campaign purposes.

We burrowed into the Monash University Geography department, which was headed up by
Mal Logan. Mal said, ‘We’ve got the new census material’. I said, ‘Let’s use it’. So of a
night-time they would run off all the stuff we needed. … We started to do profiles on the
electorates. And when we did that we got the candidates in and started educating them
about their electorates. ... (We’d) say, ‘Well it’s no good wandering around (your
electorate) talking about the aged pension when there’s no one over 40. But there are 38-
year old women there, with 2-year old kids, with no child care facilities, so start talking
about child care facilities’.

Here the party organisation identifies through research a pathway towards the ‘hopes and
aspirations’ of voters, and exploits that opportunity by directing what local candidates should ‘talk
about’. In this logic, campaign communications respond to the ‘demand’ of voters (as understood
by demographic factors) rather than the ‘supply’ of the party’s platform or the candidate’s
judgements. This voter-driven approach to campaign communications is strongly facilitated by
market research. In its depth and range, its reliability and nuance, market research has become
the essential tool in determining the content of campaign communications – both what is said, and
what is not said. As Robb recalled, Textor’s research on Prime Minister Keating’s ‘leadership’
measures following his republic speech, discussed above, persuaded the Liberal campaign not to
discuss the issue:

The Labor Party believed all along that … Keating on the republic was a winner for them. …
We said nothing. We just let them go. We didn’t talk about it, and we just let them talk
about it. We didn’t try to rebut it or engage. It was a negative for them all the way

102
 through. And it helped our targeting. We didn’t talk about it – we might say, we’re
concerned about jobs, not the republic.

More typically, of course, campaign communications are voluble and prolific, notably in the form of
paid commercial television advertising. Campaign advertising has been well documented (for
example C. Lloyd, 1990; P. Williams, 1997; S. Young, 2004). Young notes that TV advertising has
become more prominent in the overall communications mix, and ads have become shorter in
duration, simplified, personalised and ‘deliberately vague about policy details’ as to reach swinging
voters (Young, 2004: 34-8). Advertising messages are regarded as most effective when style and
content are consistent across all media outlets and when complementing messages disseminated
in the ‘free’ media through news reporting, talk-back radio and entertainment channels, as Walsh
suggests:

It’s important that you keep moving with what technology offers you, but ultimately what’s
most important is constructing a core message, and the messages that hang off that, in a
way that actually works or works as well as they can for you. Trying to get as much as
possible of what you do funnelling back to focus onto those things. So it’s more about
discipline and focus.

Concepts, themes and slogans aimed at implementing the campaign strategy are devised by
advertising agents. The advertising strategy for Labor’s 1972 campaign was proposed, in a
submission from the Hansen Rubensohn agency, as a two-phase campaign to launch the ‘It’s Time’
slogan and use it to promote policy proposals (Blewett, 1973: 14; Oakes & Solomon, 1973: 103-
6). Ted Horton and Mark Pearson, advising the Liberals’ campaign in 1996, presented Robb with a
‘we and them’ strategy which was then expressed in ‘every’ campaign advertisement (Williams,
1997: 158-9). Neil Lawrence devised an advertising strategy based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
to formulate consistent and effective advertising for Labor’s 2007 campaign (Jackman, 2008: 78-
81).

Advertising agents are selected by Head Office and work within the campaign strategy devised by
the campaign director. Pamela Williams’ account of the 1996 election campaign describes Robb
having ‘mapped out’ the critical elements of the Liberal Party’s strategy on a single sheet of paper,
on which he had ‘translated’ his strategy into simple diagrams ‘using dialogue bubbles to sum up
the key points’:

At the centre of the Coalition page was a bubble labelled, ‘I’m going to teach Paul Keating
a lesson by giving John Howard a go.’ This distillation of swing-voter sentiment was the
crux of the Liberal campaign (P. Williams, 1997: 100).

This ‘distillation’ of the research was not itself intended for external communication, but it formed
the basis of the party’s advertising and other campaign communications. In 1996, Robb’s ‘dialogue
bubble’ was captured in the Liberals’ twin slogans of ‘For all of Us’ and ‘Enough is Enough’
(Williams 1997). Other notable campaign slogans have included ‘Australia Unlimited’ (Rawson,
1961: 31), ‘It’s Time’ (Blewett 1973), ‘Turn on the Lights’ (Eggleton), and ‘Kevin 07’ (Jackman
2008). Jingles or anthems, regarded in the 1970s and 1980s as a mandatory element of
campaigns, were also designed to summarise the campaign message in emotional and memorable
terms; Labor’s 1987 anthem ‘Let’s Stick Together’, produced by John Singleton, was among the
last of this genre (Hawke, 1994: 399-400). More subtly than either slogans or jingles, focus group
research has also been increasingly used to provide specific words and phrases for incorporation
into pair advertising or other media communications. Labor’s advertising adviser Lawrence
commented admiringly that ‘the shortest political contact line in this country is Mark Textor to John
Howard’; he was impressed with Rudd’s quick adoption of suggested description of Howard as a
‘clever politician’ (Jackman 2008: 78,83). Equally, Rudd’s repeated invocation of ‘working families’
arose from market research conducted for the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and picked up
by Labor, by polling firm Essential Media Communications (Megalogenis, 2008: 343).

103
In all this, the campaign director acts as facilitator to bring together party and parliamentary
actors with research and advertising specialists to collaborate on the campaign’s plan of action and
to create a single united campaign effort. As Eggleton recalled of the Liberal Party in the 1970s:

We’d have the researchers sitting in the same meeting as the advertising agency with me
and others (such as deputy director) Nick Minchin.... The agency quite liked having,
welcomed having the research people present, and they threw the ball around between
themselves in terms of how best to develop the advertising. Occasionally people like
(pollster) Gary Morgan would propose particular types of research. The advertising and
research teams came in with ideas all the time in response to the party’s strategies and
objectives.

Eggleton also recalled the need for flexibility and speed in developing campaign communications –
an adaptation of normal commercial practices to the dynamics and exigencies of a political
environment. His analogy with news gathering perhaps reflects his own background in journalism
and public relations:

The thing that I encouraged with advertising was being fast on our feet. Not just
developing a number of ads and saying, ‘Here are our ads for the campaign’. … We’d start
with some ads in the can. Then we’d create new material a bit like a news agency: we’d
actually develop new ads day by day, to respond to the changing circumstances, both
press and television. With (the agency) Masius, they helped us evolve this fast response
strategy it, and they were really very good at it. They 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 inititive for
ourselves.

Improved production technologies, particularly the transition to digital technology, have reduced
Masius’ 13-hour turnaround time considerably, as Loughnane confirmed:

You can cut a TV advertisement, or change a TV advertisement, in 30 seconds these days,

so you can do endless iterations.

In discussing campaign communications, party officials repeatedly placed boundaries around the
influence of market research, insisting that it did not, and indeed should not, determine the
policies presented to voters at the election. Instead, market research is acknowledged only as
shaping how the party’s policies, separately agreed and determined by the parliamentary party,
are communicated:

You took them under advisement, but you still went your own way … because what they
could find today could change tomorrow if something happened (Wyndham).

We did use slick marketing techniques (in 1972), and did package Whitlam to a certain
extent. But we were 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 (M. Young, 1986).

If I’d gone to Malcolm Fraser and said, ‘I’m going to do research to tell you what to think,’
I would not have got a very good reception. If I’d said to Malcolm, ‘I am going to do this
research to see how your proposal and your philosophy and your policy is going to ride and
how people will react it to it,’ he’d say, ‘Good’. And that is really what we did. We did focus
groups and that’s how we’d decide on the advertising. So how do we need to pitch the
advertising in order to sell this particular product? and what were the likely negatives? so
what do we need to start doing in order to counter the negatives? (Eggleton).

104
 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 (McMullan, 1984)

Keeping the Labor Party with a long-term strategy is very difficult, and is getting harder
and harder. Everything is so immediate and it’s bullshit, over-reactive. … You can’t run
federal Government on the one-liner for the day, you run it on long-term policy (Hogg).

Crosby described market research as a ‘navigational tool’ to help the party reach its policy goal,
and cited the example of Howard’s GST policy:

If you believed in focus groups, you would not have introduced a GST. …. 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 it 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.

Of the events leading to the 2010 election campaign, Bitar also downplayed the policy influence of
research:

You look at any call we made during the (2010) election campaign. No call is made purely
on research. A lot of people will tell you about the (Emissions Trading Scheme), and how
the ETS was ditched based on focus group research. Nothing could be further from the
truth. It’s a load of crap.

Despite these comments it seems clear that research, and strategic considerations generally, do
underpin the selection as well as the communications of campaign policies. There are plenty of
documented examples of policies being modified or withdrawn in the light of market research,
including the Hawke Government’s abandonment of the Option C tax reform (Mills, 1986) and the
removal of food from the Fightback! GST package (Megalogenis, 2008: 75). Even the admitted use
of market research as a ‘navigational tool’ implies a significant impact on the nature of the policy
debate during an election campaign: unpopular policies can be downplayed or ‘buried’ so as to
deflect attention, and attractive but minor aspects of minor can be highlighted. Increasingly,
indeed, market research permits parties to emphasise their connection to policy values - Labor on
public education or the Liberal Party on strong defence for example – while making few specific
policy commitments: campaigns are reduced to competitions of parallel themes rather than
debates about alternative policy prescriptions. David O’Reilly is surely correct, too, in emphasising
that in electorally successful parties such as the ALP of the 1980s and the ‘new Labour’ party of
Blair and Brown, campaign skill sets complement policy innovation: ‘Party management,
government tactical positioning, electoral judgement, market research, policy development and
promotion and media management are all integrally interwoven’ (O'Reilly, 2007: 68).

Strategic Development: Resource Acquisition and Campaign ‘Know-how’

Strategy must be matched to the capabilities and resources of the organisation for which it is
prescribed. A strategy that effectively deploys the organisation’s available resources or which
acquires new and relevant resources may lay the basis for a sustainable competitive advantage;
on the other hand, a plan of action based on resources that are in fact unavailable must fail
(Lynch, et al., 2006). If for example a campaign strategy proposes intelligence gathering through
the use of market research, the organisation can only pursue the strategy if it has sufficient
relevant resources – such as the money and skills to commission, and the specialist consultants to
conduct and interpret, market research. In developing campaign strategy, then, the campaign
director must marshal the party’s existing resources and ensure their sufficiency to deliver the
strategy; in practice, this means progressively adding to the stock of existing resources to meet
the increasing requirements of the professional campaign model.

105
Fundraising – securing the financial ability of the party to conduct campaigns – is a sine qua non of
campaign strategy. As their research interviews make clear, campaign strategists are intensively
preoccupied with the tasks of raising funds and spending them on campaign activities. The issues
surrounding political money are so fundamental to the work of the party officials, and so
problematic given the increasing cost base of the professional campaign model, that they will be
considered separately in the following chapter. Yet it is true that money constitutes just one of –
albeit one enables the acquisition of - a broader range of relevant campaign resources, tangible
and intangible. Many of these resources can be accurately regarded as campaign ‘know how’
(Littig, 2009). These principally comprise resources attached to the ‘party as organisation’.
Officials of both parties speak of hiring external consultants for market research and advertising,
of building coordination forums with state party units and campaign consultants, of recruiting to
Head Office on a cyclical basis in the lead-up to election campaigns, of creating marginal seat units
within the Secretariat, of conducting media monitoring, of setting up and managing ‘war rooms’ or
campaign headquarters during the campaign, and so on. For Gray, these constituted a:

general ‘skill-set’... defining your campaign, positioning your enemy and maximising
opportunities for yourself, monitoring the media and being 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 … and making it an issue for the senior minister … The sort
of stuff we became masters in by 1983. … There was also a range of polling things. We
were very, very clever in terms of what we called our profile (sic – read, Polfile) program
and direct mail program (O'Reilly, 2007:75).

Organisational strategists are also increasingly influential in the acquisition of resources attached
to the party in office, such as policy and leadership. This is borne out by a study of the actions of
three party officials – Young, Robb and Gartrell – in building their parties’ long-term resources and
deploying the short-term resources (Mills 2012). In the lead-up to the 1972 election, Young built
the long-term organisational resources of Head Office with new hires of specialist campaign staff
and new consultants in research and advertising. But questions of leadership and policy issues
were beyond his remit as campaign director. In contrast, in the lead-up to the election of the
Howard (1996) and Rudd (2007) governments, both Robb and Gartrell undertook extensive
organisational capacity-building as well as becoming involved, during and after periods of turmoil
in the parties’ parliamentary ranks, in the selection of leadership and policy (Mills, 2012b).

As these examples suggest, resource acquisition is conducted by officials from different parties in
essentially the same way. In the professional campaign model few resources have a distinctively
partisan character. However party officials reported significant differences in the resources
available to governing parties compared to opposition parties. Governments typically have greater
resourcing than oppositions; but these are typically allocated to the ‘party in office’ rather than to
the ‘party organisation’. As the example of Young, Robb and Gartrell suggest, officials in opposition
may exercise greater influence within the party and greater control over the party’s diminished
resources:

The Leader of the Opposition is very dependent on the party organisation for resources,
the Prime Minister is not. The PM has got more resources than the party (McMullan).

In Opposition, the Federal Secretariat is one of the key resources that the party’s got, in
policy development, all sorts of things, and the reliance on the research, and it’s just in
every capacity. Probably the power of the Federal Director is a bit greater in Opposition
because of that lack of other senior people around. After the leader and the deputy leader,
you’ve probably got the next level of veto and power on certain things (Robb).

There are pluses and minus about being in opposition. More minuses than plusses, there’s
no doubt. But (in opposition) the focus - I guess from a strictly campaigning point of view
obviously - it means a large focus is political. … Everyone’s much more attuned to the
next election. … Equally when we’re in government, having done both roles, I’ve got to - a

106
 Federal Director has got to - understand that the political demands on the senior ministers
are much greater or more complex (Loughnane).

I think when you’re in Government you do have access, quite properly, but you still have
access to more resources than you have when you’re in opposition. And if you’re in
opposition everywhere, the risk you have (is that) you can’t raise the same amount of
money, and so you lose a lot of the institutional knowledge or the access to professional
expertise (Crosby).

In assembling these resources, campaign directors are drawing on diverse sources, including
external consultants, state party colleagues, ‘fraternal’ parties offshore, and – not least – one’s
partisan rivals. Campaign know-how can be transferred across boundaries of party, state and
nation:

Looking at what goes on overseas is interesting. … But you’re also borrowing from the
commercial advertising guys who are experimenting. We looked at what the unions had
done in the early ‘Your Rights at Work’ stuff. And some of what the British Labour Party
does. … Just trying to keep an eye on some of those overseas developments is pretty
important and they were the main ones. … You do watch the other side. You’ve got to be
careful because when the other side win people say, ‘You should just do what they did’. ….
So yes, there are some things you do around the place, some from the other side, some
from overseas, and some from marketers (Gartrell).

While Gartrell is speaking of the 2007 campaign, the practice of borrowing across party lines is
long-established as Combe and Robb affirmed of campaigning in the 1970s and 1980s:

Tony Eggleton had taken over as Federal Director of the Liberal Party and (in 1975 ran) …
a very good campaign. It changed the way a whole lot of things were done, such as having
a media centre that was constantly monitoring and constantly responding to what was
happening, not on a day-by-day basis but an hour-by-hour basis, preparing clips to be fed
easily into the electronic media. So by 1977 we had to have the same (Combe).

I think 50 per cent of it (sources of learning) was looking at our opponents. They had a
history of centralised control of campaigns, … in ‘87 they had a lot more sophisticated
data base, and their ability to target – which is what it’s all (about), if you have got limited
resources you’ve got to target. And their market research capacity I think was better
developed (Robb).

Party officials also need to monitor emerging communications, digital and other technologies

We just applied our brain to the fact that there was both the technology change that
allowed you to do … old things in new ways. Some were self-started, some we learned
from the states, some we learned from other countries, sometimes we’d try things in
campaigns and they wouldn’t work, so we’d try a new way of doing it next time
(McMullan).

As Gartrell noted, fraternal parties in the United Kingdom and the United States have long been
mined for new campaign resources. As early as 1960, the Liberal Party sent officials on fact
finding missions to the British Conservative Party and to observe the Kennedy-Nixon presidential
contest (C. Porter, 1981: 81; Hancock, 2000: 255). By the mid-1980s, both Australian parties
were acquiring skills in market research, television advertising and market research from the
United States (Mills, 1986). Robb was a frequent visitor to the United States in the 1990s and took
a further step in hiring US Republican Party campaigners for the Liberal campaign in 1993:

I spent a lot of time going to the US, to Washington, and I brought out two Republican
young guys who – well, early 30s, but each of them had about 60 campaigns under their
belt – because often they’d run 6 or 7 (campaigns the same time). … I got them out for 18

107
 months to 2 years to again be campaign officers … (in) the lead up to ‘93, and they stayed
on for 9 months. … These young blokes, they’d look at the research, and the research said
this, well you’d do that: it’s just automatic; they knew that was … what you’d say in
response to something the research was throwing up.

Party officials caution however that borrowing or hiring specific skills is easier than integrating
them and adapting them to the requirements of the Australian electoral context:

All political cultures and structures are different so you can’t just take an idea and apply it
in another. But you can take it and learn from it. ‘Oh, that’s how they did that. Well we can
adapt that to our circumstances’. We did start to do that. … We studied what was going on
in the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand because they’re the most comparable
democracies. … Each state innovated a bit and you could learn and adapt (McMullan).

In the US it tends to be more the technical things that come through. I think in campaigns
Australian culture is more aligned to British culture than it is to US culture, because we’ve
got a Westminster system. … But what the US does have is the big money and the
marketing and all the rest (Gartrell).

Resource acquisition is a relentless task, taking place in contexts of technological change, evolving
commercial marketing practice, frequent election campaigns at state, national and international
levels, and intense partisan contest. The object of this aspect of campaign strategy is to equip the
party with resources that are superior to the competitor’s. Campaign directors are thus engaged in
a constant process of innovation and experimentation, based on observation of and learning from
observed practice, incorporating new skills with existing proven practice and incrementally
adapting new practices to the existing disciplines and structures of the electoral contest:

Each time you try and do something new. If you’re not innovating you’re going backwards
(McMullan).

Strategic Implementation: Message Dissemination

From considering the formulation of strategy, we now shift to considering the second phase of
strategic development, in which the plan of action is implemented. This involves the two sub-tasks
of message dissemination and targeting. Strategy will fail if it cannot be implemented, and a
strategic message that does not reach its intended recipients cannot begin to influence their
behaviour. The transition is described by in Crosby in different words, as a shift from the ‘message’
to the ‘mechanics’ of the campaign:

(There are) two elements of a campaign, message and mechanics.

Crosby initially asserted that ‘message matters most, because it doesn’t matter how well organised
you are, if it’s a crap message you’re not going to be able to influence voters or achieve the
outcome you want’. Later in the interview he qualified this view:

Message matters most, but you need the mechanics to carry the message.

This distinction was also recognised by Gray, who described his role as campaign director less as a
creative task of message development than a logistic or mechanical one of implementation:

(I’m) not the campaign guru. Not the person who would sit in a corner of the room and think
up flash lines. But if you actually wanted the logistics of a campaign put in place … 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.

108
In considering message dissemination, much of the scholarly and journalistic discussion has
focussed on the technical methods employed. Successive waves of innovation in broadcasting and
digital technologies have provided campaigns with the means to broadcast on radio, advertise on
television, send computer-generated direct mail, and conduct web-based campaigning. These new
vehicles of dissemination have reduced parties’ reliance on face-to-face campaigning and on print-
based communications in pamphlets and newspapers, allowing them instead to infiltrate their
messages into the homes of voters by exploiting the national reach and immediacy of television
and of the personal computer as they grew from exotic luxuries to common staples. In selecting
communications vehicles, pragmatic considerations of effectiveness and cost come to the fore:

What you’re really talking about is are there new techniques or approaches that can make
a campaign more effective? I think even if one goes back, technology has just made it
easier to connect with people, so that’s an important change and so things like the internet
– the internet is a valuable campaign tool because it is a very low cost way of connecting
with people (Crosby).

Thus when Young and Eggleton inaugurated the ‘national campaign’ as their party’s first national
campaign directors, they did so by securing control over television advertising. For all their
successors, managing the television advertising campaign has been an enduring priority. Its
visibility, symbiotic linkages with market research, and high cost, ensure that television advertising
remains a salient element of any campaign strategy. In the last decade, party officials such as
Gartrell, Crosby and Loughnane have broadened their campaign dissemination activities onto the
World Wide Web:

The internet is a valuable campaign tool because it is a very low cost way of connecting
with people.... I don’t think it has ever been exploited to its full value in Australia as it has
elsewhere (Crosby).

We were influenced a bit by what (US Democratic Presidential candidate) Howard Dean
had done. … We’d done it in previous campaigns but it was always a tokenistic thing,
whereas this one (in 2007) was fully integrated. That’s why we had the Kevin 07 slogan
and all the things we did with that (Gartrell).

We’ve got a small but growing IT (team in the Federal Secretariat) which would not have
existed 12 years ago. It existed in very small shape 8 years ago but it’s growing bit by bit.
Our major site element is broadly what you’d call a campaigning site, which between
elections is pretty small, which is really about providing support to our incumbent
members of parliament and then, as we preselect candidates, providing support to them
and coordinating through our state divisions support for our candidates (Loughnane).

Yet while acknowledging them as necessary elements of the contemporary campaign, party
officials are at pains to downplay the importance of such technological developments. While
conceding that new technologies have increased the efficiency or effectiveness of campaigning,
they insist that, in Crosby’s words, the ‘basics never change’. In making this argument, Crosby
cited and summarised a campaign plan written by a group of Whig organisers in Illinois in 1840;
one of the signatories was Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln, 1953): 37

‘Essentially, find out who’s soft and who’s not, find out where they live, find out what
matters to them, divide the state up into Whigs and Tories, … find out those who are
capable of persuasion, find out what matters to them and who is influential.’ … In this

37
The campaign plan was obviously a favourite in the Liberal Head Office as it was also discussed by Robb in a
speech to the Sydney Institute (Robb 1996). Robb’s summary of the plan ran as follows: ‘Organize the whole
state, so that every Whig can be brought to the polls, divide their county into small districts, and to appoint in
each a sub-committee, whose duty it shall be to make a perfect list of all the voters in their respective districts,
and to ascertain with certainty for whom they will vote. Keep a constant watch on the doubtful voters, have
them talked to, place in their hands such documents as will enlighten and influence them. On election days see
that every Whig is brought to the polls.’ Robb commented that ‘not a lot has changed’.

109
 Abraham Lincoln quote, you would go out and interact with people. Once it was knocking
on the door. These days it’s hard to find people at home because they’re all working or
have other interests and activities, so you’re constantly looking for new ways to directly
connect with a voter. The internet is one, phone calls are another. Direct mail letters are
another. … That process has never really changed. Next to prostitution, politics is the
oldest profession. … The basics never change.

McMullan makes the same argument:

Everybody who has ever run for election has tried to assess what the opinion or the mood
of the public is about the questions. Opinion polling is just a good way of doing it.
Television advertising is just a new way – people used to write letters to people, post
placards up on walls, whatever it is. It’s all just - we’ve got a message, we want to get it
to people as effectively as possible and distil it to its essence and communicate the
essence of it. The internet is just another way … and the technology changes but the
essential task stays the same.

The ‘basics’ or ‘essential task’ may indeed remain constant in the eyes of the campaign directors.
Yet this view surely downplays the significance of their adoption of marketing technology.
Campaign strategies are able to survey voters’ opinions and attitudes and use that information to
design televised or digitised campaign messages of maximum effect. As the party officials
acknowledge, this has empowered them in a sort of gatekeeper role in which they can include
some voters in the campaign process and ignore others. This is achieved through targeting, the
focussing of message dissemination strategies on selected electorates and, within them, on
selected voter groups and at selected times of the campaign.

Strategic Implementation: Targeting

The strategic logic of targeting relies on the recognition that, to win a parliamentary majority,
parties will rely a combination of ‘safe’ seats, where its candidates win comfortably, and
contestable or middle ground seats. At the level of the individual voter, likewise, some voters are
‘rusted on’ adherents but parties also need the support of the persuadable ‘swinging’ voters. Party
officials rationally devote most of their campaign resources to those contestable seats and
persuadable voters. The logic is reinforced in Australia’s compulsory voting rules which relieve
parties of the task of mobilising their core loyalists. Party officials must therefore identify the
contestable seats and the swinging voters, develop dissemination strategies to target them, and
concentrate campaign resources so as to actually deliver those messages to the selected voters,
employing the most appropriate technologies of intelligence gathering and campaign
communication. McMullan affirmed:

Going back as far as I can see, people have always tried to work out where the election
was going to be won or lost, and put their effort there.

Marginal seat campaigning in Australia can be traced back to 1951 (see Appendix Two). But the
critical development in the emergence of targeted campaigning was the emergence of market
research. Rather than relying on previous voting behaviour and assuming uniform swings,
campaign directors used market research to improve their ability to identify marginal seats and to
reveal groups and individuals within those electorates who might be susceptible to party
communications. McMullan recalled:

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.

As Labor’s campaign director from 1980, McMullan identified ‘the 27 key seats’ which he believed
would provide the basis for Labor’s victory in 1983. He asserted the right of the national
secretariat to intervene in state campaigns to ‘shore up any deficiencies’ in the campaign efforts
for those seats, assigning national staff to ‘descend on their electorates – mostly in Western

110
Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory – and teach the local branches how to run good
local campaigns’ (Barton, 1981; Summers, 1982).

Head Office’s capacity to target central campaign resources on to key local campaigns was further
strengthened in 1987, with McMullan’s designation of Gray as the secretariat’s marginal seats
organiser. Gray was quick to deploy the then-emerging technologies of computerised data bases to
target automated and personalised direct mail to voters:

I was fortunate in that by 1987, the capacity of personal computing had moved to the
point where you could buy basic systems that were affordable. For less than 20,000 in
1987 dollars you could buy a machine, an 8086 chip as it was in those days, which had a
capacity to store a federal electorate data base and from which you could print targeted
direct mail. We began building systems to do that. It was by no means the first use of
direct mail in a campaign … but it was certainly the first substantial localised use of it. We
only used it in 11 seats.

Centrally funded, the computer was physically located in the office of the marginal seat candidate:

In those days $20,000 was a lot of machinery to pay for. The laser printers printed at 4
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. But it meant that campaign logistics were a very different beast (Gray).

Gray emphasises that this new dissemination strategy was effective because it was integrated with
and reinforced the campaign’s broader strategy and message:

We established in ’87, I would argue, the best political communications framework we had
had, which was the combination of the Singleton agency driving the overall message, the
focus that Bob (Hawke) had as leader, the hunger that Paul (Keating) had as Treasurer - it
was the first time the country had seen the destructive capacity of Keating at his best -
and it was the first time anyone had seen anything like the campaign machine that we put
together. It resulted in the complete restoration of the party’s political position … It was a
victory of a political philosophy, of a political capability, a prodigiously capable cabinet, and
a political machine that matched it.

By the 1990 campaign, Gray ensured that Labor’s marginal seats data base management system,
Polfile, was available for use in all the targets seats; and by 1993 he had ‘massively expanded’ the
system again. By this stage however, Labor had had to respond to perceived increases in voter
volatility and disenchantment by stretching its definition of marginal seats - from those needing a
swing of 3.5 per cent to 5 per cent and then to 6 per cent and by 1996, to 8 per cent (Williams
1997: 127-8). Previously, identifying marginal seats was a relatively straightforward process:

You’d be looking at those on the swing chart – defending your own and challenging the
others’ – a band 5 per cent either way plus those on a wish list that could jump the queue
because of demographic shifts (Hogg).

You tracked enough seats to give you a picture of what was going to happen in the seats
that you wanted to win. Q: Selected how? A: It’s an informed decision. What do we need
to win? It’s got to be broadly nationally representative – that is you need to know what is
happening in each state. … It is marginals, both ones you hold and ones you need to win.
(Crosby).

By 1990, Labor as a long term incumbent government had started to alienate some of its core
base and faced the need to defend more of its hitherto safe seats. Hogg recalls ‘broadening’ the
targeting beyond marginal seats to include more of Labor’s traditionally safe heartland seats:

111
 Signs had appeared in the preceding state election in New South Wales where we lost 60%
Labor seats (i.e. seats where Labor candidates would receive 60% of the vote). So in the
lead up to 1990 I didn’t just have a marginal seat meeting over in Parliament House, but I
insisted on Eric Fitzgibbon (MP for the safe ALP seat of Hunter) and sundry other geniuses
coming to these meetings. They couldn’t believe it. … So we broadened the targets to
prevent damage occurring. So we got ahead of it I suppose. That was a change – targeted
seats as opposed to marginals.

In the wake of their defeat in 1987, the Liberals were quick to absorb these lessons of central
responsibility for local campaigning. Joining the Federal Secretariat at that time, Robb recognised
that previously:

the states had run and been responsible for how they ran their campaigns in individual
seats – anything on the ground really. As I saw it, the Secretariat had run the national
advertising campaign, and had developed themes and messages and things, but they had
no capacity to impose those, and they certainly didn’t have any direct involvement in the
strategies that were adopted in each seat, influence over the candidates or anything.

Becoming federal director after another defeat in 1990, Robb concluded that the Liberals had to

centralise some of the activities, the coordination at least of the on-the-ground activities.
… (A)lso there was a view that we need 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. … The ALP had a lot more
sophisticated data base, and their ability to target – which is what it’s all (about). If you
have got limited resources you’ve got to target. And their market research capacity I think
was better developed.

Crosby described how improved market research allowed the Liberals to develop more localised
campaign strategies, in the quest for the critical ‘seats and voters within those seats’ who could
determine the outcome of the election. During the 1980s, the party’s research had provided
insights about overall voting intentions and Prime Ministerial approval ratings; this led to campaign
strategies that could be focused to the state level. By the 1990s, the party’s national and state-
wide polling had given way to polling on selected marginal seats:

I have seen the (research) that was done then (in the 1980s). It was overall party and
preferred Prime Minister. You did it by state but you never did it by seat. … We do the
polling now – but you didn't do Australia-wide poll, you didn’t do state-wide polls, you only
did a bunch of seats. You tracked enough seats to give you a picture of what was going to
happen in the seats that you wanted to win.38

In developing marginal seats strategies, the Liberals used market research to select seats that
were vulnerable – ‘both ones you hold and ones you need to win’ – and nationally representative –
’that is, you need to know what is happening in each state’:

You have one or two (marginal seats) from each state. … You need 2 or 3 in SA, 3 or 5 in
WA, so that you can tell what’s happening in the states as well. It’s not enough to just
have big blocks of marginals, you’ve got to have geographic representation as well
(Crosby).

Within these target seats, Crosby noted the development of research techniques to describe those
voters who were to be specifically targeted – those voters whose numbers and attributes were

38
Crosby described targeting as ‘Focussing on the seats that are critical, focussing on the people within those
seats who are critical, and focussing on the critical issues within those seats’(Bathgate, et al., 1996).

112
responsible for the seat being a marginal one. He noted of the ‘Phil’ and ‘Jenny’ profiles prepared
for the 1996 Liberal campaign:

The other thing that we focussed on was the caricature of the target voters. … ‘Phil’ and
‘Jenny’, which Tex (researcher Mark Textor) wrote, was essentially a short narrative about
the sort of people. It happened to be that … they were over-represented in marginal and
regional seats. When we were trying to get candidates, and the Leader, to think about the
people – a seat is a geographical thing, but who is in it as well is important – then there
was that narrative as well. It was seats but it was also people.

Robb’s attempt to buy the cooperation of the state branches in the national campaign effort,
described in chapter Five, was designed to ensure national campaign priorities were implemented
‘on the ground’ in these strategically significant seats, and directed to the groups who had to
‘shift’ to ‘win the seat’. Robb strengthened these efforts by employing a team of eight ‘campaign
officers’ to assist local campaigning in the 1993 election campaign. These officers, centrally
funded, were dispatched to the traditionally weaker or under-resources states of Queensland,
Tasmania and Western Australia. Each campaign officer was responsible for two or three
electorates:

It was an interesting exercise. In ‘93, they all lived in the seats and would come
occasionally to Head Office, and 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,
and it wasn’t as cohesive a campaign.

For the 1996 campaign, Robb raised the stakes:

I realised I just had to put the money in, so in the two years before the ‘96 (campaign) I
had people out on the ground, mainly in those states … I’d bring them back every second
Friday, they’d have to come in Thursday night, spend time as a group together, so they
built an esprit de corps among themselves and with Head Office, and we would workshop
… all day Friday. (We looked at) different seats and … at the research, jointly discussed it,
how do we get coordination. … You know, the seats were different so you’d have different
policy emphasis. You know it might be child care is really important in one seat, in another
it’s environment. But how do we run the same themes through these different issues. … It
worked very well.

When Crosby joined Robb as his deputy, they extended the Liberals’ on the ground campaign
capacity into television advertising. In the 1996 campaign the Federal Secretariat started funding
television advertising in support of individual candidates in key marginal seats:

We ran ads that were very specific about the local candidate. The party centrally did the
polling, conceived the ads, did the ads. 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,
because we wanted to raise their profile. So we did two things. We had a centrally
conceived and executed for the first time positive campaign in support of each of the
candidates, and we actually ran negative ads (Crosby; see also Crosby, 1996; I. Ward,
2003).

As director in his own right, Crosby continued and expanded this practice in 1998 and 2001
(Crosby, 1998 (23 October); Peake, 2001). Robb also spoke of fine tuning the Liberals’ direct mail
campaign and its purchasing of air time for television advertising, so as to further increase the
precision with which the Liberals were able to target specific voters in specific campaigns.

Efforts to target marginal electorates and swinging voters were originally complementary to the
blanket coverage achieved by high-cost high-profile nation-wide television advertising. Towards
the end of the century however the thirty-year dominance of TV advertising was waning as

113
audiences fragmented, as channels multiplied on cable services, and as internet access increased.
As Walsh commented of the 2001 election:

Already the audience was fragmenting; you couldn’t get them all at the 6 o’clock news.
These national efforts were beginning to lose their effectiveness.

Further, as Crosby observed, television advertising at that time was both too expensive for local
candidates and, in the political circumstances of the 1970s-80s, not necessary; local contests were
won on the back of the national broadcast campaigns:

Once TV came into its own, very few (local candidates) could have afforded (television
advertising), and the technology wasn’t available to be able to do (that). … (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 (as a local candidate). People (i.e. voters) were still very
heavily influenced in that way. But not anymore.

From the mid-1990s, Crosby argued, campaigns needed more integrated dissemination strategies:

The campaign has to be run top down and bottom up, and completely integrated.

‘Top down’ campaigns are disseminated by nationally-driven television broadcasts, and must be
complemented by and integrated with ‘bottom up’ campaigns of localised electorate-level
dissemination. Campaign strategists also express this as a combination of the ‘air war’ with the
‘ground war’. Like many other phrases in campaign strategy, this concept draws on the language
of warfare to make the metaphorical distinction between the campaign strategy that relies on a
single pervasive electronic broadcast of television advertising across large media markets (an ‘air
war’), and one that relies on multiple intensive personalised face-to-face campaigns in single
electorates (a ‘ground war’). 39 Where the air war disseminates the broad national campaign
themes, often centred on the party leader, the ground war emphasises the local candidate and
local issues. The rationale for a ground war is that voters still desire and respond to a personal
relationship with the individual candidate seeking their vote. Accordingly in the ground war, the
candidate seeks high local visibility through activities such as doorknocking, distributing literature
at train stations, running street stalls, attending workplace meetings, visiting nursing homes and
schools, building networks through local community organisations, and promoting petitions about
local issues. Ground campaigns draw on the community organising model which has also inspired
social movement campaigners (Rose, 2010) and trade union campaigners (for example, the 2007
Your Rights at Work campaign, (Muir, 2008)). In Crosby’s description, this is:

a battle where what was happening on the ground, in local communities, on local issues,
involving local identities would be more important than the usual commentary on national
issues and the unrealistic application of notional nationwide swings (Crosby, 1998 (23
October)).

It is important that the ‘ground war’ not be misconstrued as representing a return to an earlier era
of candidate-driven pre-television ‘street corner’ campaign. In the contemporary ground war, local
activities are designed and driven by Head Office, as elements of a larger marginal seat strategy;
they often deploy centrally-funded communications technologies and campaign staff. Marginal
seats candidates execute a local plan according to central guidelines and under central scrutiny.
This approach aims at, in Ward’s apt phrase, ‘localising the national’ campaign or, alternatively, at
centralisation with differentiation. Reviewing the 1996 campaign Robb said he had endeavoured to

39 I am grateful to an anonymous party official for providing me with this metaphor in a personal
communication. Crosby has employed a similar metaphor to describe the same campaign distinction between
‘aerial bombardment’ and ‘guerrilla warfare’ (Speech to National Press Club, 1998). A more prosaic metaphor is
drawn from accountancy, referring to campaigns that are ‘above the line’ campaigning – i.e. the visible
campaign involving the leaders and the advertising - and ‘below the line’ campaigning, Journalist Michelle
Grattan described the latter as ‘the hand to hand combat in individual seats where voters are bombarded with
direct mail target to their demographic, leaflet and phone canvassing … most of it away from the gaze of the
national media or of voters in other seats’ (Grattan, 1990).

114
‘ensure that our national campaign was locally relevant’ (Robb, 1997; I. Ward, 2003). Local
deviation from the centrally approved plan can be costly, as dramatically highlighted in the final
days of the 2007 campaign when Liberal supporters in the seat of Lindsay distributed racist
leaflets; leaked to the media, the affair became a national scandal and swamped the national
campaign’s final days (Jackman, 2008: 220-5).

Indeed, so far from the ‘ground war’ representing a revival of locally-directed campaigning,
campaign directors emphasise that the candidate’s selection and endorsement is itself increasingly
a function not of the party members in the local community but of the central campaign 40.
Echoing Kennelly’s search for ‘horses for courses’, Andrew Robb said of the Liberals 1996
campaign, ‘candidate selection is critical, especially in regional seats’ (Robb 1997); during the
campaign Robb successfully pressed the Queensland division of the party to deselect the endorsed
candidate for the seat of Ipswich, Pauline Hanson (Williams, 1997: 246-9). Crosby also affirmed
that in contemporary campaigning:

the impact of individual candidates has really become more important. … You really have
to connect with the seat you seek to represent, and if you do it’s worth a lot. … I was in
the party at the time they started to discover marginal seats, and holding candidates to
account for performance, and all those things, so I’ve seen that transition.

Candidate selection is of course one of the traditional functions of the parties state branches and
divisions, and the national campaign directors sometimes have trodden warily in ‘holding
candidates to account’ for their campaign effectiveness. Yet as McMullan also acknowledged, a
candidate ‘audit’ function, driven from the centre, has steadily increased in intensity:

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, they endorse the candidates and whatever –
though I’ll comment on that in a moment. (I sent) people around … starting to say, ‘How
is the campaign going?’ in the key seats and making sure it is OK. It is more of a national
role than that now, people going around and doing these campaign audits. Well, we didn’t
have the resources to do that. But we did something that approximated it. 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.

This focus on performance applied to Members of Parliament as well as to first-time candidates,

particularly where long-term incumbent governments were fraying the loyalties of traditional core
voters. Hogg’s decision in 1990 to target ‘safe’ Labor seats as well as ‘marginals’ was accompanied
by a blunt interrogation about the performance of the MPs from those safe seats:

I (asked) 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.

Hogg delivered the same message to another group of backbenchers by teleconference:

Geniuses like [MP name suppressed], who couldn’t blow their hat off if their brain
exploded. He asked what would happen if we don’t do this? I said, ‘Nothing much. You just
won’t hold your seat. You lose’.

So far in this section of the argument, targeting has been presented in its geographical context.
Targeting also has a temporal context which plays an important role in the implementation of

40
More recently, local primary elections are being trialled, from the centre, to return some preselection control
to local party members and supporters (Miragliotta, 2011).

115
strategy. Just as campaign directors complement their ‘air war’ with ‘ground war’ dissemination
strategies, so we see ‘long war’ strategies built around the full campaign cycle complemented by
intensive ‘short war’ dissemination focused during the election campaign and, increasingly, on the
final days of the campaign. US communications scholars emphasise the desirability of sequencing
messages ‘as the modern political campaign passes through relatively discrete stages’ such as
‘pre-primary, primary, convention’ and general election’ (Trent & Friedenberg, 2004). Australian
parties similarly orchestrate their campaign communications. Before the campaign, campaign
directors conduct various communications activities such as the mini-campaign (ALP in 1972:
Blewett, 1973), the headland speech (Liberal in 1996: Williams, 1997: 98) and the launch of a
new leader (ALP in 2007: Jackman, 2008: 84). During the campaign, messages are built around
major set-pieces such as the first day, the leaders’ debate, the policy launch and the leader’s final
message in the National Press Club speech.

‘Permanent’ or long-term communication strategies are based on a view that most voters needed
time, and repeated exposure to the campaign, to absorb policy issues and to become familiar with
the party’s leaders – campaign elements too complex and important to be left to the short intense
burst of activity in the campaign proper. Eggleton insisted that he was:

a very strong believer in winning elections before an election.

Yet the orthodoxy behind such long-term communications strategies has been steadily challenged
by evidence that voters’ attitudes are becoming more volatile. Increasing numbers of voters are
‘potentially available for conversion during the election campaign, with major consequences for
how election campaigns are organised and conducted’ (McAllister, 2011: 101). Data from the
Australian Election Study suggests that late deciders, either ‘calculating’ or ‘capricious’,
represented nearly a quarter of the electorate in the 2007 campaign; in 1998 more than 10 per
cent of voters the electorate made their minds up on polling day itself (McAllister, 2011: 104).

Campaign strategies must therefore be structured to grab the attention of late deciders. Despite
laws requiring television and radio advertising to cease on the Wednesday of the final week of an
election campaign (Orr, 2010), party officials are increasingly adept at stepping around this
‘blackout’ and continuing their campaign right up to polling day. Gartrell noted with pride that:

the marketers are good when it comes to the electronic ban, the blackout, because they
know all these other ways of advertising. There’s a good photo of a Rudd ad being played
in Retravision (television sale and hire) stores, because you can advertise in Retravision
stores... on the Friday before the election. We put it into 48 Retravision stores, so when
people went in to buy televisions they had the ad.

Telephone canvassing is not caught by the electronic blackout, and this too provides party officials
with opportunities to persuade the undecided voters on the eve of polling day. Gartrell noted that
in the 2004 campaign the Liberals had used ‘robocalls’ – automated phone messaging – to
disseminate a message from Prime Minister Howard on the Friday of the campaign; despite
anecdotal evidence that these can annoy as many voters as they persuade, Labor emulated and
improved on the idea for the next campaign:

Lynton Crosby has claimed it changed things. I think it probably helped him a bit, with a
message from Howard, because it was all about the local candidate. What we did in ‘07
was take that technique, but 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.

The final stage of campaign dissemination occurs at what Bitar refers to as the ‘point of sale’:
immediately prior to the voter entering the polling station. He recalled Labor’s ‘brilliant strategic
campaign’ in the by-election in 2000 for the Queensland state seat of Woodridge to which, as the
NSW state party organiser, he was seconded to work. The challenge facing the Labor candidate,

116
Mike Kaiser, was that a field of independents and minor candidates were directing their
preferences away from Labor. In the state’s optional preferential system:

we had everyone running against us, and we had to exhaust all these preferences that
were flowing against us. The night before Election Day (we) didn’t sleep. We spent the
whole night putting Just Vote 1 stakes and posters right through the electorate. … There
were Just Vote 1 posters over this entire electorate. We got about 20 Young Labor people
from New South Wales to drive up for the by election and they gave us a hand. … We
totally exhausted all the preferences against Mike and (he) just got up.

Having absorbed the lesson, Bitar went on to provide training for Labor’s local campaign
volunteers on the need to place posters near polling stations:

Point of sale marketing. It’s really critical that you get up at 4 in the morning and put up
your posters. …The (local volunteers) would just think, ‘This is a joke, why? I’ll just get up
at quarter to eight and whack them up; the posters aren’t going to make a difference’.
When you put them through a training course and say to them, ‘This is why it does make a
difference, and 25 per cent of people don’t decide who they’re voting before they get to
the polling booth’. In point of sale marketing the last thing they remember, if it’s your
message, when they hold that ballot paper they’re more likely to vote for you than for the
others.

Reviewing the Campaign

The final sub-task of strategic planning – reviewing the campaign - occurs outside the timeframe
of the election campaign proper. Reviewing is the process of appraising the campaign strategy at a
time when, after the results of the election are known, its strengths and weaknesses can be
properly assessed and the reasons for its success or failure can be understood. Campaign directors
review campaigns in order to improve the effectiveness of future strategies and to shape the
environment within which future strategies are formulated and implemented. Reviewing can
highlight lessons that need to be learned by the campaign organisation, pitfalls avoided, successes
replicated. Similarly it can provide a basis for credit and blame to be allocated among members of
the campaign organisation and decisions made about future membership of the campaign team.
Reviewing can thus make a critical contribution to the party’s resource base of campaign ‘know
how’, improving its organisational and campaigning skills and personnel. Reviewing can also shape
external perceptions about the campaign organisation. This can be directed at regulators, with a
view to influencing how future campaigns may be regulated. More broadly, reviewing can be seen
as a continuation of the campaign by other means, directed at underlining public perceptions of
the strengths of the campaign organisation and the weaknesses or vulnerabilities of its rival.
Whatever its purpose, the campaign director is central to the review process.

At a basic level, reviewing involves personal reflection and lesson-learning by campaign directors.
As noted in chapter Three, party officials have been selected into their Head Office role as
seasoned campaign practitioners with extensive experience as campaign managers. Several of the
research interviews suggest that experience-based reflection and learning has been a valuable
source of improved campaign know-how and hence future performance. Experience, particularly
the experience of defeat, is a respected teacher:

I think you learn your most from losses (Robb).

What I will say is, the more campaigns you’ve been through the better. You learn a lot
from your mistakes. In campaigning you learn a lot more from your mistakes than through
your victories. Because, as I said, I’ve seen this on election night, everyone says it was
this pamphlet that won it for us, it was this ad, this speech - when you lose, that is when
you have real reflection (Bitar).

117
By way of example, Robb said he learned from the 1993 campaign experience where the Liberal
Party was defeated after having released its Fightback! tax reform policy.

That was inexperience by (party leader) Hewson, and Reith who was deputy, and myself.
We had all this pressure from the Government: ‘Where’s your policy’? 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. The same (pressure) happened in ‘96. … But I had the experience. I
really had to be strong with people and put up with a lot of abuse. I was quite green (in
1993). We had … advanced a lot of the technical side (of the campaign) in ’93. But on the
politics, the judgement side, that’s when I learned a whole lot of things that didn’t work.

Robb further describes the process of learning the distinction between, and the importance of
combining, campaign ‘science’ and ‘judgement’:

I did learn that judgement was important. But you had to have the science and the
judgement. 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. I became in the end, I did see great
need for the judgement, but in combination. 41

Gartrell also learned from his experience of defeat in the 2004 campaign:

In ‘07 I made that (strategic planning) group really small. It was effectively about six
people … In ‘04 I found it very difficult because I was trying to be as consultative as
possible, but with a national organisation like that to have any sort of effective discussion
is impossible. … What happens is everyone goes and grandstands and the party officials
are very defensive and it’s to be tolerated and endured rather than be useful. The small
group is really very useful.

Loughnane concurs, drawing on his business career experience as well as his parliamentary and
campaign experiences:

I’m lucky that I had time in business, so that helps me with the CEO role. And I also
worked in Parliament House as a chief of staff so that was very good. I’ve absolutely
grown in the time. The experience has mattered. Going through the full campaign in 2004
and then ’07, the experiences of campaigning have been very important. The nature of
campaigning has evolved. You can’t say it has changed radically but it has changed, and
being able to adapt to those changes has been important. In a sense it’s a ‘learn on the
job’. I think being a campaign director, you can be prepared for it, but doing the job itself
there is no – you can’t be 100 per cent prepared for it.

There is of course a limit to the extent to which this process of reflection and learning should be
indulged; generals must not equip themselves to fight the last war. As McMullan noted:

You can’t look back. You’ve got to look forward. It’s very hard. We are all self-critical
people, it’s a human trait: ‘If only I’d done something different in 84 we might have done
better’. So you spend all your time fixing that up when, in fact, the problem’s changed, so
you’ve got to discipline yourself to look forward not back.

A second, more formal and overt, form of campaign review takes place within the forums of the
party organisation. The campaign director typically conducts a post-election review at the behest
of the party’s national executive. These internal reviews are typically conducted in private and
findings not made public. These internal reviews date back at least to the 1949 campaign, when

41
Robb made a similar comment in his speech (1996) to the Sydney Institute: ‘You can introduce sophisticated
technology and scientific method and still get it hopelessly wrong if your judgement is faulty.’

118
Kennelly appraised the reasons for the defeat of the Chifley Government, and became
institutionalised by the 1970s. Eggleton recalled the nature and purpose of his post-campaign
reviews:

After every election I did a detailed report for the Federal Executive drawing attention to
the strengths and weaknesses of the campaign. That then was discussed with me and my
team so that we could identify areas, based on the experience of the last election, where
we could do better. It was often not so much policy but the way we had structured the
campaign and how we could make campaign headquarters work more effectively.... So we
structured those sorts of lessons we would learn.

An example of a post-campaign report is McMullan’s report after Labor’s close-run success in 1984.
McMullan reviewed the performance of party officials, the advertising agency, the market research
and the minister, recommending a new two-tier structure of the national campaign committee and
closer coordination by the parliamentary party with the party’s agreed campaign. McMullan’s
report was supplemented and informed by post-election market research conducted by ANOP
(McMullan, 1984).

In the wake of its unhappy performance in the 2010 election campaign, Labor’s National Executive
commissioned a review – not by the national secretary but by a panel of party elders – to which
Bitar was invited to make recommendations. He recalled addressing the party’s financial
indebtedness:

A number of (my recommendations) were adopted, where there’s got to be some checks
and balances on going in to debt. If you are going to go into debt you have to at least run
it past the National Executive. There has to be checks and balances on the party
organisation as well - and on the leader by the way.

In contrast to the private nature of these review processes, party officials also participate in a
number of public reviews and inquiries. This third stream of reviewing, centring on the Joint Select
Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM 42), shifts the focus from the internal forums of the party
organisation to the public forums of the ‘party in office’. JSCEM, an all-party committee of
Members and Senators, is required to review each federal election. Campaign directors provide
written submissions and give evidence in person at public hearings. Some of the issues they raise
are of a routine procedural nature for example concerning the operations of the Australian
Electoral Commission and interpretation of the Commonwealth Electoral Act; JSCEM has become a
‘useful vehicle’ for resolving such technical issues (N. Kelly, 2011). But other matters raised by the
party officials are explicitly partisan. After the 2001 federal election, for example, the Liberal
Party’s submission by Lynton Crosby dealt with the powers of booth officials to prevent distribution
of ‘misleading’ how to vote cards, while also canvassing ‘push polling’ and ‘false’ radio advertising
by the ALP; the ALP’s submission by Geoff Walsh called for tighter disclosure of party donations
and of ‘inappropriate’ Government advertising. Committee members, who are themselves
‘appointed to look after their own party’s interests’ (Kelly 2011: 106), reciprocate with sometimes
partisan sparring with the rival party official.

Colin Hughes has observed, ‘the rules of the game do matter’ (C. A. Hughes, 1990: 154). The
involvement by party officials in these parliamentary forums provides Head Office an opportunity
to intervene in the legislative and regulatory campaign environment. In any campaign, of course,
the ‘rules of the game’ - covering electoral boundaries, compulsory voting, preferential voting,
campaign advertising, public funding and so forth – are given; campaign strategies must take
them into account. Such rules however are products of previous decision making by legislators – a
process in which accusations of ‘offensive partisanship’ form a ‘recurring theme in the history of
Australian electoral reform’ (Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Reform, 1983). This active
shaping of the state’s support for the party system is a defining characteristic of the cartel model
as proposed by Katz and Mair (1995).

42
From 1983 to 1987, the committee was titled the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Reform (JSCER).

119
Finally, party officials also seek to shape public perceptions about their campaign performances.
Since 1993, both the winning and losing campaign director have, separately, made post-campaign
speeches at the National Press Club.43 Victors crow and losers explain. In the same vein, party
officials have also acted as informants to post-campaign narratives and analyses by journalists (for
example Williams 1997, Jackman 2008) and academics (Blewett 1973). They have collaborated in
a number of academic studies of Australian election campaigns (Clive Bean, et al., 1997; Simms &
Warhurst, 2000; Warhurst & Simms, 2002; Simms & Warhurst, 2005; Simms, 2009a) and
participated in other conferences (for example, Young 1986) and public forums (Robb, 1996b). In
all public statements the partisan element is never far from the surface. Eggleton regards this as a
recent development where the party official ‘spins’ the outcome to partisan effect – in effect, a
continuation of the campaign after polling day:

If you happen to win, and even if you only just scramble over the line, the media are
inclined to look and say, ‘You must have done everything right’ and ‘Aren’t they clever’.
And if you lose, no matter how good a campaign you might have fought, because you’ve
lost, you’ve lost. You’ve just got to wear it. It’s resulted in something that was not really
on the agenda in my day. I am speaking of spin after an election, attempting to spin the
outcome - whether it’s spinning to say, ‘How great we were, we did all of these marvellous
things’, or spinning to denigrate your opponent’s campaign.

Campaign reviews emerge from a complex set of motivations, including personal lesson-learning,
organisational improvement, allocation of credit and blame, regulatory reform and partisan
advantage. The role of the campaign director in conducting the reviews and communicating their
outcomes is itself a further indication of the increasing prominence of this position in the party and
in the conduct of elections in this country. In contrast to the one-off candidate-based campaigns of
the United States, Australian campaign directors are participants in party-based campaign contests
that stretch back for decades and that stretches ahead as well. Campaign reviews are therefore
important in building organisational capacity for future campaigns. The capacity of party officials
for reflection and learning is a defining characteristic of their role as campaign professionals. Their
willingness to participate in the interviews of the present research is further evidence of this.

Discussion

In their text on political campaign communication, Trent and Friedenberg insist that election
campaigns must be understood as ‘campaigns of communication’:

It is communication that occupies the area between the goals or aspirations of the
candidate and the behaviour of the electorate, just as it serves as the bridge between the
dreams and hopes of the voter and the actions of the candidate. ... Communication is the
means by which the campaign begins, proceeds and concludes. It is ... the epistemological
base (Trent & Friedenberg, 2004: 15).

This approach recognises the ubiquity, variety and prominence of communications in election
campaigns. But it errs in confusing what is merely visible in a campaign with what is strategically
important. Campaign communications do not exist as autonomous phenomena; as this chapter
suggests, communications emanating from a political party are designed to express an underlying
strategy. Just as looking at a motor car will not reveal the complex process of designing,
manufacturing and marketing that lies behind it, so looking at campaign communications will only
show us a finished product. To acquire an informed understanding of campaign communications it
is necessary to examine the process of design which lies behind them. That is, we need to focus –
as suggested in this thesis – on the production of election campaigns, not just their consumption,
by shifting our attention from the visible activities of candidates and voters to penetrate the
strategic intentions of party officials in Head Office. This chapter has addressed the central aspect
of the party officials’ work relating to campaign strategy.

43
In 1990, only the winning campaign director, Labor’s Bob Hogg, addressed the National Press Club.

120
Strategy is an insufficiently explored aspect of election campaigns. This is in part because of its
confidential status: strategy formation takes place behind closed doors, and strategic documents
are closely held by party organisations. The findings outlined here help redress that shortcoming.
They suggest that party officials perform strategic work as understood in the much more extensive
literature on strategy in business and other fields. Strategy is understood by party officials as a
plan of action towards a goal. For these party officials, the goal is electoral victory. Strategy
development and implementation is the particular responsibility of the party officials in their
capacity as campaign directors and, since the strategy forms the prescriptive and exclusive
rationale for all the activities of the campaign organisation, party officials occupy positions of
extraordinary influence. In developing the strategy, party officials make use of their experiential
knowledge, as seasoned practitioners, to select strategic pathways that best suit the needs of the
party. More importantly, campaign directors are informed by market research, which provides
essential intelligence about the campaign environment which the strategy seeks to influence.
Research intelligence thus also shapes the development of the campaign’s messages, identifying
the needs and opportunities in the electorate which communications are designed to address and
exploit. Beyond this foundational contribution to strategic development, research also shapes
strategic implementation, highlighting for party officials the most effective methods of message
dissemination and targeting. The logic of targeting recognises the need for campaigns to appeal to
marginal seats and swinging voters in pursuit of a parliamentary majority; campaign directors also
target messages at different times in the campaign cycle. Beyond development and
implementation, campaign directors are also responsible for reviewing the strategy as a basis for
learning, accountability and rule shaping.

Campaign strategies must be matched to the organisation’s resources, and can only succeed if
available resources are efficiently allocated or new resources acquired. Underpinning the
sustainability of a party’s electoral success, deploying and acquiring resources forms a vital part of
the campaign directors’ strategic role. Resources broadly defined include, as this chapter has set
out, the intangible skills-set or ‘know-how’ which are essential to the conduct of the professional
campaign model. Resourcing must also be understood to include financial resources. The high cost
of the professional campaign model imposes on campaign directors the responsibility to raise
sufficient funds to implement their strategies. This will form the theme of the next Chapter.

121
 Chapter Seven

‘If I Had Another Couple of Million Bucks’: Head Office and the Funding Imperative

‘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. … If I had another couple of million bucks a lot
of my concerns would be alleviated.’

‘We didn’t have much money after the ‘93 election. 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.’

‘It was quite a tortuous process where you had to get the states to agree to spend a certain
proportion on the marginal seats, and to pay a certain proportion to the Feds to fund the central
campaign. … Anyway we decided to change the law.’

‘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. … It is real Struggle Street.’

P
olitical money – raising it, spending it and accounting for it – has become a major
preoccupation for national party officials. Karl Bitar ‘spent most of my time fundraising’ to
clear the ALP’s debt; his opposite number Brian Loughnane believes one of his ‘key jobs’ is
‘allocation of scarce resources’. It was not always thus. In both major parties, primary
responsibility for handling funds lay originally with the state units of the party and subsequently,
with national actors other than the party officials: the Liberal Party co-opted well-connected
business leaders while the ALP adopted a curious hybrid involving the parliamentary party and an
external consultant. Both these contrasting models of party financing were flawed. The shift to
centre stage by the national party officials was led by the ALP national secretaries, who in the
early 1970s took control of party funding, placed it on more rational and secure footings, and set
about the task of raising new funds.

It is no accident that these developments coincided with the emergence of the professional
campaign model, with the national campaign director at its centre. As we have seen in previous
chapters, this model required the centralisation of campaign responsibility in the hands of the
national campaign director and then that director’s assumption of responsibility for formulating
and executing the campaign strategy. These twin imperatives were directly associated with a third:
the national campaign director required a cash flow sufficient to fund the operations of the
professional campaign model. This funding imperative forms the subject of this chapter.
Specifically, following from the discussion in the previous chapter about non-financial resources,
this chapter focuses on money. Expenditure questions are relatively straightforward: the campaign
director needed to be able to purchase the elements of the professional campaign, especially
television advertising. The revenue questions are much more complex: how much is needed? and
how and from whom is it raised? The national party officials, it emerges, were central to the
national parties’ efforts to, first, free themselves from their mendicant position vis a vis the states,
gain control of party expenditure for campaign purposes and seek new sources of party funds.

This chapter makes no effort to estimate actual revenues or costs for any specific campaign. Given
the parties’ determined confidentiality about their own financial affairs and their readiness to
speculate about their rival’s affairs, the inadequate enforcement of disclosure and the opaque
nature of key cost drivers such as the market for television advertising, reliable information is

122
scarce. Besides, in the absence of context (and a suitable deflator), reference to, say, the ALP’s
1975 overdraft of $250,000 or its 2007 campaign debt of $8 million is somewhat meaningless. In
the argument of this chapter, party finances involve questions that go beyond the numbers;
raising and spending campaign money deals with questions that are inherently political: Who
donates? Who lends? Who raises the funds? Who controls the spending? And who is accountable?

The chapter begins by describing the parties’ initial funding methods. Drawing on the research
interviews, it then turns to the interventions by national secretaries Young and Combe in the
1970s to take control of the ALP’s funding, to boost campaign spending and to locate and develop
new sources of party funding. Labor’s introduction of public funding in time for the 1984 election
brought both parties a new source of funds, though this soon proved inadequate to fund
continuing campaign expenditure. Financial crises engulfed both parties in the 1990s leading to a
further call on taxpayer support. The Labor Party built and then dismembered a property portfolio,
and under Gray started competing effectively for business donations. The Liberal Party under Robb
and Crosby experienced a resurgence of long-standing federal-state disputes about fundraising
and campaign spending. In this narrative, while the Liberal Party’s financial resources were initially
much superior to those of the ALP, the ALP officials - perhaps because of their greater need - were
the more innovative in mobilising new sources of funding. Yet in the new millennium, spending
ever-increasing sums of new cash, both parties – notably the ALP - continued to struggle with
debt.

Federal Problems of Party Finance

As in so many other respects of party organisation, the financial arrangements of both major
parties were shaped by their federal structure, which protected the financial base of the state
party units to the early disadvantage of the nascent central offices. All key sources of funding
flowed in the first instance to the state level. Members paid their dues to local branches which are
affiliated in turn with state branches/divisions; there is no concept of party membership other than
via a state branch. Financial flows from the key interest groups and institutional supporters of both
the party of Capital and the party of Labour were also typically retained at the state level. Trade
unions, with roots pre-dating the Federation, were and remain affiliated with Labor’s state
branches. Private enterprise too, naturally gravitating to the anti-Labor political entity, operated in
markets that formed around capital cities and built their earliest ties with the state-based elements
of the conservative forces; in any event these parochial fragments only organised into a truly
national structure with the creation of the Liberal Party in the 1940s. These familiar problems of
federalism helped ensure that in both parties it was the state branches/divisions that held the
parties’ purse strings.

In the Labor Party, the state branches paid levies or ‘sustentation’ fees to the Federal office, which
were to be paid to the Federal Secretary 44. But in practice these funds were often late and never
adequate. Crisp notes that the federal elements of the party were ‘starved’ of regular income,
drolly asserting that 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’ (Crisp, 1955: 78; C. A.
Hughes, 1963: 654-5). Chamberlain’s 1961 proposal to create a full-time national office in
Canberra would have required a quadrupling of state levies, and was shelved (C. A. Hughes 1963:
655).

On the conservative side, political organisation was fragmented and dispersed. The United
Australia Party was entirely organised and funded at the state level by ‘shadowy’ finance

44
The ALP’s Federal Executive Rules of 1915 stated: ‘To meet the general expenses of the Executive, each
State shall pay to the Secretary not later than the 31 st of January each year a sum of £2, and towards
defraying the expense of each Interstate Conference the State Executive shall every third year pay a further
sum of £5 each’ (Weller and Lloyd, 1978: 5).

123
committees, made up of ‘small coteries of big business interests’ in the various state capitals (C.
A. Hughes, 1963: 647; Watson, 1979). The new Liberal Party insisted that it would ‘raise and
control its own funds (and) in this manner be free of any possibility of control from outside itself
and would determine its own destiny’ (cited in Starr 1980: 81). There was much initial optimism
that the federal party could fund itself through voluntary subscribers. Federal President Tom
Ritchie envisaged the Party funding its Secretariat with an annual budget of £1 million, rising to £2
to £3 million, from member and corporate subscriptions. Such aspirations were never attained –
though his successor, Richard Casey, did raise very large sums from the business community in
support of the Liberals’ anti-bank nationalisation campaign before the 1949 elections (A. L. May,
1968).45 In the event, however, it was federation that thwarted the national party’s financial
aspirations. As Katherine West (1965) has described, South Australia refused to contribute
anything, the other smaller states failed to meet the agreed pro rata formula; and ultimately the
two wealthiest states, New South Wales and Victoria, proved unable to carry the whole structure
themselves. Turning to business, the national party launched a Federal Fund in 1952 (Hancock
2000:131). The initial list of target donors - individuals and companies in Victoria and New South
Wales - gradually grew longer and more inclusive; by 1958 the party’s Federal Treasurer, Sydney
stockbroker Stanley Utz, proposed that the federal office become the sole collector of donations
from any company that operated across interstate borders, keeping what was needed for the
federal secretariat and only then distributing the balance among the states. As West records, the
proposal led to an explosion at the 1959 Federal Council – ‘though not in the columns of the
press’. Out of need, smaller states backed Canberra while the well-off Victorian and New South
Wales divisions bitterly opposed the Federal incursions into their local networks (West, 1965: 237-
243). Andrew Robb’s frustration (described in chapter Five) at being unable to access state
division records for the purposes of direct solicitation was only a late manifestation of deeply-
entrenched jealousies surrounding the national organisation’s efforts to raise funds within the state
divisions.

Contrasting Models of Centralised Funding

Each party developed a different approach to dealing with these state-based constraints on their
national activities. From its foundation, the Liberal Party vested responsibility for raising and
controlling its funds in the ‘party organisation’; Menzies insisted the ‘party in office’ not be
beholden, as the UAP had been, to extra-organisational financiers (Menzies, 1967: 291-2). This
became an article of faith in the Liberal Party, cited favourably in 1975 by Malcolm Fraser, who
wanted to insulate himself and the parliamentary party from contact with, and even awareness of
their identity of, donors (Oakes 1976: 270), and in 2011 by Peter Reith in his post-election review
(Reith, 2011: 20). It was not the Federal Director however who carried primary responsibility for
fundraising. The closest Willoughby got to fundraising was ‘lobbying’ the government on behalf of
donors and discretely recommending them for Imperial honours (Hancock 2000: 130).
Responsibility lay instead with the party’s Federal Treasurer. This is an honorary position on the
Federal Executive that has been filled by a series of twelve businessmen drawn from either the
Melbourne or Sydney business communities.46 According to the Federal Directors, their relationship
with the party Treasurer was one of their most important relationships. Robert Crichton-Brown, in
the words of Eggleton, was part of ‘a great duo’ with party President John Atwill. They:

had confidence in the Secretariat. If ever we needed money they made sure it was
available.

45
According to the well-connected journalist Don Whitington (1961), this was as much as £1 million, including
£100,000 from business connections in England; Casey’s biographer W J Hudson (Hudson, 1993) put it at a
perhaps more realistic but still impressive £250,000.
46
Sydney-based Treasurers were B. F. Dargan (1949-56), Stanley Utz (1956-62), Sir Robert Crichton-Brown
(1974-85), David Clarke (1987-89), Malcolm Turnbull (2002-03), Mark Bethwaite (2006-08), and Michael
Yabsley (2008-11). Melbourne-Based Treasurers were Sir William Anderson (1962-98), Sir Charles McGrath
(1968-74), John Elliot (1985-87), Ronald Walker (1989-2002), and John Calvert-Jones (2003-06).

124
John Elliott was also in Eggleton’s words ‘very successful at raising money. Elliott’s role in luring
Eggleton back from London in 1974 with an ‘offer I couldn’t refuse’ has already been noted. Elliott
went on to play a critical role, as Federal Treasurer (1985-1987) and President (1987-1990) in
funding the Federal Secretariat through the wilderness years in opposition. In the immediate
aftermath of the 1987 election defeat, Elliott and Eggleton met in Sydney (Ramsey, 2009);
quizzed by Elliott as to his needs at the secretariat, Eggleton recalled:

(He) said, ‘We’ll increase the budget and expand your staff, and get you people in that you
want’. It was in that context that I got in Andrew (Robb) … as deputy.

Another Melbourne businessman, Ron Walker, became the party’s longest serving Federal
Treasurer (1989-2002). Walker, who simultaneously served as co-treasurer of the British
Conservative Party, was critical in restoring the Party’s fortunes after the debacle of the 1993
defeat, both through fundraising from the business community and in negotiating an overdraft
with the party’s bank, the National Australia Bank (Williams 1997: 84-88). Walker appears to have
been excessively thrifty in denying Eggleton his financial entitlements after his resignation
(Gordon, 1991), but as a fundraiser he was, in the admiring words of Andrew Robb, ‘in a league of
his own’:

He had the relationships at the ‘top end of town’, where he could extract more than
anyone else. He was talking to his peers. Often there’d be all sorts of other things – he had
relationships in a commercial sense and they’d all have their charities. He’d be giving them
I think from his own company to their charities – you know. There’d be six deals going on,
one of which was the Liberal Party. Nothing improper about it, he just had relationships.

Taking a diametrically opposite approach, the Labor Party’s fundraising model had the
parliamentary leadership performing the central role. Elected party leader in 1935, the former
journalist John Curtin recognised the electoral importance of, and the expense of, the emerging
communications media such as radio broadcasting and display advertising in the press. Curtin
persuaded the party’s Federal Conference to establish a new fund which would hold 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, it was under the legal control of three
trustees one of whom was Curtin and his successors as party leader. As Federal Secretary,
McNamara was appointed one of the first trustees, but over time the other trustees were
appointed from the party caucus. In any event the fund in practical terms was at the disposal of
the party leader (Overacker, 1952: 284-5; Crisp, 1955: 68, 88-92). Chifley and Evatt succeeded
Curtin as prime controllers of the Fund; journalist Alan Reid reportedly claimed that Chifley had,
‘during an election campaign’, carried £32,000 in cash to a bank and deposited it in the Trust
Account (recorded in Cameron, 1990: 482). In the 1950s, Rawson notes that the Fund’s ‘size,
sources and use’ was known only in general terms, though it had been attacked by the Democratic
Labor Party during the Split as a ‘slush fund’.

Labor’s approach to fundraising, and the role of the Leader’s Fund, cannot be fully understood
without a critical evaluation of the party’s relationship with Sim Rubensohn. South-African born,
Rubensohn was educated in Sydney, and after working in the Sydney-based Goldberg Advertising
agency, established his own advertising firm Hansen-Rubensohn47 in 1928. The ALP engaged
Rubensohn at both the New South Wales and national level in the late 1920s or early 1930s and –
with the notable exception of his switch to Menzies in 1949 – he remained Labor’s advertising
consultant until 1974. As Rawson makes clear, the Leader’s Fund while complex in its sources of
income, was simple in its disbursement: it was devoted to paying Hansen-Rubensohn for campaign
advertising.

47
The firm was established as a partnership but though Rupert Hansen departed within the first year his
surname survived. In 1959 Rubensohn sold the firm to an American multinational to create Hansen
Rubensohn-McCann Erikson and became governing director of the new company (Goot, 2002)

125
On advertising grounds alone, such a relationship would be significant. Access to a skilled
commercial advertising agency improved Labor’s campaign skills far beyond its preparedness to
spend and the capacity of its few, overworked, staff. Rawson suggests Labor probably got better
value for money from Rubensohn than it could have acquired any other way (Rawson 1961: 75-6).
The corollary of course, which Rawson does not spell out, is that from a commercial point of view
the Labor account was unprofitable for Rubensohn. Wyndham acknowledged that Rubensohn
‘carried’ Labor, not charging commercial rates for the advertising services and permitting late
payment: ‘he didn’t push for the money’ (Wyndham). 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’ (Braund, 1978: 286).48

But Rubensohn’s generosity came with strings attached. Rubensohn played a double role, unique
in Australian party politics, as both advertiser and fundraiser for Labor. That is, he was the
principal recipient of outflows from the Leader’s Fund while also acting as a major conduit for
inflows. Given his agency was ‘one of the largest businesses of its kind in Australia’ (Rawson
1960:76), whose clients included the government-owned airline TAA, NSW statutory corporations,
and private companies including Caltex Oil, Philips Electrical Industries and Marrickville Holdings
(Goot, 2002), Rubensohn’s links into the Australian business community were valuable and rare
for a union-based Party with a still-meaningful commitment to a socialisation objective. Certainly
Labor parliamentarians and officials themselves lacked the business networks that drove
fundraising in the Liberal Party. As Wyndham commented of Opposition Leader Arthur Calwell’s
fundraising abilities:

Private donors? Well, Arthur [pause] didn’t have the pulling power.

The Rubensohn connection was a witch’s brew of potential – if not actual - conflicts of interest.
Rubensohn candidly acknowledged that his relationship with Labor – a ‘combination of friendship
with fundraising’ – allowed him not only to advise the Labor Party but ‘also to complain’ (Braund
1978: 285). 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, in exchange
for campaign donations; in turn, Labor parliamentarians were electorally reliant on his fundraising
and campaign skills and moreover were responsible for disbursing funds to him from a confidential
trust account. A striking example of the overlap between political and commercial interests is
provided by Marrickville Holdings, a margarine manufacturer whose business prospects were
limited by Commonwealth and state government protection of the dairy industry. After Marrickville
lost its High Court appeals against the quotas, the company’s managing director and then
chairman, Dick Crebbin, engaged Rubensohn in the late 1960s to plan a television advertising
campaign to lobby for change: the ads, which featured a margarine-buying housewife ‘Mrs Jones’
drew significant public attention to the cause. Meanwhile 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 abolish quotas on margarine production.

These contrasting models of centralised fundraising – one built around the party’s honorary
Treasurer and the other built around the parliamentary leader – were both flawed. The Liberal
Party could not resolve tensions between the state divisions and the centre while Labor found itself
poorly funded and severely conflicted. By one estimate in 1961, the Liberal Party employed
between 60 and 70 full-time staff in well-appointed offices around Australia, in addition to as many
as 40 full-time field organisers and incurred large telephone and printing costs. By contrast the
ALP organisation was ‘weak in the extreme, largely because of lack of funds’ (Whitington 1961;
see also C. A. Hughes 1963: 655).

48
The quoted words from Rubensohn in this section are reported in indirect speech by Braund, who interviewed
Rubensohn in December 1977 for her thesis. Braund is the daughter of Rubensohn.

126
 ALP: Reforming Internal Funding

It is no coincidence that the organisational breakthrough in party fundraising came in the Labor
Party, through the intervention of the first national campaign directors. The cost of the new style
of campaign management, with its paid staff, market research and national television advertising,
gave first Young and then Combe the incentive, as national campaign director, to overhaul Labor’s
finances. The party’s relationship with Rubensohn was the first to be challenged. Young’s research-
driven and emotive communications style of the ‘It’s Time’ campaign was at odds with
Rubensohn’s more rational appeals to voter interests (Mills 1986: 95). Moreover, Rubensohn’s
willingness to ‘carry’ Labor’s debt from one campaign to the next was being seen in a different
light – less an act of generosity than of capture. After Young was elected national secretary in
1969, he noted that:

we still owed many thousands of dollars to the advertising agency for the 1966 election
and the 1967 Senate election, and we had yet to commence raising funds for the 1969
election (M. Young, 1986: 96).49

He later boasted that the 1972 election was the ‘first time in decades’ that the ALP had finished a
campaign free of debt; his criticism of both Rubensohn and Wyndham is implicit but clear:

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 (M.
Young, 1986: 98).

Combe took the next step, shifting responsibility for Labor Party fund-raising out of the
parliamentary wing and into the organisation and, specifically, into Head Office. He advanced on
several avenues. In regards to the Leader’s Trust Fund, he negotiated an agreement that the
proceeds of the Fund would be directed to campaign purposes, ensuring that final decisions on its
disbursement would lie with the Secretariat not the parliamentary party. As late as 1974, Combe
recalled this fund remained the recipient of ‘most of money raised for the election’, and while
Whitlam as Prime Minister had ceased to be a trustee, ownership of the Fund essentially remained
with the parliamentary party:

A lot of money had been raised through what was called the Leaders Trust Fund … by
Gough (Whitlam) in Opposition … and was allocated at the discretion of the leader. … So
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.50

This breakthrough in turn allowed Combe to finally sever the relationship with Rubensohn. He
identified the agent’s fundraising role for the party, and the party’s chronic debt to its agent, as
the interrelated triggers:

49
Young was blunter in his 1971 report to the National Executive regarding fundraising for the 1969 Federal
election: ‘The (national campaign) committee was charged in the first instance with raising $25,000 to pay
outstanding accounts from previous campaigns. Not a very inspiring way to start the campaign off, to say the
least’ (Blewett, 1973)
50
The Fund continued to be a source of controversy within the parliamentary party following the defeat of the
Whitlam Government. Clyde Cameron was one MP who frequently probed around the edges of the fund, asking
questions about its signatories, cash flows and purposes and even puzzled as to whether there was more than
one fund. Cameron objected to paying the legal expenses Whitlam incurred defending himself against the
Sankey conspiracy charges ‘while he persisted in his refusal to allow the Party to know what the funds were
still in the account or accounts he controls’ (Cameron 1990:481-2).

127
 Since 1949 the party had used Sim Rubensohn. It had never been able to do otherwise
because Sim had also raised the money for election campaigns, a lot of which came from
people seeking abolition of margarine quotas. But there was always a residual debt left to
… Hansen Rubensohn-McCann Erikson at the end of an election campaign - which in effect
meant you couldn’t change agencies. After the 1974 election campaign, 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. How was this done? … It was really, as I recall, the transfer of
that money (from the Leader’s Trust Fund) that enabled us to pay out Hansen Rubensohn-
McCann Erikson and be debt free, which then enabled us to go to market and choose an
advertising agency we wanted to work with.

For his part, Rubensohn professed to have ‘retired’ from political advertising, refusing to play
second fiddle in Labor’s now-enlarged and market research-driven campaign team (Braund 1978:
287n).

Combe’s ambitions to expand the financial base of the Secretariat were broader still. Having
broken the party’s debt cycle, he embarked on the national party’s first attempt to escape the cash
basis of party operations, with its attendant volatility and reliance on state branch support:

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 after getting it printed in his home state of
South Australia (Oakes, 1981). But his most substantial fundraising initiative was to acquire a
portfolio of income-earning properties. Labor’s state branches had pointed the way: the New South
Wales branch earned income from its investment in the union-owned radio station 2KY; unions
also owned radio stations in Newcastle and Melbourne (Rawson 1961: 117; Hughes 1963: 651).
But Combe had his eyes on becoming a landlord. The then-National Capital Development
Commission provided low-cost leases to national organisations to encourage them to build and
occupy their national headquarters. In October 1973 Combe secured National Executive approval
to build on the ALP’s block in the Canberra suburb of Barton, and to borrow $1.5 million from the
Commonwealth Bank for this purpose; by mid-1974 the foundation stone was laid on John Curtin
House:

Of course at a time of escalating interest rate costs, costs blew out, and by the time we
finished realistically we ended up with a building that cost about $2.6 million of which we
borrowed 2.5.

Combe’s plan was for the building to earn funds in two ways: through rental income (tenants from
1976 included the Commonwealth Bank and some other Commonwealth agencies) and as equity
which could be mortgaged to generate campaign 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.

Labor’s property investment was on a scale larger than any other party. 51 The Liberal Party had
directly or indirectly owned its national headquarters in Barton since 1965. But Menzies House was
fully occupied by the Party itself and never earned rental income; moreover the Party’s
constitution forbids it being mortgaged. A closer model for Combe’s strategy was provided by the

51
This paragraph draws on the Royal Commission report (Hunt, 2004: Ch 6).

128
then-Country Party which had erected its national headquarters, John McEwen House, in Barton in
1968 and leased it to various Commonwealth agencies in 1973-1976 and 1983-92. But Combe’s
vision was broader still. John Curtin House was and remains considerably larger than any other
party headquarters, a substantial three-storey building with a net lettable area of 4240 square
metres; R G Menzies House, enlarged and refurbished in 1994, stands two-storeys high with a net
lettable area of 845m2, while John McEwen House, refurbished and enlarged in 1996, is a three-
level building of 2071m2. Combe envisaged further property acquisitions as well, also designed to
earn rental income and build up an asset base for the party; by 1980 he had engineered Labor’s
purchase of another commercial building, in the Canberra suburb of Braddon:

At my last Executive meeting before I handed over to Bob (McMullan), we got through the
purchase of another building. In other words the whole idea of the John Curtin House
Limited entity was it would continue to become an aggregator of property.

Taken together, these fundraising initiatives allowed Combe to regard his financial restructuring as
his ‘single biggest achievement’, because it placed:

the national entities of the party on a very solid financial footing which made the party
much wealthier than its opponents, and created a situation in which it was capable of
planning an election campaign budget which it was able to borrow for, against the equity
in a real estate 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
the 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. When I left, the party had become much
wealthier at the national level than its rivals. I believe today that the federal party in terms
of assets is substantially better off than pretty well all the state branches, which is a huge
turn around. It should be much better off again but probably mistakes (were) made along
the way there.

Again, the purpose is to improve campaign funding:

I think that gave the party the opportunity to plan much more sensibly for elections,
setting budgets knowing that you could go into debt which could be covered by the equity
in its property portfolio. That was a major change.

Notwithstanding these initiatives, however, Labor’s finances remained under severe pressure,
notably after the dismissal of the Whitlam Government given the challenge in 1975 of fighting its
third Federal elections in three years. At the beginning of the 1975 campaign Combe and Whitlam
agreed to a suggestion, from the former Victorian state secretary Bill Hartley, 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 increased Labor’s advertising spend as the campaign
progressed. When the promised funds failed to appear, Labor ended the campaign owing a
substantial sum to its new advertising agency, Mullins Clarke and Ralph, which faced bankruptcy
as a result (Oakes, 1976: 270-95; Cameron, 1990: 26, 28, 83). Combe attributes this ‘act of
madness’ to the financial pressures facing the party at the time:

There is another story about ‘75 that I don’t want to go into now, but it’s the whole paying
for the campaign, 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

129
 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 then-party President, Bob Hawke, chaired a Federal Executive inquiry into the affairs 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 he was ‘prepared to put it down to the
thoughtless reaction of a Secretary who was strapped for funds’ (Hawke, 1994: 78-9). Combe
remained as party secretary through defeats in the 1977 and 1980 election campaigns. When
McMullan took over the National Secretariat after the 1980 election, he found Labor’s finances in
poor shape:

We had no money. David had started to professionalise the fundraising. But we really had
been in Opposition a long time and we had pre-75 not much in the way of modern – what
we call modern – fundraising. So we didn’t have much dough.

ALP: Promoting Public Campaign Financing

Labor Party officials were also closely associated with the introduction of the system of public
funding of party election campaigns. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1974, Mick Young
used his maiden speech to call for a system of Government funding and auditing of election
campaign costs. Young described the estimated $5m cost of the 1972 and 1974 campaigns as
‘socially wasteful’ and said it should be ‘rationalised as a matter of urgency’, while political
fundraising – ‘stomping around the country drumming up funds for election campaigns’ - was an
‘obnoxious political chore’:

There is something demeaning about having to hawk the principles of your political party
in this way. … 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 (M. Young, 1974: 234-8).

With campaign spending already dominated by television advertising - and with costs set to rise
further with the introduction of colour television - Young called for ‘a rational set of laws governing
campaign spending’. The Whitlam Government did legislate to limit campaign expenditure and
compel disclosure of campaign donations, but the bill was twice rejected by the Senate in 1975
(Whitlam, 1985: 681-3). In 1983, as Special Minister for State in the new-elected Hawke
Government, Young revived the push, with McMullan also keen to ‘organise a system in which the
party does not have to go cap-in-hand to its rank-and-file members or to the corporate bosses for
donations every time an election is called’ (O'Neill, 1984). Parliament amended the Commonwealth
Electoral Act52 to pay parties for their campaign costs according to their primary vote (where they
obtain at least 4% of the total formal first preference votes). This ensured that the two major
parties would always take the lion’s share of the public funds (Table 6, below); in exchange,
parties were compelled to disclose campaign donations above a certain threshold (Beazley, 1983:
2213). The new system of public funding took effect in time for parties and candidates to receive
$7.8 million after the 1984 campaign.

This was not an initiative with bipartisan support. Despite welcoming the inflow of funds from the
taxpayer, the Liberal Party had opposed the legislation fearing the disclosure provisions would
deter its corporate donors; Young, while avoiding partisan commentary, probably knew this could
be the case. As Robb and Crosby explained:

52
Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, as amended by the Commonwealth Electoral Legislation Amendment Act
1983.

130
 The price of transparency was a lot less money. A lot of people just didn’t want to be
(involved) (Robb).

As disclosure intensified – it came in and then intensified – some corporate donors no

longer donated obviously, for a whole range of reasons (Crosby).

While under the legislation public funding was allocated on the basis of votes received by
candidates, the actual payments were not made to the candidates or the parliamentary party but
to the party organisation. Party officials are prominently involved in the administration of public
funding and are responsible for all compliance activities: lodging claims for public funding
payments, receiving the payments and furnishing details of the party’s campaign expenses and
campaign donations. The legislation specifies that the party ‘agent’ was the only person who could
perform these tasks on behalf of a party (Australia, 1984; Australian Electoral Commission, 1986:
2-3). But there was a twist to this rule. Campaigns may have been increasingly managed on a
national basis, but the parliamentary electoral process itself is organised around electorates within
each state (Australian Electoral Commission, 1991: 7; 1995: 9). So although this was
Commonwealth legislation providing national funds in relation to national election campaigns, the
legislation required ‘agents’ to be state not national party officials.

In terms of the three-face two-level framework of party structure set out in Chapter One, such
payments strengthened the party organisation at the expense of the party in office - but within
that organisational face, strengthened the state units at the expense of the central office. From the
point of view of the national officials, this was unacceptable: deep-seated problems of federal
coordination resurfaced in both parties and the authority of the national office – and of the national
campaign structure – was weakened. Who in the party really controlled the public funds? Would
state branches share public funds with the national office? Would they accurately report their
campaign costs? How could the national office recoup its national campaign spending?

Table 6: Major Party Receipts as a Percentage of Total Public Funding

Federal Total election ALP receipts Liberal receipts ALP + Lib

election funding $ as % of
total
1984 7 806 778
1987 10 298 657 4,759,413 3,495,954 80.1
1990 12,878,920 5,300,868 4,612,260 77.0
1993 14,898,807 7,098,641 5,697,592 85.9
1996 32,154,801 12,856,382 12,489,503 78.8
1998 33,920,787 14,010,512 11,488,881 75.2
2001 38,559,409 14,917,024 14,492,349 76.3
2004 41,926,159 16,710,043 17,956,326 82.7
2007 49,002,639 22,030,460 18,133,645 81.2
2010 53,163,385 21,225,869 21,097,860 79.6
Source: Australian Electoral Commission Funding and Disclosure Reports

Over the first decade of the legislation, covering the federal elections in 1984, 1987, 1990 and
1993, both parties experimented with various methods of dealing with this problem (Appendix
Three, Table 9). State parties were able to lodge an ‘apportionment statement’ with the Australian
Electoral Commission after each campaign in which the national secretariat outlined its own
campaign expenditure within each state; invoices or auditor’s certificates were required to
demonstrate their apportionment. The funds were still paid to the state branches, but these
branches had essentially acknowledged the national origins of this portion of their campaign
expenditure. The ALP proved faster at achieving national coordination: in 1990, all the ALP state
and territory agents lodged nil returns while the national office under Hogg claimed responsibility
for 100 per cent of the spending.

Yet this raised new accountability concerns in the national office. In 1991 Hogg was charged with
failing to disclose $2.2 million in small donations to the ALP in the party’s returns between 1987

131
and 1990. He pleaded guilty, claiming he had misinterpreted his obligations under the legislation,
and received a good behaviour bond without conviction (Campbell, 1991). At the National Press
Club after the 1993 election he said he was ‘a little bit concerned’ that as national secretary he
might be personally responsible for data provided from deep within the party organisation –’what
may happen at the Koo-wee-rup branch?’ – which he could not monitor or control. He said party
officials ‘deserved a clause in the sort of way than an auditor does, or an accountant does, ‘to the
best of their endeavours’ et cetera’ (Hogg, 1993 (24 March)). The same issues concerned Liberal
Party officials too. Crosby was concerned that the state divisions might play ‘funny buggers’ with
information which the Federal Office had to disclose. Around 1999 he sought changes to the party
Constitution ‘to make sure they had to give you the information’:

They baulked at it, so they voted against that. In the end there has never been a practical
problem, it was just potential.

As we shall see, problems of federal coordination continued to dog the Liberal Party for the
remainder of the decade.

ALP and Liberal Party: Funding Crises of the 1990s and Beyond

Despite the high hopes espoused by its Labor Party founders, public funding failed to cap electoral
expenditure or to provide financial certainty for either party. By the 1990s both parties were
experiencing significant financial crises. Hogg’s first campaign as national secretary – the
successful re-election of the Hawke Government in 1990 – came at a significant financial cost.
Campaigning costs, especially the cost of television advertising, had risen through the 1980s and
Labor was also rolling out its Polfile data base management system to marginal electorates. Public
funding receipts covered a shrinking proportion of campaign expenditure (Hughes 1990: 151 citing
AEC data). In Hogg’s words:

After the ‘90 election we were quite broke. Public funding had helped but it was still
relatively modest compared to the outlays.

With a campaign debt of some $5 million and facing rising interest rates:

we had to find basically $20,000 dollars a week just to stop the debt getting out of control
(Gray).

Gray was appointed as assistant national secretary with specific responsibility for fundraising, with
a brief to tap new sources of funding through corporate donations. Setting up a program of visits
to corporate headquarters, he solicited donations using the argument that companies should make
‘moderate even-handed donations to both sides of politics (which thereby) guarantees the strength
and integrity of our party system’ (Gray, 1996: 50).53 But the funding crisis forced more extreme
financial restructuring. Combe’s legacy, John Curtin House, was partly sold to the Australian
Council of Trade Unions to help repay its debt. Hogg also embarked on a new property
development to generate longer-term rental income. Like John Curtin House, land for a new
property was available for national associations but tenants were restricted to other national
associations or government agencies (Hunt 2004: 15). Labor’s new headquarters was to be owned
by John Curtin House Ltd and, in the party’s centenary year, was called Centenary House. Unlike
Labor’s first foray into property development, the Centenary House transaction became deeply
controversial, leading to long-drawn out partisan attack over the generous rental agreements
signed with two Commonwealth agencies, the Auditor-General and the Australian National Audit
Office. Two Royal Commissions were set up, by the Keating Government and then the Howard
Government, to investigate the deal (Morling, 1994; Hunt, 2004). Hogg insists:

53
Gray was not the first Labor official to seek corporate donations but did so on a more systematic basis.
Young had driven fundraising targets for the national campaign committee in 1972 and took a ‘prominent’ role
in fundraising (Blewett 1973: 13). In the 1980s, with former New South Wales state secretary, then Senator,
Graham Richardson, acting as ‘bagman’, the Hawke Government secured large donations from a new
generation of corporate entrepreneurs and financiers (Wilkinson, 1996).

132
 There was nothing wrong with it. I kept the parliamentary party remote from it because
we were in Government, and so that no questions could be asked. Two Royal Commissions
ensued. The issue was rents and the rental escalator being out of kilter with the market.
We built it on the basis that it had to pay its way like any commercial enterprise. We were
paying 13% on a $22 million building, so we struck the base rate of rent plus the growth
factor. Every smartie said interest rates would not fall, but when they did the rent
escalator looked obscene … I was cross-examined in public for many hours. I structured it
totally at arm’s length from the Government.

Commissioner Hunt did find the terms of the lease were ‘excessively favourable’ to the ALP. But
both Morling and Hunt were satisfied with Hogg’s probity, Hunt stating no criticism should be
levelled at him, the ALP, or John Curtin House Ltd.

The property strategy was vigorously pursued by Hogg’s successor Gray who, as we have seen
(p36), identifies building the party’s asset base as a defining characteristic of his role as national
secretary. But Gray’s efforts to build a national party in part through underwriting property
purchases by fiscally weak state branches carried financial risk, as he discovered in late 1994
when the New South Wales branch found itself ‘financially distressed’. A commercial property
development was planned which would allow the branch to trade out of its difficulties; it involved
consolidating two sites in Sydney, containing an Australian Workers Union-owned building and an
ALP-owned building to develop a single high-rise block. According to Gray, the New South Wales
branch would be able to:

take the development profit to repair the finances of the NSW branch and we (the Federal
office) get a drink on the way through. It was exactly the right plan, no doubt about that.
The problem is, to do commercial property development in the CBD Sydney you’ve got to
have deep pockets, and we didn’t have deep pockets. ... To the extent we had deep
pockets we had one, it was mine, and the NSW branch had its hand well and truly in it.
That was my decision supported by the board of John Curtin House.

John Curtin House Ltd had provided a $1.7 million guarantee to the project:

But when the guarantee got called in, it ended up costing us $1.7 million. That one big hit
had substantial implications for John Curtin House, that really meant I had to cut my cloth.

Alongside these promising but turbulent initiatives, Labor continued to target donations from the
business community. Gray’s fundraising proved effective, diversifying Labor’s revenue streams
from its reliance on trade union funding, and opening up a new front in party competition. The
Liberals felt their superiority in corporate fundraising was being eroded, as Robb acknowledged:

Gary Gray in particular spent several years, even when he was deputy to Hogg, or
assistant or whatever they call it, he 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. 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 give 160, but they’d give 80 each instead of 140 and 20.

Nor were the Liberals able to counter by targeting Labor’s long-standing stream of funding from
affiliated trade unions, resulting in what Robb described as a 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. 54

54
This became a regular point of contention with Labor officials denying any such disparity – see for example
Gray 1996: 49 ‘We do get a lot (of money from trade unions) but nowhere near the figures that get bandied
about.’

133
As national secretary Gray introduced a binding ‘Code of Conduct for Fundraising’ into the party
Platform in 1994 (Australian Labor Party, 1994). The Code emphasises that it is the ‘organisational
wing’ that is responsible for fundraising – specifically, that the national secretary is the ‘National
Director of Fundraising’ – and forbids the party from accepting funds intended to obtain ALP
support for specific actions, attitudes or public statements.

Corporate donations are volatile and driven in part by donors’ assessments of the party’s likely
success in the forthcoming election. The Liberal Party’s corporate funding dried up under the
unsuccessful Downer leadership (Williams 1997: 17), while for the ALP at the turn of the
millennium resources – both staff and donations – were also volatile:

I guess the extra resources come when it looks like you’re going to win and people want to
get on board. So in early 2001 people were getting on board (but) by mid-2003 … people
(were) getting off-board. … Clearly this was a party going through some pain and
adjustment, and they’re not the circumstances that attract support (Walsh).

Both parties, at the state and national levels, have become ever more sophisticated and elaborate
in wooing corporate donations. Efforts include inviting company representatives 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 through fundraising arms such as (at the state level)
the Liberal Party’s Millennium Forum and the ALP’s Progressive Business entity. Close to half the
parties’ revenues are channelled through ‘associated entities’ – such as the Liberals’ Greenfields
and Cormack Foundations and the ALP’s Labor Victory Fund - which arguably exist to cloak the
identities of corporate and other external party donors (S. Young & Tham, 2006: 18-9).

A third Labor initiative ‘precipitated’ by its 1990 debt crisis (S. Young & Tham, 2006: 107) was a
short-lived effort by the Hawke Government to impose a legislative cap on campaign expenditure.
The Political Broadcasts and Political Disclosures Act 1991 banned paid television advertising
during election campaigns proposing instead to supply parties with free air-time. Challenged in the
High Court by a group of television networks, the legislation was struck down as being in breach of
an implied Constitutional freedom of political communication (Orr, 2010: 169-70).

In any event, such initiatives did not provide Labor with an adequate war-chest for the 1993
campaign, dubbed ‘unwinnable’ because of the longevity and unpopularity of the Labor
Government. As Hogg recalls, lacks of funds forced him to cut back spending on both market
research and television advertising:

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. … I remember coming to Singleton’s
(advertising agency) and saying, ‘We need a very hard hitting ad campaign, but there’s no
money for production. Think of simple ways of doing it’. And they did. It was quite simple
– and effective. We couldn’t afford lavish production – not on film but video.

In the same period, the Liberal Party was also experiencing financial crisis. Shattered by the 1993
defeat, the Party also had to deal with a debt of around $5 million. Robb was proud of having
saved ‘$600,000’ by selecting his own advertising team in 1996 in place of the full service agency
George Patterson. According to Crosby, the federal party was ‘pretty skint financially and had to
get bank support’. The managing director of the National Australia Bank, Don Argus, was ‘pressing’
for security in the form of a mortgage over the newly-refurbished Menzies House (Williams 1997:
17). The party’s constitution however forbade this course, so the party Treasurer, Ron Walker,
opted to give Argus a personal guarantee. After the 1996 election victory, when the party could
not repay the loan, that guarantee was called in. In circumstances that later became the subject of
scrutiny by the Australian Electoral Commission, Walker paid out the debt. He later denied having
received donations from any third party 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

134
had no disclosure obligations. Quizzed in 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
Labor Party constantly says there is a loan in place and so forth. The fact is that there is
not. We have made that point consistently (Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Reform,
1999, 22 June 1999: 197) .

The Australian Electoral Commission expressed concern about the potential of transactions such as
this to circumvent the disclosure provisions of the public funding legislation. The AEC also noted
that Greenfields treated its debtor the Liberal Party ‘in an uncommonly favourable manner’, not
charging interest and insisting on modest annual repayments (Australian Electoral Commission,
2000: Part 5).

These financial crises led the parties to cooperate in a substantial new call on the taxpayer.
Negotiations between Hogg and Robb led to 1995 legislation that lifted the value of each Senate
and House of Representatives vote (Millett, 1994; Wright, 1994).55 Public funding payments
arising from the 1996 election were more than double the amount of the 1993 campaign (Table 6).
The Australian Electoral Commission noted that most of the major parties had been able to retire
debt and restore their profitability in the subsequent, 1998, campaign (cited in Johns, 2006: 52).

As had happened after 1984, the ALP was far more efficient at ensuring the public funds were
centralised in the national Head Office. Replacing the cumbersome apportionment process, Labor
state and territory offices lodged ‘redirection agreements’ with the Australian Electoral Commission
which essentially instructed it to redirect their entitlements to the national office. Thus after the
1996 campaign, Labor’s entire public funding receipts of $12.8 million were paid in the form of a
single cheque made out personally to the ALP’s national ‘agent’, national secretary Gary Gray. 56
For the Liberal Party however the new funding led to a revival of squabbling between the Federal
and state divisions. After winning office in 1996, the party appears to have strongly decentralised
its public funding receipts. For the three election campaigns of 1996, 1998 and 2001, state and
territory divisions claimed and received all public funds. Both Robb and Crosby recall ‘tortuous’
negotiations with the states to redistribute the funds with the federal office:

We would negotiate each time, how much of the public funding went to the Head Office
and how much (went to the states). … Usually what went to the states reflected the
agreements we had already struck back on seat-by-seat (negotiations) [as described in
chapter Five] (Robb).

There used to be an agreement with the states, where the states would agree a certain
expenditure from the public funding money. That included an amount that the states were
supposed to pay to the Federal Secretariat to cover television and radio advertising and so
forth. … The Feds, to ensure they could run an advertising campaign, negotiated with each
state - and it was quite a tortuous process where you had to get the states to agree - to
spend a certain proportion on the marginal seats, and to pay a certain proportion to the

55
By 1993, inflation adjustment had lifted the payment rate for each House of Representatives primary vote to
100.787 cents, and for each Senate vote to 50.393 cents. The 1995 amendments lifted the payment rate to
$1.50 for both House and Senate votes. The new legislation also substantially eliminated the obligation on
parties to disclose details of their campaign expenditure (Young and Tham 2006: 99).
56
The Australian Democrats party also put in place a similar centralised arrangement from 1996 where all
payments were made to a ‘principal agent’. The Commission became concerned, ‘particularly given the very
large amounts of funding now being paid to individuals as agents of political parties’ that party officials were
not legally required to hand over the funds to the party. A Commission official told one newspaper reporter
that 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.’ Payments were thereafter made
to parties not individuals (Australian Electoral Commission, 1997; Dore, 1998 (14 March))

135
 Feds to fund the central campaign. That was always a negotiation with the Feds always –
you were on the back foot, you were mendicant (Crosby).

Robb recognised this solution was managed ‘not as effectively as the Labor Party’, and both he and
Crosby recognise that some states managed to retain public funding at the expense of the federal
party:

I knew that they (the states) weren’t just pocketing it. A little of that went on. But … by
the end of it the resources were somewhat more certain, and the distribution of them
between the Feds and the states was certainly more certain. The Feds had a better base.
… (But financial relations with the states) 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. So the financial side was probably the biggest
frustration (Robb).

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. So the money wasn’t always
acquitted on campaigns in the way it was intended. … There were times when there were
fights with the Victorians, for example, who didn't want the Feds to be involved at all,
when Victoria very much was the machine, the Liberal machine (Crosby).

Indeed Crosby recalled that he himself, in his earlier role as state director of the Queensland
division, 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, giving rise to what he called ‘one of the
most significant changes’ in the party’s handling of public funds. In advance of the 2001 election,
Prime Minister Howard got ‘jacked off’ by the ‘rear-guard action by some of the states’ and moved
to amend the public funding legislation in Parliament. The Commonwealth Electoral Amendment
Act (2002) ensured that the Liberal Party’s public funding entitlements would be paid to its Federal
Secretariat rather than its state divisions:

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 (Slipper, 2001).

The new arrangements thus gave the Federal Office effective control of the funds, reversing the
previous position where it had been ‘on the back foot … mendicant’ (Crosby). The achievement did
not come without public gloating from Labor: the legislation was about imposing on the Liberal
Party ‘a resolution to its incessant internal bickering about the disbursement of public funding
within their party’, while the ALP had used the ‘simple mechanism’ in the existing legislation – the
redirection agreements – to manage the internal allocation of its public funding (Faulkner, 2001).

Despite the injection of tens of millions of public dollars public funding, the parties’ debt crises of
the 1990s were succeeded by further campaign debts in the new millennium. Centenary House,
built amid furore to earn an enduring cash income, was sold under Tim Gartrell’s watch in 2005.
Just as John Curtin House had been part-sold to pay the debts of the 1990 campaign, the
Centenary House sale proceeds - reportedly more than $30 million – were devoted to pay
campaign costs. Hogg reflected with some disappointment on the sale:

136
 That building – my effort, bluntly, and (Lend Lease) - was sold, paid for two winning state
election campaigns and funded the last (2007) federal campaign when they sold it
(Hogg).57

Even so, the 2007 campaign also ended with the ALP carrying a very significant debt burden,
estimated by Bitar as at ‘about $8 million’. This was after receiving public funding of $22 million.

The Liberal Party post-millennium does not appear to have plumbed the same depths of
indebtedness and crisis as Labor. Yet funding problems recur, often as proxies for broader
organisational strife. The resignation of party Treasurer, Michael Yabsley, and the leaking of his
resignation letter, brought to the surface questions about financial management by Loughnane and
of party President Alan Stockdale. Yabsley accused the pair of ‘overruns in campaign expenditure
that have created a situation where the party's reserves are well below the minimum $3m required
to meet statutory and other obligations’ (Savva, 2010). Stockdale responded by revealing that
Yabsley, a professional fundraiser, lacked accounting qualifications and had been spared the
responsibility of managing the party’s accounts (P. Williams, 2011b, 2011a). Former minister Peter
Reith sought to replace Stockdale as president, but was defeated by a single vote; Reith’s
subsequent review of the 2010 campaign damned Loughnane with faint praise as having run a
‘good’ campaign but proposed the party appoint an in-house fundraiser on a commission basis.
Reviving Robb’s initiative of the 1990s, Reith advocated this fundraiser undertake high volume/
low value fundraising and issues-based fundraising (Reith 2011).

Debt-funded Campaigns: Living Beyond their Means

From his unique perspective of having worked in Labor’s national Head Office both before and after
public funding, Walsh observed the changes it wrought in the ALP:

Before public funding (and) before the era of systematic fund raising in the private sector,
things had been very tight. You had to raise all that you spent. You got certain affiliation
fees from the unions, you got certain levies from the state branches which they reluctantly
paid, but it wasn’t till public funding really came in - that delivered amounts of millions of
dollars in each election - that you had a stable financial base that you could use to
professionally staff the organisation and conduct continuous or reasonably frequent polling,
and to develop the skills and presentation capacities of your front line spokesmen.

Yet despite receiving tens of millions of dollars in new funding from the taxpayer, parties still lack
a genuinely sustainable financial footing. Public funding has not achieved Mick Young’s aspiration
of reducing socially wasteful campaign expenditure; nor did it save either party from going ‘cap in
hand … to the corporate bosses’ in McMullan’s words. In 2008, public funding constituted only
around one-fifth of total receipts by each of the major parties over the electoral cycle; the balance
comes through a wide range of fundraising activities involving party members, affiliates, members
of the public and corporations (Australian Government. Special Minister for State, 2008: 11-13).
Public funding has simply been integrated, by both parties, as one element of ever-expanding
campaign budgets. As Gartrell noted, public funding provides a base level of funding for television
advertising:

Probably the biggest change for the Secretary’s role is that when public funding was
introduced, which I think was in ‘84, (this) basically meant there was always at least some
capacity to run a campaign. The asset streams change over time, depending on things like
the (Global Financial Crisis) or property and all the rest. But the one thing that’s
comforting for the modern National Secretary is that you know every three years that
there will be enough resources to run the TV advertising.

57
Labor won state elections in New South Wales and Queensland in 1995. Since the sale of Centenary House,
the ALP’s national office has occupied rented premises in Canberra, while sharing accommodation in Sydney
with the New South Wales branch.

137
According to Bitar, public funding is ‘factored in’ to the budget and fully expended during the
campaign. Because public funding payments (and many donations) arrive after the campaign, they
are used to repay debt incurred during the campaign. This was the approach adopted by Combe in
1975 in relation to the Iraqi loans, by Gray in the 1990s, and by Bitar in 2010:

All the campaigns were financed substantially by bank overdraft, and then you paid the
bank overdraft back from campaign donations (Gray).

We paid the creditors but it was on the credit card, so our interest payments alone were
hard enough to keep up with (Bitar).

This practice of ‘factoring in’ public funding receipts entrenches a structural reliance by Head Office
on corporate and private donations and, ultimately, on bank debt:

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.

There may be some Labor-specific factors at work here. Bitar suggested the short terms served by
Labor national secretaries was a driver of the debt-funded practice:

There is no long term planning. Most party secretaries are not there long-term, they are
not there for 20 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.

Discussion

The response by party officials to the funding imperative lends some support to the long-standing
idea of the ALP as the party of ‘initiative’ in Australian politics (Simms, 2009b). Graeme Orr (2010:
241) has noted that the ALP ‘continues to show a greater interest in regulating political finance
than the more libertarian Liberal Party’. Labor’s record confirms this, though practical factors loom
as large as ideological factors here. The Leader’s Special Fund, the conflicted Rubensohn
relationship, the audit of Wyndham, the disastrous quest for Iraqi loans, the censure of Combe,
the inability to maintain a property asset all suggest a party struggling to manage its finances.
Necessity appears to have been the mother of invention. From a nomadic squatter, Labor became
a homeowner and a landlord, building a portfolio of property investments - before largely
dismantling it. The Labor-inspired introduction of party funding in 1984, its generous bipartisan
reformulation in 1995, and the inflation-adjusted increases which by 2010 had lifted the aggregate
level of public funds for political parties to $53 million, have provided both parties with a stable
level of campaign funding. Labor’s continued union support, its improved performance in raising
funds from the business community, and the apparent loss of some Liberal donors because of the
disclosure provisions, have also served to elevate Labor to contest election campaigns on a
roughly equal footing with its historically better-resourced Liberal rivals. By contrast with these
initiatives by the ALP’s National Secretaries, their Liberal Party counterparts were caught up in
‘tortuous’, though ultimately successful, efforts to secure control of party funds from their state
divisions. Their only truly innovative fundraising proposal – Robb’s plan to harness the party’s data
bases to run national high-volume low-value fundraising – foundered on these same rocks of
federalism.

Beyond such party-specific analysis, however, officials of both parties respond to the same
imperative: to fund the professionalised campaign model. None of the officials suggested they
were satisfied with the level of party funding; to the contrary, they would agree with Bitar’s
assessment of the stressful professional challenge to make ends meet:

138
 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.

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.

Bitar declared the ALP existed on ‘Struggle Street’ and Loughnane sardonically observed that:

There’s nothing wrong with the operations of any political party that another 3 or 4 million
dollars wouldn’t solve, in my view, to be very frank.

Thus from the officials’ perspective, the parties only rarely and intermittently experience self-
sufficiency and what they believe to be campaign adequacy. The competitive dynamic of
campaigning and the ever-expanding range of capital-intensive campaign tools mean parties live
precariously beyond their means and frequently in debt. For national campaign directors engaged
in a struggle for electoral victory, demand for resources invariably outstrips their availability,
spending is preferable to saving, and the certainty of debt trumps the risk of defeat. Thus party
finances can never reach a stable point of adequacy. Indeed, ever-expanding campaign needs
have prompted deeper debt and greater reliance on public or private cash. Normative aspirations
may be held for the parties to operate without reliance on donors, banks, vested interests and
taxpayers. But any such notions of financial autonomy have become increasingly out of reach, as
the professional campaign model came to dominate Australian election campaigning.

139
 Conclusion: Party Officials, Party Professionalisation – and Party Decline?

N
ational party officials have existed in Australia for nearly one hundred years, since the 1915
decision by the Australian Labor Party’s Federal Executive to elect a Federal Secretary. For
three decades, these were honorary part-timers engaged in clerical work; their real
energies were focussed elsewhere than on the under-resourced national Head Office. It was not
until Cleland’s appointment in 1945 as the first Federal Director of the Liberal Party that a full-time
national party official was paid. The appointment marked the first step in a professionalisation
process that took place within the Australian parties and campaigns over the next seven decades.

The research presented in the thesis demonstrates the critically important contribution of the
national party officials to the professionalisation process. Recognising the electoral logic that
rewarded parties for mounting coordinated and consistent election campaigns, they centralised,
they strategised and they raised funds. Apart from differences of timing and sequence, there is
little evidence that professionalisation in the ALP differed fundamentally from professionalisation in
the Liberal Party. Overcoming the federalist practices of previous decades in which campaign
management had been the responsibility of the states, national party officials of both parties,
designated as national campaign directors, set about creating a national approach to campaigning
in which they played the central managerial role. They strengthened their Head Offices, co-opted
their state colleagues, imposed consistent communications, engaged specialist marketing agencies
and generally sought to build the authority of the national party. Having thus established control of
national campaigning, they also developed their capacity to plan and execute a campaign strategy.
Campaign strategies constitute plans of action that prescribe the necessary path to the party’s
goal of electoral success. Formulating the strategy and implementing it through an overlapping
sequence of interrelated tasks over the entire electoral cycle became the distinctive task of the
national party official. These tasks included the use of intelligence gathering through market
research, developing and disseminating the campaign message, targeting the message and
conducting post-campaign reviews – tasks which required borrowing from and adapting the skills
and techniques of commercial marketing within an environment of rapid technological and societal
change. To meet the twin imperatives of centralisation and strategy, the party officials needed to
confront a third, the funding imperative: they moved to free the national party of its mendicant
dependency on the states and set about generating the very large sums of money necessary to
implement the campaign strategy. Centralising, strategising and fundraising, these party officials
assembled thereby the professional campaign model which now dominates Australian party
activities.

In doing so, the officials themselves became campaign professionals. As we see in this research,
the qualitative methodology has permitted party officials as expert informants to articulate the
core characteristics of the professionalism they constructed in the Australian party context. Paid
employees, they occupied a distinctive economic status; highly skilled and experienced campaign
experts, they performed distinctive party functions to a high level of competence; and operating
within party lines, they delivered a professional service by working to achieve the electoral
interests of their client, the party. These economic, technical and ideological aspects of
professionalism were not drawn from any textbook, party precedent, theoretical framework or
international model. They were created by the party officials themselves, and applied in real time,
in the face of competition both from within the party and from the rival campaign.

Taken together these changes constitute the process of professionalisation. Avoiding the trap of
technological determinism which has limited the utility of previous models of campaign change,
and placing endogenous factors at the heart of the change process, professionalisation is correctly
understood as a path dependent process of institutional change. As the historical institutionalist
approach suggests, the parties did shape their officials’ role and behaviour in enduring fashion.
The ‘founding moments’ of the two Head Offices – the appointment of Cleland in 1945 and the
election of Stewart in 1915 - determined the character of succeeding party officials and

140
constrained their behaviour within party structures. They were in many respects creatures of
party. They were party members. They became seasoned campaigners through gaining experience
within the party apparatus. They were selected by their parties to high executive office.
Significantly, they assumed a professional identity without shedding their partisan affiliation.
Indeed partisanship was integrally associated with their professional identity; their work as
professionals was dedicated to serving their client, the party, through achieving what they believed
was its superordinate goal of electoral success.

Yet the party officials proved to be more than the unwitting subjects of powerful impersonal
institutions. Adaptive, innovative and empowered, these human agents challenged many of the
existing rules and conventions of their party institutions. The parties’ distinctive methods of
selecting their officials were gradually modified to accommodate the professional needs of these
new party actors. The parties’ original intent that the officials should perform administrative or
clerical work - captured in titles such as ‘secretary’ and ‘secretariat’ – was progressively outmoded
as the officials assumed the new title, and the formidable new role, of national campaign director.
Election campaigning became a more important, even all-encompassing, party activity based
around techniques adapted, by the party officials, from commercial marketing. Head Offices grew
in resources, skills and influence, especially at the expense of state branches and inevitably - as
the evidence presented here suggests – coming into conflict with the parliamentary wing and party
leader. If institutions are, as Sanders (2006) suggests, simply ‘rule structures’, then
professionalisation can be understood in historical institutionalist terms as a process of rules
change. Rules developed over decades within path dependent party institutions – for example,
federal rules of campaign management, or rules governing the selection of party officials – were
found to be inconsistent with the emerging needs of professional campaigning. Accordingly they
were gradually supplanted by new practices, conventions and identities - the rules of
professionalism – formulated in large part by the emerging campaign professionals. The
introduction of these new rules - the process of professionalisation – brought about institutional
change.

Historical institutionalism employs ‘thick’ descriptive narrative to unravel its unavoidably long
causal chains. The thesis has used the voices of the party officials, supported where relevant by
documentation, to elaborate in some detail the many components and aspects of the
professionalisation of Australia’s two major parties. The structure of the argument is essentially
thematic. However the party officials interviewed for this research constitute a sequence through
time; each individual official occupied Head Office for only a short span of what has been a
decades-long process of professionalisation. It is possible to recast the thematic material into a
chronological narrative. In this sense professionalisation of the Australian parties can be presented
as having occurred in three phases.

The first phase (1945-1972) saw the emergence of professionalisation. Starting with Cleland’s
appointment, the Liberal Party created a well-resourced national Head Office and in 1949
conducted an intensive, protracted, expensive campaign of radio broadcasting – the first, though
isolated, example of the professional campaign model. Once in government, the Liberal Party
continued to take steps towards professionalisation, building the image of the parliamentary leader
and subscribing to survey research (1954). But professionalisation in the Liberal Party was held
back by its Head Office’s continuing subordination to the parliamentary leader and – despite
coordinating mechanisms such as the Staff Planning Committee – by its unresolved contests for
authority and money with powerful state divisions, which retained control of campaign
management, external advertising agencies and fundraising. The ALP lagged much further behind.
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; likewise its early (1951)
insights into marginal seat campaigning could not be realised. The relatively late introduction of
commercial television broadcasting into Australia, combined with early Liberal scepticism about its
importance to campaigning, further delayed professional campaigning; the first campaign
broadcasts occurred in the 1958 elections. The Liberal Head Office was located permanently its
own headquarters in Canberra from 1965. Labor’s effort to professionalise its operations with the

141
appointment of Wyndham (from 1963) and to coordinate its state branches through mechanisms
such as the National Organising and Planning Committee (1960s) came to grief with Wyndham’s
1969 ouster. Yet from this point Labor’s campaign professionalisation increased rapidly and
surpassed that of the flagging Liberals. With its survey research-driven pre-campaign (1971), its
appointment of Young as the national campaign director chairing a national campaign committee
(1972), Labor conducted the first recognisably modern professional election campaign with its
emotive ‘It’s Time’ television advertising campaign (1972).

The next quarter-century (1973-2000) saw a second, intensification, phase in which both parties
pushed ahead on many fronts to consolidate and expand campaign professionalisation. After the
Liberals’ restructure (1974) and the ‘catch-up’ appointment of Eggleton as national campaign
director (1975), both Head Offices were emphatically recognised as, and operated as, the principal
authority for national campaign management. Labor ‘caught-up’ by establishing its own permanent
national Head Office building in Canberra (1974), as part of a broader plan to professionalise its
financial arrangements; campaign funding was removed from parliamentary control permitting
Head Office to appoint a new marketing agency (1975). Labor confirmed its national character by
dropping the word ‘Federal’ from its titles (1975). Once dominant state divisions and branches
were progressively co-opted into the national campaign projects in both parties; parliamentary
wings also found themselves dependent on the growing campaign expertise of autonomous Head
Offices staffed by a pipeline of seasoned campaign practitioners, especially on the Labor side.
Successful insurgency campaigns in 1975 and 1983, in the mould of 1949 and 1972, delivered
victory for opposition parties. But unlike the emergence phase, with its 23-year period of Liberal
government, the intensification phase saw more regular alternation with both parties enjoying
substantial periods in office. It was as governing parties that Labor (under McMullan and Hogg in
the 1980s) followed by the Liberals (under Robb and Crosby in the 1990s) brought the
professional campaign model to its high point. A critical development was the qualitative market
research commissioned by and provided to Head Office by researchers Cameron (ALP) and Textor
(Liberal). This research allowed governing parties to link their campaign strategies to disciplined
policy development. They also proved adept at identifying and defending their marginally-held
seats (notably, ALP 1987 and Liberals 1998), supplementing national television advertising with
highly targeted localised campaigns including direct mail driven by early-stage computerisation
(mid-1980s) and regional television (Liberals 1998). Working closely with research agencies,
commercial advertising agencies were themselves increasingly constituted as party-specific teams.
The spiralling costs of capital-intensive campaign machinery drove a diversification of party
funding sources and the scandal of the Iraqi loans debacle. This led to the introduction (1984) and
expansion (1995) of public funding; parties competed for corporate donations and experimented
with property investments and direct-mail fundraising.

From around the start of the new century a third phase of professionalisation has commenced
which, while incomplete, can be described as a phase of diversification and deadlock. Campaigning
remains centrally planned and strategically driven within both parties. But fragmentation of
television audiences, expansion of data base capacity and the rise of the internet have created
more diverse delivery channels and facilitated even more highly targeted, localised and even
personalised communications. Identically motivated to secure electoral success at the other’s
expense and highly averse to the risk of defeat, each Head Office is locked in a ceaseless quest for
competitive advantage with professionalising initiatives by one met and matched by the other. Yet
equally available to both parties, such techniques have delivered no decisive advantage to either
party; as a result campaigns are increasingly competitive in execution, similar in style and
negative in tone. A kind of deadlock has emerged with a number of apparently malign
characteristics. In line with the campaign logic of centralised and consistent communications,
political expression by voters, members and candidates is severely limited by Head Offices. Market
research continues to be the central tool of party strategy but is used less to open up strategic
choices than to narrow them; rather than promoting deliberative consideration of policy
alternatives by informed voters, parties often choose the less risky path of recycling swinging
voters’ own values and prejudices back to them, in their own language. Market research has also,
controversially, become a routine element of the leadership destabilisation which afflicts both

142
parties. Where Michels predicted party oligarchs presiding over disempowered members, in this
phase oligarchy presides over depopulated branches; party members have simply exited leaving
hollowed-out structures. Yet campaign costs continue to spiral and despite taxpayer support
professionalised parties appear chronically indebted.

Over these three phases, professionalisation within each party took somewhat different paths, and
occurred at different rates. The Liberals’ earlier payment of officers and establishment of national
headquarters suggest they were better resourced than Labor; Labor was able to use its state
branches as a training ground for its national officers, while its practice of internal democracy
resulted in contested elections in contrast to the Liberals’ more stable appointment methods.
Incumbency status emerges as a more important determinant of professionalisation than party
ideology. However in considering the professionalisation process, differences of ideology, structure
or resources should not be overstated. These rival parties – studies in contrast, created in different
ways, at different times, by different social groups, with different structures, policies and practices
–developed similar ‘catch-all’ (Kirchheimer, 1966) responses to their changing relationship with
civil society, shedding grass-roots members and coming increasingly to resemble each other as
professionalised campaign organisations. Most strikingly, both parties engaged campaign
professionals, whose similar methods and goals in strongly empowered Head Offices led to
professionalisation of campaigning in both parties. Oddly neglected in party scholarship, party
officials emerge in this analysis as playing the central, distinctive, role in the professionalisation
process. In thus confirming the hypothesis of this research project, the thesis provides a more
complete explanation of the professionalisation process than has been previously been available.
Political parties are not victims of technological change, and professionalisation cannot be
adequately understood as an externally-generated imposition on the parties’ otherwise stable
structures and attitudes. Rather professionalisation is an adaptive response in which human agents
– including, at the centre of the stage, the campaign professionals themselves – seek to arrange
and re-arrange institutional structures and rules so as to promote the survival, and the electoral
success, of their party.

It perhaps needs to be repeated that the research has focussed on the production not the
consumption of electoral politics – that is, on those who claim to ‘manage’ election campaigns
rather than those who participate in them as candidates or voters. Questions of participation,
accountability and representation are of course vital and legitimate concerns of electoral studies.
But they must not be permitted to crowd out the managerial perspective presented here. The
evidence of the interviews reveals party officials as managers, concerned with implementing a set
of managerial operations to improve the parties’ campaign effectiveness. These operations include,
as we have seen, organisational rearrangements aimed at reducing duplication and increasing
consistency and coordination through centralisation of control, strategic planning to develop plans
of action and implement them through rationally targeted resource allocation and message
dissemination, and concentrated efforts to acquire resources, including campaign ‘know how’ as
well as financial resources, to improve scale and achieve sustainability. Understanding election
campaigns as managerial exercises also provides a valuable corrective to those campaign studies
that prioritise advertising and other campaign communications. In the managerial perspective
these activities are the visible and short-run outputs or manifestations of a more enduring,
underlying campaign strategy which should therefore be the proper focus of scholarly and
journalistic attention. It is of course precisely because of its central importance that the strategy
document is closely held by campaign organisations; attention is directed instead to the message
which they have constructed for public consumption.

That said, the professional campaign model does not, and cannot, provide any guarantee that
voters will actually confer electoral success to a professionalised party. The more important point
is that the professional campaign model is believed, not least by those within Head Office, to be
necessary and effective. A contest between a professionalised Liberal Party and a professionalised
ALP can still only have one winner. But a series of contests is likely to have more even outcomes –
a particular characteristic of the deadlocked third phase of professionalisation. That this has in fact
occurred is shown by the performance record of the professional campaign model since 1972.

143
Taking Labor’s 1972 ‘It’s Time’ campaign as the first of the professional campaigns, the forty years
to December 2012 have seen remarkable parity between the two major party groupings. As Table
7 shows, the Coalition won seven of the sixteen elections in that time, and Labor nine. Over that
same period, the two parties have governed for almost exactly the same amount of time: Labor
for less than 53 per cent of the time (21 years 1 month) and the Coalition for more than 47 per
cent (18 years and 11 months).58 The 2010 election, which produced the historically extraordinary
result of a hung parliament, only underlines the delicate balance between the two combatants. By
contrast, in the pre-1972 emergent phase of professionalisation the Liberal Party won nine of the
ten elections and governed for 23 unbroken years.

Table 7: 40-year Electoral Record of the Professional Campaign Model (1972-2012)

Election dates by governing party, and intervals between elections in years and months

ALP Coalition
Dec 72 – Mar 74 1y 5m
Mar 74 – Dec 75 1y 7m
Dec 75 - Dec 77 2y
Dec 77 – Oct 80 2y 10m
Oct 80 – Mar 83 2y 5m
Mar 83 – Dec 84 1y 9m
Dec 84 – Jul 87 2y 7m
Jul 87 – Mar 90 2y 8m
Mar 90 – Mar 93 3y
Mar 93 – Mar 96 3y
Mar 96 – Oct 98 2y 7m
Oct 98 - Nov 01 3y 1m
Nov 01 – Oct 04 2y 11m
Oct 04 – Oct 07 3y 1m
Oct 07 – Aug 10 2y 9m
Aug 10 – Dec 2012 2y 4m
From 1972:
Won 9 elections Governed for Won 7 elections Governed for
(3 from opposition and 21 years 1 month (2 from opposition and 18 years 11 months
6 re-elections as (52.75%) 5 re-elections as (47.25%)
incumbent) incumbent)

This volatility can give neither party confidence its professionalised campaign model will deliver
electoral success. Yet such is the competitive electoral environment and the aversion to loss,
uncertainty only reinforces each side’s determination to find a potentially winning advantage. This
logic also helps explain why party officials are not always held to account when managing a losing
campaign. Commercial marketing campaigns can succeed at the margin – by growing market
share or brand awareness for example – and can show clear process of cause and effect. Electoral
campaigns by contrast will always generate a clear winner and loser, no matter how close the
margin; yet amid the many variables at play, cause and effect is inherently obscure. In the
absence of objective evidence and definitive explanations, competent campaign professionals
themselves can legitimately disagree, given their subjective perceptions and experiential
knowledge. Was it a good campaign strategy poorly executed (perhaps Labor in 2004)? Or was it
well conceived and well executed and yet still fell short (Labor in 1969 or Liberals in 1990)? Did it
succeed only after mid-campaign shifts (Labor 1974) or last-minute gambles (Liberals 1980) or
unexpected wildcards (the 9/11 attacks and the Tampa incident in 2001)? Besides, accountability
itself is hotly contested in political parties. As Bitar grimly acknowledged, the glory of victory is
claimed by the parliamentarians, but ‘when things go bad, the first person who gets blamed is
always the party official’.

58
‘Time in government’ is counted here as the interval between elections rather than the sitting dates of the
House of Representatives.

144
In discussing the distinctive role of the party officials in the professionalisation process, the thesis
has drawn on a three-face two-level framework of party structure. The framework locates the
tensions and conflicts between and within each of the faces which have characterised the
professionalisation process – in particular, the struggle by Head Office to centralise campaign
authority at the expense of state branches and in the contested terrain lying between the national
party official and the parliamentary leader. This analysis is borne out by the qualitative research
presented here. It is also richly confirms Katz and Mair’s (1993) prediction of conflict between
leaders of these different faces. Yet it is harder to agree with their conclusion, that the central
office is losing its ‘centrality’ and authority to the parliamentary party. Certainly, there is evidence
that the party in public office has been strengthened by the acquisition of influential private staff
(Walter, 1986; Holland, 2002; Tiernan, 2007), communications allowances, marketing budgets
and the like (Peisley & Ward, 2001; Johns, 2006; I. Ward, 2006: 89; S. Young, 2007). Yet the
central office has also acquired new resources: in Australia, public funding is directed to the party
central office, not (as in Katz and Mair) the parliamentary party; private corporate donations are
also typically handled by the party central office. The party central office also controls the
commissioning and dissemination of market research which, as we have seen, is central to the
party’s electoral strategy and not infrequently a tool in the destabilisation of the parliamentary
leader – a point not considered by Katz and Mair or for that matter in the model of party leader
succession developed by Bynander and ‘t Hart (2007). Thus reports of the demise of the central
office may be not only premature but misdirected. Indeed, as parliamentary leadership itself
becomes more tenuous and contested – seven individuals have served as Opposition Leader since
1996 - the central office may well occupy a more not less salient role in party affairs, as a stable
repository of organisational memory and campaign preparedness.

More compelling is the confirmation provided in this research of Katz and Mair’s broader argument
about the emergence of the ‘cartel’ party as a new, post-‘catch-all’, model of party organisation
(Katz & Mair, 1995; Blyth & Katz, 2005; Katz & Mair, 2009). In this model, parties increasingly
behave like members of a cartel, colluding to capture the resources of the state to promote their
own electoral success at the expense of new entrants. Cartel parties conduct election campaigns
that are ‘capital-intensive, professional and centralised’ (Katz and Mair 1995: 20-2). The concept
of the cartel party, originally devised to explain power sharing in European multiparty systems
built on proportional representation, has been applied to the study of parties in many other
democratic contexts. In Australia, it has met with significant resistance: Australia’s bi-polar party
competition and ‘winner-take-all’ electoral system permit little of the accommodative behaviour of
European legislatures (R. Smith & O'Mahoney, 2006: 97-8), while major party collusion does not in
fact appear to have excluded minor parties (Goot, 2006). Katz and Mair’s contention (1995: 20-2)
that democratic elections themselves become little more than state-sponsored rituals for a civil
society that is ruled rather than ruling does not appear necessary to the theory. On the other
hand, the cartel party thesis is recognisable in the way the major Australian parties, having lost
their roots in civil society, have sustained their activities through securing subsidies from the state
- notably, through public electoral funding (I. Ward, 2006). Critics have refused to accept this as
evidence of cartel-like collusion, arguing public funding was actually opposed by the Liberal Party
and does not operate in practice to exclude minor parties. It is true as we have seen that the
public funding reform was led by the ALP. However the ready acquiescence of the Liberal Party,
and its cooperation in the 1995 increases, suggest its initial reluctance may have been a tactical
response, more about the disclosure provisions than with the new funding itself. Indeed, the major
parties, cartel-like, have jointly benefitted from public funding and have done so in ways that
minor parties cannot. Specifically, public funding allows the major parties to mount capital -
intensive professional campaigning; even with public funding, minor parties still cannot afford to
do so. It is no coincidence, moreover, that the ALP and the Liberal Party alone are able to employ
campaign professionals who are the architects of the professional campaign model and who, as we
have seen, are tasked with generating the large sums of money needed to fund it. Driven by the
funding imperative, they seek to shape the rules and norms of the electoral environment including
the funding regime. To the extent that the officials have captured public funding in this effort, then
Australian parties do indeed conform to the cartel model.

145
The recurring theme of this research is the centrality of party officials in the professionalisation
process in Australia. Yet many aspects of the Head Office, its relationship with the broader party
structure, and its role in the professional campaign model, remain to be illuminated by further
research. This thesis has concentrated exclusively on national party officials and indeed, on those
national officials who have occupied the senior-most role in the respective Head Offices. Future
research could relax this tight focus to investigate others in the national Head Office who were
closely involved in election campaigning, such as the Liberals’ long term campaign operative
Graham Morris who, in Eggleton’s admiring phrase, would have earned enough campaign medals
‘to cover his whole chest’, and ALP deputy national secretaries Ken Bennett and Candy Broad.
State party officials have only received sporadic, individual attention (for example, Hancock’s
(2006) study of John Carrick); study of the various responses by state officials to the centralisation
process described here would further elucidate this important organisational transformation.
Moving outside the organisational face, further interviews could include central actors in the
parliamentary wing, such as Prime Ministerial advisers Peter Barron and Bob Sorby (Hawke), Don
Russell (Keating), and Arthur Sinodinos (Howard). The emergence of political consultants such as
Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor and Labor’s Bruce Hawker opens the possibility of new
arrangements for managing party campaigns. Gender issues – specifically, the puzzlingly complete
absence of women from the senior-most party roles - also deserve further consideration. More
generally, campaign scholars must develop a more complete understanding of the role of strategy
– its development and implementation – in determining electoral and political outcomes. Moving
outside the major parties, research of the minor parties such as the Greens could be directed at
substantiating the extent to which professional campaigning has penetrated parties whose
electoral goals fall short of seeking government. Indeed, research of campaigning by the trade
union movement, the voluntary non-profit sector and the emerging social media-based networks
might well reveal that the professional campaign model has become the norm for political
campaigns of all genres; if so, issues of control, participation and funding will loom large for these
organisations as they have done for the major parties.

The starting point of the thesis was to note the centrality of parties to the operation of
representative democracy in Australia. The research findings have underlined that fundamental
point. To be sure, electoral support for parties may be falling. Party membership is certainly in
dramatic decline. Party linkages of participation and representation between citizen and the state
may be weakening as a result. But there is no sign that parties are in retreat from their defining
role in seeking and attaining political office. To the contrary, they remain entrenched in the
legislature and equipped with empowered Head Offices. Their proven capacity to contest elections
is undiminished and in important respects strengthened. The research thus challenges the frequent
conclusion of party scholars that parties are in decline. For many scholars, especially in the United
States, parties have substantially exited the campaign arena and have been replaced by
candidate-centred campaign organisations of non-party, commercial, consultants. The rise of the
professional campaign model is equated with, almost a measure of, the decline of party. Yet in
Australia, the party directs the marketing consultants, not the other way around; and the Head
Office is far from surrendering campaign control to the parliamentarians.

‘Parties are, if nothing else, survivors’ (Dalton, et al., 2011: 14). Indeed, parties are alive and well
and planning the next election campaign. Their institutional longevity and continued relevance is a
triumph of adaptive response in an environment of change and competition. That response was
driven by the party officials in Head Office. To advance their party’s central purpose, the pursuit of
office, the officials centralised their resources, learned or bought new campaign skills, honed their
strategic perspectives and secured new resources to sustain their organisation. In short, they
fashioned a new, professionalised, model of party activity and assumed the identity of campaign
professionals. Their work is central to the work of parties and they are integral to the character
and standing of parties. As parties continue to pursue electoral success, the role of the campaign
professional is unlikely to diminish.

146
147
 Appendix One

Party Officials: Biographical Notes

T
his appendix provides summary biographies of all the officials who were interviewed for this
research. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations are from the interviews. In addition,
biographies of Mick Young and Bede Hartcher are provided given their periods in Head Office
overlapped with the coverage of the interviews. Most of the earlier officials are covered by the
Australian Dictionary of Biography. These include all the Labor officials up the 1960s: Arch Stewart
(Love, 1990), Dan McNamara (Cook, 1986), Pat Kennelly (Love, 2007), Matteo ‘Jack’ Schmella
(Cross, 2002) and F E ‘Joe’ Chamberlain (Oliver, 2007). Among the Liberals, the ADB covers Don
Cleland (Nelson, 1993). Bob Willoughby does not yet appear and the reader is referred to press
reports (Whitington, 1961; Smark, 1967a; Stephens, 1969).

Australian Labor Party

Cyril Wyndham: Born in London in 1930, Cyril Isaac was educated at Kingston Day Commercial
College. Joining the British Labour Party’s ‘Labor League of Youth’ as a 14-year old, he was an
active schoolboy canvasser for the Party’s candidates in his St Helier area of suburban west
London. He won a year’s trade union scholarship to the London School of Economics, and also saw
service (1948-50) in the Royal Army Service Corps. At the age of 17 he was hired as a clerk in
Labour’s Transport House headquarters. Netta Burns, an Australian who later worked with
Wyndham in Canberra, recalled him as ‘the office boy who handed me my money every week’; but
he was soon appointed as personal assistant of the Party’s general secretary Morgan Phillips
(1950-53) and worked in the international department travelling extensively in Europe. He was
also elected alderman of the local Merton and Molden council. When the British Labour Party
hosted the Commonwealth Labour Parties’ Conference in London in 1957, Isaac was charged with
looking after the Australian delegation: parliamentary leader ‘Doc’ Evatt, Chamberlain as Federal
President and Schmella as Federal Secretary. Chamberlain recalls that Isaac ‘did a great job of
looking after us’ (Chamberlain, 1998); Evatt, evidently equally impressed, invited the 27-year old
to come and work on his staff in Australia. Keen to put his London past behind him, he determined
in Australia to change his surname, and as Cyril Wyndham he worked with Evatt until his
retirement in 1960; when Evatt retired, he was the only staffer taken on by the new party leader
Arthur Calwell. By the end of 1960, and with the support of Calwell and Chamberlain, he defeated
twelve other candidates to be elected state secretary of the Victorian branch (Reid, 1971;
Freudenberg, 1977).

Lacking a factional or union power base, he set out to serve the party as a whole and proved
industrious, capable and dedicated. Victoria’s electoral record at the time was poor, its failure to
win seats having been a critical factor in Labour’s narrow defeat in the 1961 federal election.
Wyndham managed to secure an unexpected win for Labor in a Liberal seat in state by-election
(Broadmeadows, 1962). Wyndham’s elevation to the Federal office was confirmed by Federal
Conference in October 1963; he commenced duties as Federal Secretary in January 1964, opening
federal Labor’s first presence in the national capital in ‘a small, ratty office suite at the top of the
world’s most ancient lift’ (Ramsey, 1996). His appointment immediately improved the party’s
administration. Wyndham was an impeccable and rapid shorthand writer and minute keeper
(Freudenberg, 1977; Burns, 1993). He analysed federal voting statistics to trace shifts in popular
sentiment at national and state level (Wyndham, 1966a). He was also a fluent pamphleteer,
articulating the Party’s case against communism (Wyndham, 1964) and the National Civic Council
(Wyndham, 1965b), both at the direction of the Federal Executive, and promoted the party in
lengthy articles in public journals (Wyndham, 1966a, 1968). He became an articulate internal critic
of party attitudes and structures; at 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’ (Wyndham, 1965a); in a 1968 speech to the Labor Women’s
Organisation he reportedly described aspects of the party as ‘ridiculous, absurd and criminal’.
Newspaper columnists referred to him as ‘Cerebral Cyril’, Labor’s ‘Mighty Atom’, the Cockney

148
Sparrow, ‘a new broom for an untidy party’, ‘a professional among amateurs’ (Sorell, 1968); a
‘frustrated reformer’ (Smark, 1967b) and ‘the little Englishman, who … worked like a drover’s
sheep dog to rehabilitate the ALP’ (Reid, 1971: 261).

Yet Labor’s ‘grand plans for an adequately staffed national secretariat’ to support Wyndham were
never delivered (McMullin, 1991: 324); in 1967 the full staff complement was ‘Cyril plus two’
secretaries (Burns, 1993). Wyndham was further frustrated by his inability to make progress on
what had become his principal mission as Federal Secretary, to reform Labor’s antiquated national
decision-making structures. The ‘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. A key element involved including the parliamentary leadership as
members of the federal executive, effectively diluting the power of the paid state branch officials,
in the wake of the ‘faceless men’ affair of 1963 (McMullin, 1991: 294). The reforms thus placed
Wyndham at the intersection of powerful fissures emerging in the party: between traditionalists
and modernisers, led by Gough Whitlam the party’s deputy leader from 1960; between the Left
faction which dominated the executive and the Right represented by Whitlam; 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. Wyndham’s 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. Their relationship soured. Wyndham’s reform plan was debated at the 1965
Federal Conference and shelved (Freudenberg, 1977: 90; McMullin, 1991: 309-10). Wyndham
attempted to force change on the state branches from below, by directly appealing to the party’s
rank and file members, but he was ‘kept away’ from branch members by the Executive (Botsman,
2011). Netta Burns, his secretary, recalled that the Executive barred Wyndham from travelling
outside Canberra without permission (Burns, 1993). Labor’s electoral debacle of 1966 perhaps
further weakened his position. Wyndham’s relations with Whitlam, party leader from 1967, also
deteriorated following a disagreement about a redistribution proposal in 1968 (Freudenberg, 1977:
151-2).

Led by Chamberlain and the left, Executive ‘made it impossible for him (Wyndham) to stay’ (Burns
1993) and Wyndham – taciturn, unhappy, exhausted – opted to take up the vacant state
secretary’s role in New South Wales. He resigned as federal secretary in March 1969. However
there was more to come. The Executive commissioned an audit of Wyndham’s management of
party funds from mid-1967; discrepancies were allegedly discovered. Wyndham was said to have
misused party funds, variously to pay a garage bill of his wife’s car, or to cover his travel costs
while on party business (Burns 1993). Wyndham himself asserts that he ‘came a cropper’ because
he used party funds to help Whitlam pay for a dinner with the Federal Executive on a visit to
Sydney:

This is where I came a cropper. Gough - they didn’t earn what they do now. Politicians.
Nowhere near. He had (several) young children. I remember (laughs) we had the
executive to lunch somewhere in Sydney. The meeting was in Sydney. He 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.

The auditor’s report was debated at a two-day meeting of the Executive in May to which Wyndham
was reported to have provided ‘misleading’ answers and he was unanimously censured (Anon,
1969; Australian Labor Party, 1969). Refusing to defend himself publicly, Wyndham took himself
and his wife to Norfolk Island (Interview) and failed the following week to report for duty in New
South Wales. He was dismissed. Yet the extraordinary vendetta continued. Journalist Alan Reid
reported that Wyndham’s enemies continued to ‘feed out’ highly damaging material against their
former employee; Burns states that scurrilous leaflets about him were circulated at the party

149
conference in Victoria in June (Reid 1971; Burns 1993). Wyndham’s only defender was the
controversial journalist Maxwell Newton who, himself the subject of an extraordinary
Commonwealth Police raid on his premises on the same day as the Federal Executive meeting,
issued a statement that Wyndham had been ‘ill-treated, maligned and smeared’ by members of
the executive (Reid 1971: 263). Politically, Wyndham’s career was ‘finished’ (Freudenberg 1977).59
Wyndham was offered a job by Newton, and worked for many years as his editorial controller and
editor and columnist of Daily Commercial News (Newton, 1993). Wyndham lived in retirement in
Newcastle until his death in July 2012.

Mick Young: Born in Sydney in 1936 and educated by the Marist Brothers until the age of 15
(McMullin, 1991: 324), Michael ‘Mick’ Young became a shearer in South Australia. An active and
effective organiser for the Australian Workers Union, Young was elected South Australian state
organiser of the ALP in 1964, working in the party’s ‘cramped and shabby quarters in one corner of
the Trades Hall’ (Blewett & Jaensch, 1971). With ‘a golliwog’s shock of black hair and a face that
was a map of Ireland’ (Reid, 1971), Young’s ‘outwardly jovial, even crude bonhomie masked a
sharp intelligence, an openness to new ideas and a voracious appetite for work’ (Blewett &
Jaensch, 1971). Campaign manager for Premier Don Dunstan’s narrow defeat in 1968, he was
appointed state secretary in March 1968 and a year later was narrowly elected as federal
secretary. Young did not relinquish his full-time role with the state branch; the party’s national
office shifted to Adelaide and Young ‘carried the federal secretariat around in his briefcase for
several years’ (Brenchley, 1973). At the 1969 Federal Conference, Young won the sympathies of
the media for hosting an open bar in his suite of the Chevron hotel (Oakes & Solomon, 1973: 20).
After managing Labor’s 1972 win, Young promptly resigned and returned to South Australia to
secure preselection to the safe House of Representatives seat of Port Adelaide, which he held from
1974 to 1988. In the Hawke Government, Young was a brilliant and savage parliamentary
performer as Leader of the House and, as Special Minister for State, oversaw the introduction of
public funding of election campaigns. Having tipped off a contact about the imminent expulsion of
the Russian spy Ivanov, Young was forced to resign his portfolio in 1983 but was reinstated and
later appointed to the immigration portfolio. Young also served as national president of the ALP.
He resigned from Parliament in 1988 to set up a business consultancy. He died of leukaemia in
1996.

David Combe: Born in Glenelg, South Australia in 1943 to a conservative family, David Combe
was educated at Prince Alfred College and the University of Adelaide, where, as a second year
politics student in 1962, he was inspired to join the Labor Party after hearing a speech about the
White Australia Policy by then opposition frontbencher Don Dunstan. A friendship developed and
when after the 1965 election Dunstan became Labor’s attorney-general, Combe was hired as his
press secretary (Parkin & Patience, 1981); transferred involuntarily to the office of Premier Frank
Walsh, Combe rejoined his mentor’s staff when Dunstan toppled Walsh. After the 1968 defeat,
Young’s promotion to the state secretaryship created a vacancy for an organiser; Combe was the
first organiser selected from outside the union movement. Young’s election as federal secretary
likewise created the opportunity for Combe to succeed as state secretary in 1968 and again, when
Young resigned as federal secretary, Combe succeeded him in 1973 at the age of 30. He was
regarded by headline writers as a ‘new look man at the helm’ (Hill, 1975) and – thanks to his use
of market research – as a ‘numbers man’ (P. Ward, 1977) and – thanks to his property
development role – as a ‘Labor entrepreneur’ (Oakes, 1981). Combe’s eight years as federal

59
Combe shed further light on this controversy: ‘Cyril left the job under a cloud. It wasn’t really a cloud. The
presumption (was) that he was a crook. I remember that when I had time on my hands, after I went into the
party office at 39 Ainslie Avenue, going through a lot of the old papers and it was very clear to me (that) Cyril
was not a crook. He was very careless about money. All his accounts were to the nearest ten shillings, or the
nearest pound. … Which told me one thing: if they want to get you, they’ll go for the books. So I would never
sign a cheque the whole time I was there that had not been signed by the other two signatories first. I was
always the last signatory on a cheque. I don’t think Cyril was a crook and it’s very sad that he went out that
way. Because I think he was a modernising influence who was done over because he was too close to Gough.’

150
secretary remains a Labor record; he managed four federal campaigns, only one (1974) leading to
victory.

Resigning in 1980 and defeated in a rank and file ballot for preselection in New South Wales (Wise,
1982), Combe set up a Canberra lobbying business hoping his political contacts with the new
Hawke Government could open doors for commercial clients. Disastrously for him, one of his
contacts was a Russian diplomat Valeriy Ivanov, who was exposed as a spy in the early days of the
Hawke Government and expelled; Combe was essentially cut adrift by the party and his business
imploded (Marr, 1984). Hawke was forced to set up a Royal Commission which investigated the
whole affair (Marr, 1984). Labor’s National Conference in 1984 passed a resolution noting the ‘pain
and distress’ caused to Combe and his family and noting that there was ‘no present impediment’ to
his dealing with the Commonwealth Government; but his career as a lobbyist was finished. Combe
was later employed by the Australian Trade Commission as a trade commissioner in Canada
(McMullin, 1991: 422-4).

Bob McMullan: Born in Perth in 1947, Robert ‘Bob’ McMullan attended Guildford Primary School
and Governor Stirling High School and graduated from the University of Western Australia with
degrees in arts and economics. An activist in the anti-Vietnam war campaign, McMullan in 1968
became the first West Australian to be exempted from conscription as a conscientious objector on
political, as opposed to religious grounds (Uhlmann, 1995). An organiser first with the engine
drivers’ union and then with the prison officers’, McMullan was elected the inaugural president of
the Federal Labor Youth Organisation in 1971. He was elected assistant state secretary of the state
ALP branch in 1973 and, with the absence through illness of the long-term state secretary Joe
Chamberlain, frequently acted as the state secretary. He was elected to that post in 1975 and
managed three unsuccessful state campaigns; elected National Secretary in 1981, he managed
three successful national campaigns (1983, 1984 and 1987). In a 1986 speech to the Fabian
Society, McMullan articulated a ‘coherent sensible philosophy of power’ for Labor based on its
Swedish counterpart which, he said, preferred to ‘stay in power even if it means taking reform
more slowly’, with each successive government laying groundwork for the future (Linton, 1985;
McMullan, 1986,13 April). A falling out with Hawke prompted McMullan to resign in 1988. He was
elected Senator for the Australian Capital Territory from 1988; in 1996 he shifted to the House of
Representatives and held several ministerial and shadow spokesman roles. He retired from
Parliament in 2010.

Bob Hogg: Born in 1937 in Melbourne, Robert ‘Bob’ Hogg attended Brighton Technical College and
the Caulfield Institute of Technology, where he did not complete a diploma of mechanical
engineering. Hogg worked as a project engineer in the food industry in the early 1960s and joined
the Caulfield branch of the ALP in late 1962. Active in the anti-hanging and anti-Vietnam war
movements, Hogg did volunteer work in the 1966 federal campaign and contested a safe Liberal
seat in the 1967 state election. Abandoning his well-paid technical career, he secured appointment
as Labor’s state organiser. He ran a successful by-election campaign in Bendigo in 1969 and
worked on the 1970 Senate campaign, but the left-wing Victorian branch, under siege from
Whitlam, was taken over the federal party and the office-holders, including Hogg, were dismissed.
Hogg returned to technical work, this time in the printing industry, while working as an unpaid
organiser for the socialist-left faction.

Hogg played little role in Whitlam’s 1972 campaign. But while some on the left, notably state
secretary Bill Hartley, remained isolationist, Hogg began reaching out to the small group of
‘Independent’ party reformers including John Button, Gareth Evans and Ian Turner and in 1976
secured broad support to win election as state secretary. With the right-wing Graham Richardson
the new state secretary in New South Wales, Hogg made an unlikely but effective pair in working
with Combe to bring a national perspective to federal campaigns. Likewise Hogg worked at
‘convincing the contending factions of the necessity for co-existence’ (Walter, 1986: 104) and
helped secure the election of John Cain as Victorian party leader in 1981. Hogg managed the
campaign that made him Premier in 1982 – state Labor’s first win in nearly three decades (Costar
& Hughes, 1983). Hogg’s preparedness to transcend factions to secure electoral success was

151
displayed most dramatically in the 1982 Federal Conference where in defiance of his left colleagues
he moved a compromise resolution on the party’s controversial anti-uranium policy (McMullin,
1991: 405-6).

As state secretary, Hogg worked closely with Cain as Premier and, after Hawke’s election, spent
three years as a political adviser in the Prime Minister’s office. He returned to Melbourne in 1986 to
work with Cain again, before finally winning the national secretary’s position in 1988. Labor’s tenth
national secretary, Hogg directed the 1990 campaign for Hawke’s fourth victory and, more
improbably, Keating’s victory in the subsequent ‘unwinnable’ election in 1993. He retired almost
immediately to join advertising agent John Singleton as deputy chairman (Hewett, 1993) and later
wrote a newspaper column. Hogg made a brief cameo appearance in the 2007 election campaign
as unofficial adviser to his partner, Maxine McKew, in her successful bid to unseat Prime Minister
John Howard from the electorate of Bennelong.

Gary Gray: Born in 1958 in Rotherham, in Yorkshire in the United Kingdom, Gray migrated at the
age of 8 with his family to Whyalla, South Australia, where his father worked with BHP. He was
educated at Whyalla High School and joined the Whyalla branch of the ALP at the age of 16,
describing himself as an ‘active’ member. ‘An active party member is 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’ (Interview). He moved to Canberra to
complete an economics degree at the Australian National University, and recalls visits to
Parliament House to watch Question Time as a guest of his ‘local’ – that is, South Australian –
member, Laurie Wallis. Advised in 1982 that a job was available with the NT Opposition Leader
Bob Collins, Gray got in his car and drove to Darwin in three days (Ramsey, 1993). On a private
visit to the UK in 1985, he worked for the British Labour Party for a year, meeting future Blair
election campaigners Peter Mandelson, Phillip Gould and others. Gray travelled at his own expense
to inspect the campaign capabilities of social democratic parties in France, Austria and Sweden. He
returned to Australia in 1986 when McMullan, rebuilding the party after the scare of the 1984
election, advertised for two assistant national secretaries. Gray won one of the posts and worked
as a national organiser, then assistant federal secretary, on the successful 1987 and 1990
campaigns with specific responsibility for marginal seat strategies and fundraising. Gray opted not
to pursue a parliamentary career – despite the seat of Grey, covering Whyalla, becoming vacant –
and, after Hogg’s retirement, was elected as national secretary.

The 1996 election campaign in which Labor lost office was marked by acrimony between Gray and
Prime Minister Keating (Gray, 1996; P. Williams, 1997). Gray also managed Opposition Leader
Beazley’s first defeat in 1998. He quit Head Office in 2000 to take up a corporate advisory role in
Perth with resources giant Woodside Energy. He was elected to the House of Representatives in
2007 for the Perth seat of Brand and has served as a parliamentary Secretary and Minister in the
Rudd and Gillard Governments; he is now Special Minister for State with responsibility for electoral
reform.

Geoff Walsh: Born in Sydney in 1953, Geoff Walsh was educated at Melbourne’s Caulfield
Grammar School and graduated with an arts degree from La Trobe University. A newspaper
journalist with the Albury Border Morning Mail, he was hired into the Canberra bureau of the
Melbourne Sun by bureau chief Laurie Oakes in 1976 (Oakes, 2008) and later worked in Melbourne
for The Age. Having joined the ALP in his late teens, he allowed his membership to lapse believing
that a journalist should not be a party member; he rejoined upon being appointed in 1981 as
National Communications Director for the ALP.

Walsh’s career has been a series of short-term appointments within the ALP structure, the public
service and business, usually dealing with media communications and political strategy. With the
election of the Hawke Government in 1983, Walsh joined the new Prime Minister’s staff as press
secretary; in 1986 he moved to Geneva with the International Labour Organisation, but returned
to Hawke’s office as political adviser in the lead-up to the 1990 election. Joining the Department of
Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) as the Canberra-based head of media, he returned to Parliament

152
House once more to head Prime Minister Keating’s office in 1994 before returning to DFAT as
Australian consul-general in Hong Kong, and then in Melbourne.

Walsh had considered seeking the national secretaryship after McMullan left in 1987 (Cockburn,
1987), and with Gray’s departure and Labor in Opposition in 2000, Walsh was a strong candidate.
He was elected with the support of party leader Kim Beazley. Leaving the ALP’s Head Office after
the defeat in 2001 (Walsh, 2002), Walsh worked with public affairs consultancy Gavin Anderson
(2004-06), Victorian ALP Premier Steve Bracks (2006-07) and, from 2007, with BHP Billiton. He is
a director of the Western Bulldogs Football (AFL) Club and was appointed a member of the Order
of Australia in 2005.

Tim Gartrell: Born in Orange, NSW, in 1970, Tim Gartrell was educated locally and at the
University of Sydney. His parents, ‘conservative’ orchardists, provided foster accommodation to
babies and young children, providing Gartrell an early insight into social justice issues. Active at
university in the anti-apartheid movement and other social causes, Gartrell joined the ALP’s
Darlington branch at the age of 19 and entered Labor party politics via Young Labor and the trade
union movement. He worked first as a volunteer with the Municipal Officers Association while
completing his University studies part-time; he then was employed by the Construction Forestry
Mining and Energy Union as a research officer during which he was assigned to run a local
member’s campaign in the 1993 Federal election. Working on the staff of Left-faction ministers
Jeanette McHugh and Frank Walker and backbencher Anthony Albanese, Gartrell came to the
attention of Gray who invited him to join Labor’s Head Office in 1998 – first as a campaign
assistant during the 1988 campaign, then as an organiser, until replacing assistant national
secretary Candy Broad in 2000. In this capacity he served under Walsh in the 2001 campaign and,
with Walsh’s departure, succeeded him in 2003.

Gartrell’s arrival coincided with a fresh round of turmoil in the parliamentary leadership, with
Simon Crean replaced, without having led the party to an election, by Mark Latham in 2003.
Gartrell managed Latham’s disastrous 2004 election campaign, in which the Howard Government
won majorities in both Houses of Parliament (Gartrell, 2005). Latham stood down and was
replaced by Beazley for his second stint as Opposition Leader; Beazley in turn was replaced by
Rudd in late 2006. Gartrell directed the successful “Kevin ‘07” campaign (Jackman, 2008;
Hartcher, 2009) but resigned from Head Office shortly afterwards. He joined market research
company Auspoll as CEO; he has subsequently headed two community campaign organisations,
the indigenous advocacy group Generation One and then You Me Unity, which campaigns for
constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Karl Bitar: Born in 1971 in Sydney, Bitar spent six teenage years in his family’s native Lebanon
and attended an international American high school in Beirut. Amid the worsening civil war and in
1989 with ‘bombs landing literally around our house’, the family returned to Australia. Bitar
completed HSC through Bankstown TAFE, and then an arts degree at the University of New South
Wales, majoring in economics and research methods, statistics and computing. He was also
working part-time, first with the Commonwealth Employment Service in Marrickville then in the
Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs as a labour market researcher
in skills shortages.

Motivated by opposition to the Liberals’ Fightback program, Bitar joined the Labor Party in 1992.
He quickly became engaged in factional politics in Young Labor on behalf of the right, rising to
senior-vice president and performing intensive ‘foot soldier’ campaign work throughout Sydney.
Bitar’s effort to secure preselection for the state seat of Canterbury in the mid-1990s was thwarted
in a branch stacking row with the right’s veteran warrior Leo McLeay MP – ‘probably one of the
biggest blues in the history of the party in NSW’ - but, mentored by assistant state secretary Mark
Arbib, he turned the tables on McLeay by winning election as state organiser in 1999. Bitar
coordinated ethnic advertising in the 1999 state campaign and target seats in the 2003 campaign
and, when Arbib became secretary in 2004, Bitar filled his slot as assistant secretary. He was
Arbib’s deputy campaign director in the 2007 state campaign and succeeded Arbib as NSW state

153
secretary in December 2007. He played a key role in the struggle between party and government
over power privatisation which brought down Premier Morris Iemma, and promoted the
appointment of his replacement Nathan Rees. But he served only ten months in Sussex Street,
moving quickly when Gartrell’s resignation was known to secure elevation to the national
secretary’s role in October 2008. Bitar was reportedly involved in the leaking of internal party polls
that brought about the downfall of Prime Minister Rudd in mid-2010, and managed Labor’s 2012
campaign which produced the hung parliament. Bitar quit the national Head Office in 2011 and has
taken up consultancy work for Crown Casino, part of the Packer empire.

Liberal Party of Australia

Bede Hartcher: Born in Sydney in 1918 and educated by the Marist Brothers in Darlinghurst,
Hartcher began work as a clerk for the NSW State Railways. He completed an economics degree
through part-time study at the University of Sydney. As the Liberal Party began staffing its new
national office, Hartcher answered a newspaper advertisement in 1947 and was hired as a
research officer in Sydney. He was to spend the rest of his career with the Liberal Party, either in
the national office or on secondment to state branches including in Victoria from 1954-7 where he
played a role in the election of Henry Bolte as Premier (Juddery, 1968). He succeeded W S
Bengtsson as senior research officer in 1955 and became Federal Director in 1969 following the
retirement of Bob Willoughby (Hancock, 2000: 290n). Hartcher was ‘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 (1961). Hartcher was Federal
Director for the 1972 campaign when the Liberals lost office after 23 years in government, and
nominally for the 1974 campaign. But he was a victim of the post-defeat restructure of the party
and left Head Office in 1974 (see below). He worked as Finance Director of the party’s NSW
division for eighteen months but succumbed to illness and died in August 1977. The party’s senior
research officer, Dr Graeme Starr, who had also left the Secretariat at this time, dedicated his
documentary history of the Liberal Party (Starr, 1980) to Hartcher’s memory.

Timothy Pascoe: Born in Adelaide in 1940, Timothy Pascoe attended St Peter’s College and then
the University of Adelaide where he completed degrees in engineering and economics. Winning a
Shell scholarship for pure and applied science, he completed a PhD in operations research at
Cambridge before moving to Harvard and completing an MBA in the Business School (Coleman,
1981). Recruited by global management consulting firm McKinsey and Co in New York, Pascoe
returned to Australia in 1969 as a 30-year old to work in McKinsey’s Melbourne office, where he
shared an office with John Elliott, then a rising Melbourne businessman. McKinsey expanded to
Sydney and Pascoe opened the office there, but fell out with the English manager and resigned; he
then ran a small venture capital firm for three years, before returning to McKinsey as a consultant.
He joined the Liberal Party in 1970. As the Liberal Party reorganised its Head Office after the 1972
defeat, Pascoe was approached - he believes it may have been at Elliott’s suggestion - to set up a
new Federal Policy Support Unit (FPSU) in Sydney (Lloyd and Reid, 1974: 317-21, 358-9).
Separately, Opposition Leader Snedden, federal president Southey, and Elliott were luring
Eggleton back from London (see below). The appointments of Pascoe and Eggleton were
announced in February 1974. The onset of a double dissolution election in May, however, brought
both new roles into sharper focus. Eggleton joined Snedden’s office for the duration of the
campaign - the party communications role never materialised - while Pascoe convened an
intensive brainstorming session of shadow ministers and policy experts in Melbourne over the
Easter week. The group produced a 136-page policy document which was immediately sent to the
printers and distributed for the campaign as ‘The Way Ahead’ (Interview; see also Oakes &
Solomon, 1974; Tiver, 1978). Also during the 1974 campaign, Pascoe set up a campaign
headquarters or ‘war room’ in Snedden’s Sydney office - the Liberals’ first - to track itineraries and
serve as a clearing house for information between Snedden and his frontbenchers. Electoral defeat
in 1974 fuelled the momentum of organisational change. The party’s Executive had revived its
Federal Campaign Committee which required Hartcher, as Federal Director, to consult daily with
the parliamentary leader, federal president and state divisions; Snedden announced a Marginal
Electorates Committee to make a concerted effort in Labor-held seats (Starr, 1980: 294-6). But

154
these changes were only precursors for a more dramatic restructuring of the Head Office. In
Pascoe’s view, the Secretariat had not been involved in any of his policy development or campaign
management work; he scathingly describes it as ‘moribund, incompetent, boring (and) useless’,
and more concerned with doing ‘what the Secretariat thought was right’ rather than ‘cooperating
with the leader’s office’ and with ‘the practical outcome of getting the party elected’. In Eggleton’s
view, the Secretariat needed to serve the parliamentary party like ‘a shadow Prime Minister’s
department’ (McLeay 1974).

Pascoe and Eggleton agreed privately that Pascoe would seek to become Federal Director for 12
months to ‘turn the place around and do all the bloodletting’, and then stand aside for Eggleton.
This plan was ‘seeded’ with Southey – again, perhaps by Elliott. ‘So after that I ended up as
Federal Director,’ Pascoe recalls. Pascoe’s appointment, in July 1974, was on the basis that
Hartcher would stay on in the Secretariat. It was a tricky and unstable situation. Pascoe recalls
that Hartcher continued to occupy the Director’s office. A journalist reported that the Head Office
would be effectively split into three parts: Pascoe’s policy unit and Eggleton’s communications unit
working out of Snedden’s office, with Hartcher responsible for ‘liaison between Canberra and the
states’ and ‘national committees’ (McLeay 1974). Pascoe, determined on a decisive resolution,
requested a meeting with Southey and the outgoing and incoming party Treasurers, businessmen
Sir Charles McGrath and Sir Robert Crichton-Browne, and presented them with a paper outlining
his case:

What I said basically was, ‘This is ridiculous. These two guys 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. (Interview)

Liberal Party historian Ian Hancock (2000: 269) suggests that in the eyes of the ‘so-called
McKinsey set’, Hartcher and Holt ‘stood out like dinosaurs’ and were ‘brutally removed’. Pascoe
hired energetic replacements in policy and communications (Marsh, 1976), rebuilt the
organisation’s relationship with the parliamentary leadership and shadow ministry office and, with
Southey, protected Eggleton from direct involvement in the imminent Snedden-Fraser leadership
challenge (Ayres, 1987). His twelve month term complete, and with Fraser having toppled
Snedden, Pascoe stepped aside and Eggleton became Federal Director in mid-1975, the third
director in the space of a year.

After a year as director of the Victorian division of the Party, Pascoe returned to his consultancy
work, establishing an innovative non-profit group ARTS Limited designed to provide commercial
consultancy to arts bodies. He was appointed by the Fraser Government as chairman of the
Australia Council in 1981. Since 1984 he has managed his private Sydney-based consultancy
specialising in strategic advice and leadership. He was appointed a member of the Order of
Australia in 2004.

Tony Eggleton: Born in 1932 in Swindon, UK, Tony Eggleton was educated at King Alfred’s
College in Wantage and joined the Young Conservatives. His first job was as a copyboy then
reporter with the Swindon Evening Advertiser in the late 1940s. Arriving in Australia as an 18-year
old, he resumed journalism with the Bendigo Advertiser, where he interviewed newly-elected
Senator John Gorton. Moving to the Australian Broadcasting Commission in Melbourne and
Adelaide he gained rare expertise after the introduction of television in 1956. Promoted rapidly to
chief of staff in the Melbourne news room, he began to look for new opportunities. The Department
of the Navy advertised for an experienced radio, television and newspaper reporter to run its
public relations activities. He got the job, partly thanks to intervention by the minister, Gorton,
who recalled the Bendigo interview and who also saw this new departmental position as a potential

155
political asset (Hancock, 2002: 90). Eggleton recalls he ‘spent a lot of time at Parliament House
rather than Russell Hill (Defence offices)’. He came under the eye of Prime Minister Menzies in
1964 when, following the collision between the destroyer, HMAS Voyager, and the aircraft carrier
HMAS Melbourne in which 82 sailors died, Eggleton managed the media with a sure hand.
Separately, chairing a committee to create a National Press Club in Canberra, Eggleton had reason
to write to Menzies. Impressed, Menzies arranged for Eggleton to serve as press secretary to then-
defence minister Shane Paltridge during the 1964 Senate election, and asked Paltridge to report
back to him on his performance; Menzies subsequently took on Eggleton as his own press
secretary. At Kirribilli House over summer in 1965-6, Menzies confided in Eggleton, whom he
referred to as ‘laddie’, his intention to retire. Eggleton was bequeathed to Prime Minister Holt and
helped the new leader promote his image through effective use of television (Frame, 2005: 146-
9), though leadership aspirant Paul Hasluck regarded Eggleton as a ‘little twerp’ who helped
destroy Holt’s leadership by feeding his weakness for publicity (Henderson, 1998: 198). In the
days after Holt’s disappearance in the surf at Portsea in December 1967, Eggleton came to very
wide public attention through his dignified and composed television briefings (Anon, 1967b). His
high profile is suggested by the fact that, when Liberal MPs gathered to vote for Holt’s successor,
Eggleton both admitted the cameras to the party room before the vote and also announced the
result to the waiting press afterwards. Joining Prime Minister Gorton’s staff as press secretary,
Eggleton’s brief expanded to a trouble-shooter role, having accompanied Gorton during his
controversial late-night visit to the US Embassy with journalist Geraldine Willesee (Reid, 1971;
Hancock, 2002). Eggleton also wrote a highly critical internal report about Gorton’s media
performance during the 1969 campaign, urging the ‘close supervision of the campaign by a
campaign manager, and the appointment of a television specialist’ (Hancock, 2002: 244). When
Gorton was toppled by McMahon, Eggleton commenced work for his fourth Prime Minister but soon
moved to London where he was appointed Information Director for the Commonwealth Secretariat.
Following the Liberals’ defeat, Eggleton was made ‘an offer I couldn’t refuse’ to return to Canberra
to establish and run a ‘new communications shop’ for the party; Elliott phoned to offer to ‘help
finance’ his return (Ramsey, 2009: 17). This was Eggleton’s first job with the organisational rather
than parliamentary wing of the party.

Following Pascoe’s restructures, Eggleton soon became Federal Director. At this point Eggleton
joined the Liberal Party for the first time. As a working journalist he had not joined the Party, and
could cite the authority of Menzies for his decision not to do so:

(Menzies) said – 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. … 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 national campaign manager for the 1975 and 1977 election campaigns, which saw
massive wins for the Liberals, as well as the much closer 1980 victory. But he then oversaw three
successive defeats, an unprecedented experience for the Party as it entered a ‘period in the
wilderness’. At the suggestion of Fraser, Eggleton had prepared a ‘to do’ list in the event of
election defeat and amid the continuous Howard-Peacock leadership rivalry, Eggleton became a
stabilising influence, a scrupulously neutral broker between the warring factions (O'Reilly, 1987).
Eggleton recalls repeatedly offering to step aside but 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 (Ramsey,
2009).

Eggleton retired from Head office on his 59 th birthday in 1991 after 17 years as Federal Director –
nearly as long as Willoughby’s marathon 18 years – and moved to Brussels to head the global aid
agency CARE International. Like Willoughby before him, Eggleton’s lengthy tenure in the Head
Office led ultimately to contented retirement in the garden suburbs of Canberra.

156
Andrew Robb: Born in 1951 as one of nine children in a dairy farming family in Epping, Victoria,
Robb was educated by the Christian Brothers at Parade College, Bundoora. He completed a
diploma of agricultural science at Dookie Agricultural College and worked as an animal health
officer and agricultural economist with the Victorian Department of Agriculture (1972-79).
Studying part-time, he completed an economics degree at La Trobe University and went on to a
part-time tutoring role: an academic career beckoned. Robb however opted against doctoral
studies in the US and accepted an appointment as economist with the National Farmers’
Federation (NFF) where he was introduced to rural politics. Taking an increasingly prominent free-
market role 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 (P. Kelly, 1992: 41-2; P. Williams, 1997: 53-4). Identified by John Elliott as a potential
future party official, Robb was appointed deputy director in the lead-up to the 1990 campaign.
Robb set up a specialist campaigning unit focussed on marginal seats, and travelled with Peacock
during the campaign proper. When Eggleton resigned, Robb was appointed Federal Director in
1991. He managed the Liberals’ losing campaign in the 1993 ‘unwinnable’ election and the winning
campaign in 1996 (Robb, 1996b, 1997; P. Williams, 1997).

Leaving Head office in 1997, Robb became a senior executive with Kerry Packer’s Publishing and
Broadcasting empire (Snow, 1997) and Chief Executive (1991-2001) and then Chairman (2001-
04) of direct marketing company Acxiom Australia, created as a joint venture between PBL and
US-based Acxiom Group. Robb later chaired an industry association, the Australian Direct
Marketing Association. Elected to the House of Representatives as the member for Goldstein in
2004, Robb served as a parliamentary secretary and junior minister in the last years of the
Howard Government, and in opposition has held senior frontbench roles including Finance. He was
appointed a member of the Order of Australia in 2003.

Lynton Crosby: Born in 1956 in Kadina in rural South Australia, Crosby graduated with an
economics degree from the University of Adelaide. He joined the Liberal Party at 18 and recalls
handing out pamphlets criticising the Whitlam Government’s tax plans in Rundle Mall in 1975. An
active party member, he rose to become state president of the Young Liberals. Crosby worked
briefly as a market analyst for Golden Fleece Petroleum, but in 1978 began his political career,
joining the staff of Liberal Senator Baden Teague as a research assistant. The following year he
shifted to the state level, working for Harold Allison, the state minister for Education and
Aboriginal Affairs (1979-82) and, following the defeat of the Tonkin Liberal Government, for Martin
Cameron, Opposition Leader in the upper house (1982-86). He stood unsuccessfully for the safe
Labor state seat of Norwood in the 1982 campaign. Turning down a 1987 offer from Eggleton to
join the Federal Secretariat so that his wife could take up a job with the stock exchange in
Adelaide, Crosby returned to the private sector working for Santos and Elders until 1991, when he
was invited to become state director of the party’s Queensland division. ‘A party member and
activist who happened to get into the professional wing’, Crosby directed the Liberals’ campaigns
in Queensland in the 1992 state elections and the 1993 Federal elections. Again invited to join the
Federal Secretariat, this time by Andrew Robb, he accepted and moved to Canberra in 1994. As
Robb’s deputy he ran the marginal seats unit during the 1996 election campaign (Williams, 1997:
202-3). He also inspected Republican Party campaign techniques in the United States in 1994
(Bathgate, et al., 1996).

Crosby’s first campaign as campaign director was a close run thing; at the end of the 1998
campaign he had to tell Prime Minister Howard his polls were showing the Government heading for
defeat; the Liberals scrambled over the line (Errington & van Onselen, 2007: 275). Crosby
successfully directed Howard’s third campaign success in 2001 (Crosby, 2000, 2002). Resigning as
Federal Director in 2002, Crosby moved into a new career phase, setting up a political and
business consultancy, Crosby-Textor, with market researcher Mark Textor. In addition to the
Liberal Party, Crosby-Textor has provided market research and political advice to the British
Conservative Party in 2005, the Canadian Conservatives under Stephen Harper, and Boris
Johnson’s successful campaigns for Lord Mayor of London in 2008 and 2012; he has been
described as a ‘maestro of the dark arts’ who has introduced ‘dog whistle politics’ into the UK

157
(Grice, 2005; Glover, 2008). Crosby Textor’s 2005 work for the New Zealand National Party has
also been critically portrayed (Hager, 2006).

Brian Loughnane: Born in 1957 in Geelong, Loughnane was educated in Colac where he recalls
regularly seeing Malcolm Fraser - the member for the neighbouring seat of Wannon – on local
television. He graduated from La Trobe University in 1981 with a degree in political science. Active
in the Liberal Club on campus, he was elected to the SRC as a Liberal, before formally joining the
Liberal Party in his final year. He celebrated his 18 th birthday on the day of the dismissal of the
Whitlam Government, allowing him to enrol and vote in the subsequent election. Employed by
Shell Australia as an industrial relations manager for ten years from 1982, Loughnane travelled
extensively; but he maintained membership of the same party branch, Viewbank in suburban
Melbourne, for his entire career. He was an active member, holding several positions in the branch
including president and directing numerous local campaigns during federal and state elections.
After the election of the Kennett government in Victoria in 1992, Loughnane shifted into political
staff work as senior adviser to Small Business minister Vin Heffernan. Two years later he was
approached to serve as Chief of Staff to ill-fated Opposition Leader Alexander Downer; within a
few months Downer had been replaced as leader by John Howard. Loughnane was joined Howard’s
staff but after a few months opted to return to the private sector; he worked with the Gas and Fuel
Corporation in Melbourne in 1995 and 1996. Appointed by the newly-elected Howard Government
as chief of staff to Industry, and then Defence, minister John Moore (1996-2000), Loughnane
returned to Melbourne as the state director of the Liberal Party in 2000. He came to national
prominence in July 2001 as campaign director in the successful by-election defence of the
Melbourne seat of Aston, which the Howard Government had been widely expected to lose. He
succeeded Crosby as Federal Director in 2003 and was campaign manager in the successful 2004
campaign and the losing campaigns of 2007 and 2010 (Loughnane, 2005, 2007 (19 December),
2012).

158
 Appendix Two

The First Marginal Seat Campaign

The origins of targeted campaign strategies in Australian elections can be traced back to 1951.
Labor’s Federal Secretary Pat Kennelly developed the first, albeit rudimentary, plan for what is now
commonly termed a ‘marginal seat’ campaign: a nationally coordinated effort to target campaign
resources to seats identified as essential for victory. Loss of government in 1949 and defeat in the
1951 double dissolution prompted Labor’s Federal Executive to review their campaign
performance. Kennelly was dispatched to Britain, where he witnessed the triumph of Atlee and the
British Labour Party in the 1950 general elections. In the first of two reports to the Federal
Executive, Kennelly emphasised the need for earlier candidate preselections by state braches for
those seats they believed they could win back, along with better public relations and more
discipline to counter the better funded Liberal Party (Weller and Lloyd, 1978: 414, 420, 432-3 and
note). His 1951 review went further. Picking up his earlier recommendation about preselections,
Kennelly proposed a plan for the party to ‘concentrate’ its campaign resources. Kennelly identified
21 seats he believed Labor could take from the coalition. With the Menzies Government having
been returned with a 17-seat majority, winning these seats would be enough to secure a small
Labor majority. In the ensuing debate at the Federal Executive, these 21 seats were described as
‘marginal seats’ - perhaps the first recorded usage of this term in Australian campaigning (Weller
and Lloyd, 1978: 448-50).

What did Kennelly mean by ‘concentrating’ resources? As a state secretary, Kennelly had built his
own influence through deft interventions into candidate preselections in Victoria, a process he
referred to as selecting ‘horses for courses’. He now recommended state branches preselect
candidates for the 21 seats within the next six or eight months. Further, he suggested state
branches meet with him and the Federal President ‘for the purpose of working out a system,
including the financing of same, whereby the endorsed candidate could be able to spend
considerable time in the electorate prior to the election.’ Not wholly convinced, Executive agreed
to a discussion with State executives about ‘marginal seats and the special financing of candidates
for such seats’. The details of this ‘special financing’ became clear later, when Kennelly reported
back on a meeting with the Opposition Leader, Ben Chifley. At the meeting, the parliamentary
leader and the party organisation had developed a cost-sharing scheme: in each of the targeted
‘barometer or marginal seats’, the Federal Executive, the Federal caucus election fund, and the
respective state branch would each contribute an equal sum to provide an electorate-specific
campaign fund. The sum agreed - £5 per week for each contributor – was hardly a lavish amount;
over two years it might amount to a commitment of perhaps £1500 per seat or £30,000 in total.
But Kennelly believed it would allow candidates to put in ‘preparatory work’ prior to the campaign
proper. The states were evidently uneasy about this federal intervention in their campaign
management: any campaign work under the scheme was to be performed ‘under the supervision
and direction’ of the respective state branch and would apply only ‘in those seats where agreement
was reached’. Chifley’s support for the scheme would perhaps have overcome such parochialism –
but the promising negotiations were interrupted, by Chifley’s sudden death (Weller and Lloyd,
1978: 507), and were never apparently resumed.

Kennelly deserves recognition for formulating this rudimentary marginal seat campaign. But –
quite apart from his inability to secure party agreement for it - there was a crucial flaw at the
heart of his logic. This goes to the correct definition of ‘marginal’ seats. All the 21 seats on his list
were ‘marginal’ in the sense that, requiring an average 2PP swing of 3.4 per cent based on 1951
voting, they were indeed seats Labor could realistically hope to win. But all of them were held by
the Liberal or Country Parties: absent from Kennelly’s concept was any recognition that Labor
needed to defend its own seats. In fact, several Labor seats, including the soon-to-be Opposition
Leader Dr H V Evatt’s NSW seat of Barton, were held by a thread and should surely have received
any additional campaign resources. The proposed concentration or targeting of resources thus
misrepresented the reality of the strategic challenge facing Labor by assuming a pro-Labor

159
swing.60 One suspects indeed that, given, some of the seats on Kennelly’s list had been held by
Labor under the Curtin/ Chifley Government, Labor simply hoped it could recreate the conditions of
the 1940s a decade later; others however were new seats created in the 1949 expansion of the
House of Representatives. Whatever the shortcomings of Kennelly’s plan, however, Labor’s 1954
campaign preparations were as united and as detailed as they had ever been (Weller and Lloyd,
1978: 553) and Labor under Evatt won an absolute majority of the vote and picked up five seats in
five different states – all of which had been on Kennelly’s list61.

The Liberal Party also developed the principles of marginal seat campaigning, though their
approach was not driven nationally, from the Federal Secretariat, but by the New South Wales
state director, Carrick. In the lead-up to 1954, Carrick identified eight marginal seats in that state
for ‘maximum intensity’ of campaigning. Unlike Kennelly, the Liberals did recognise the need to
defend (three Liberal-held marginals) as well as to attack (five Labor-held marginals). Using their
best electoral asset, Carrick prevailed upon Menzies to include visits to all of the eight seats on his
campaign itinerary (Hancock, 2000: 147-8). Three Liberal-held NSW seats, Mitchell, Robertson and
St George, were on both parties’ lists; of them St George fell to Labor.

60
The target list also omits some seats, particularly in Queensland, which on a 2PP basis were apparently
more ‘winnable’ for Labor. The target list also emphasises seats in the large states in which Labor was already
strong: six seats were identified in New South Wales, where Labor already held 24 of 47 seats (51 per cent),
and five in Victoria where it held 15 of 33 (45 per cent); by contrast only three Queensland seats were on the
list though Labor held only four out of 18 seats in that state and one seat in Western Australia where Labor
held only 3 of 8 seats. This reflects that incumbency provides greater campaign capacity; it may also suggest
that expectations of future success were higher where success had been already experienced.
61
The five seats that changed hands in 1954 were St George (NSW), Griffith (Qld), Sturt (SA), Swan (WA) and
Bass (Tas). A sixth seat on the list, Flinders (Vic) had been won by Labor in a by-election in 1952 but was lost
to the Liberals in the 1954 elections. It is not clear what if any additional campaign resources Labor may have
concentrated on these campaigns and this question would repay closer study.

160
 Appendix Three

Party Officials: Interview Data, Demographic Data and Party Experience

Table 1: Research Interviews: Where and When Conducted

Date Interviewee Location of Interview Duration Approx

(hours/ word
minutes) count of
transcript
24 Feb 2010 Andrew Robb Respondent’s office, Parliament House, 1h 27m 9,800
Canberra, ACT
26 Feb 2010 Bob Hogg Respondent’s home in Epping NSW 2h 30m 6,800
17 Mar 2010 Timothy Pascoe Respondent’s office, Edgecliff NSW 1h 41m 7,700
22 Mar 2010 Tony Eggleton Respondent’s home, Deakin ACT 2h 19m 17,000
24 Mar 2010 Bob McMullan Respondent’s office, Parliament House, 1h 27m 10,500
Canberra ACT
19 Apr 2010 Geoff Walsh Respondent’s office, Melbourne Vic 56m 4,500
21 Apr 2010 David Combe Researcher’s office, University of Sydney 1h 55m 11,000
NSW
20 Sep Tim Gartrell Restaurant, Redfern NSW 1h 02m 6,800
2010
21 Sep Lynton Crosby Respondent’s office, Sydney NSW 1h 39m 10,500
2010
15 Dec 2010 Gary Gray Respondent’s office, Parliament House, 1 h 30m 9,100
Canberra ACT
8 Mar 2011 Cyril Wyndham Respondent’s home, Newcastle NSW 1 h 22m 6,800
15 Mar 2011 Brian Loughnane Liberal Party Headquarters, 1 h 18m 7,200
Canberra ACT
18 Oct 2011 Karl Bitar Hotel foyer, Sydney NSW 1 h 53m 15,000

161
Table 2: Interview Coding Schema: Principal Themes

Theme Sub-theme Sub-sub-theme

Personal Experience - prior to selection as Outside Party Private enterprise
National Secretary/ Federal Director Journalism
Union movement
Overseas
Joins party
Within Party On the ground Campaign/ non-
In central office - state campaign experience
In central office – nat’l
In Party in Office
Methods of Selection as National Secretary/ Election (ALP) Contested
Federal Director
Consensual
Appointment (ALP)
Appointment (Liberal)
Campaign activities Campaign director
Campaign lessons/ innovations
Campaign organisers
Campaign style
Centralising and coordinating of
Communications Advertising
Direct mail
Internet
Media management
Headquarters
Strategic planning Market research
Marginal seat campaigning
Rational allocation of resources
Head office characteristics Relationships with party/ campaign elements With members (on the ground)
With party in public office – inc leadership
With national executive (party central office)
With state branches/divisions (party central office)
With external consultants (party central office)
Finances Banking/ overdraft/ debt
Budgeting/ expenditure
Property development

162
 Public funding receipts
Transfers from state branches
Nature of work
Professionalism Agree/disagree with description of self as
Elements of definition of Career development
Competent
Dispassionate/ rational/ scientific
Modernity
Paid, not voluntary
Passionate/committed
Personal skills/ experience
Vocational/ serious

163
 Table 3: National Secretaries and Federal Directors: Place of Birth and Education

ALP Where born Education

Arch Stewart Sebastopol, Vic Unknown

Daniel McNamara Pomborneit Vic State schools
Patrick Kennelly Northcote, Vic St Patrick’s College, East Melbourne
Jack Schmella Charters Towers, Qld Christian Brothers College
F E Chamberlain London, UK Local UK schools; apprenticed at age 14
Cyril Wyndham London, UK Kingston Day Commercial College (UK); London School of Economics trade union program
Mick Young Sydney, NSW Marist Brothers, to age 15
David Combe Glenelg, SA Prince Alfred College, Adelaide, Adelaide University, B.A.
Bob McMullan Perth, WA Stirling High School; University of Western Australia (B.A., B.Ec)
Bob Hogg Melbourne, Vic Brighton Technical College, Caulfield Institute of Technology
Gary Gray Rotherham, UK Local high school, SA; Australian National University (B.Ec.)
Geoff Walsh Sydney, NSW Caulfield Grammar School; La Trobe University
Tim Gartrell Orange, NSW University of Sydney; Masters in Communications Studies
Karl Bitar Sydney, NSW High School in Lebanon; Bankstown TAFE; University of NSW (BA)
Liberal Where born Education

Don Cleland Coolgardie, WA Guildford C of E Grammar School

Robert Willoughby Greenock, Scotland Local high school, UK to age 15
Bede Hartcher Sydney, NSW Marist Brothers, Darlinghurst; University of Sydney (B.Ec.)
Tim Pascoe Adelaide, SA St Peter’s College, Adelaide; Adelaide University (B. Eng., B.Ec); Cambridge University (PhD);
Harvard University (MBA)
Tony Eggleton Swindon, UK King Alfred’s College, UK
Andrew Robb Epping, Vic Parade, Christian Brothers; Dookie Agricultural (Dip. Ag. Sci.); La Trobe University (B.
Ec.hons)
Lynton Crosby Kadina, SA Adelaide University (B.Ec.)
Brian Loughnane Geelong, Vic La Trobe University, (BA hons)

164
Table 4: National Secretaries and Federal Directors: Occupations and Political Experience Prior to Appointment

ALP Age Previous Occupations Prior political activity Prior political activity Prior political activity
joined (non-political) (extra-party) (‘party in office’) (‘party organisation’)
party
Arch Stewart ? Mining, selling groceries Trade union member Candidate Vic and Fed Secretary, Ballarat PLC; Senior v-p,
and delegate (AWU) parliaments; Vic PLC;
Fed Electorate campaign manager;
Sec, Vic ALP 1911-1925
Daniel McNamara ? Local co-op ventures Elected Berwick Shire Candidate Vic Delegate to Vic conferences; Member
Council, president; parliament; Elected to Vic executive; Asst sec and
Trade union organiser, Leg Council 1917-1947; organising sec, Vic branch; General
AWU Minister, Vic Govt; secretary 1925-1947
Patrick Kennelly 15 Clerk, miner Trade union member, Member Leg Council Local Branch sec; Member, Vic
FCU 1938-1952; Minister, executive 1932-1950;Organising sec,
Vic Govt Vic branch
Jack Schmella ? Teacher, Qld state Union member, State sec, Qld branch
department researcher, industrial
Jackeroo, prospector officer, AWU
and miner
F E Chamberlain ? Apprentice printer Trade union member State sec, WA Branch 1949-1974;
Army Conscript (UK) and secretary and Delegate, Federal Executive; Fed v-p
Labourer, timber advocate (WA and President (1955-61)
clearer, road worker, transport); Delegate,
dairy farmer, ACTU
watchman, tram
conductor and driver
(WA)
Cyril Wyndham Teenager Elected Merton and Clerk, then assist to Gen’l Sec, then
(14?), Morden local council, UK admin officer, internat’l dept, British
British Press sec, Ldr Labour Party 1944-1957; State sec,
Labour Opposition, ALP 1957- Vic branch 1961-63
Party 61

Mick Young ? Shearer Trade union member Organiser, Asst state sec and state
and official AWU sec, SA branch
David Combe 19 Casual petrol station Press sec and ministerial State electorate campaign manager;
attendant; staff, SA Govt; Organiser, asst sec, sec, SA branch

165
 Graduate trainee, Shell

Bob McMullan 20 Pres, Federal Labor Youth Org; Assist

sec, acting sec, WA Branch; Anti-
Vietnam war movement, anti-
conscriptionist; Trade union
researcher (Prison Officers’ Union)
Bob Hogg 24 Food technician, Mauri Political adviser, Prime Branch office holder; Factional
Bros; production Minister Hawke organiser; Fed Conf delegate; State
planning engineer, sec, Vic Anti-Vietnam war
Thermo Radiant Ovens; movement; Anti-hanging campaign
Part-time printer
Gary Gray 16 Branch Member, SA and National organiser, asst national sec;
NT Volunteer, British Labour Party, visits
Staff Opposition Ldr, NT to soc-dem parties in Europe
Geoff Walsh Teenager/ Newspaper reporter, Press sec, Prime Communications Director, Federal
early 20s Foreign Affairs official Minister Hawke Secretariat
Resigned,
rejoined
Tim Gartrell 19 Council employee, Young Labor; Ministerial Asst sec, Federal Secretariat
South Sydney council staffer, Federal Parlt Researcher; trade unions (MOA,
CFMEU)
Karl Bitar 21 Research officer, Dep’t Young Labor NSW Branch Organiser; Asst State
of Education, Sec, State Sec
Employment and
Training

166
 Liberal Age Previous Occupation Prior political activity Prior political activity Prior political activity
joined (extra-party) (party in office) (party organisation)
party
Don Cleland Before 35 Army officer, 1919- Candidate WA President, National Party WA 1936-
1928; Solicitor and Parliament, 1933,36,39 38; Vice-president, Liberal party WA
barrister; AIF officer, and Federal Parliament
1939-1945 1945
Chair, Production
Control Board Papua
New Guinea
Robert ? Parl’tary Staffer: Senate Clerk, Administrator and field
Willoughby (Employee 1938-47; Opp’n Leader organiser, Liberal Federation SA
at 16) Menzies 47-49; PM 1924-38
Menzies 1949-51 Parliamentary liaison, Fed secretariat
Bede Hartcher Not a Clerk, NSW Railways Research officer and Senior research
member officer, Federal Secretariat;
before Senior Research Officer, Vic Division
employed
by Liberal
Party at
age 29
Tim Pascoe 30 McKinsey and Co., New
York, Melbourne and
Sydney;
Enterprise Management
of Australia (venture
capital)
Tony Eggleton Teenager Newspaper reporter, Public relations, Dept of Press sec, Prime Communications unit, Federal
(Young UK; Newspaper then Navy (Voyager Ministers Menzies, Holt, Secretariat
Conservativ Radio/TV Journalist disaster); Gorton, McMahon 1965-
es) (ABC) Communications 71
Director,
Joined Commonwealth
Liberal Secretariat,
Party at 42 London
Andrew Robb 37 Stock inspector, Exec director, Cattle Deputy director, Federal Secretariat
agricultural economist, Council; Exec director,
university tutor National Farmers

167
 Federation

Lynton Crosby 18 Golden Fleece, Santos, Parliamentary Staffer, Young Liberal state pres;
Elders Senate; State director, Qld division;
Ministerial staff, SA Deputy director, Federal Secretariat
Govt and Opp’n;
Candidate, SA
parliament
Brian Loughnane Final year Shell, industrial Chief of staff, State and Branch president
Uni relations manager; Federal ministers and
Senior manager, Gas Fed Ldr Opposition State director, Vic division
and Fuel Corp

168
Table 5: National Secretaries and Federal Directors (interviewed): Prior Election Campaign Experience

ALP With party ‘on the ground’ With party ‘in office’ With party organisation

Cyril Wyndham UK 1940s Fed 58 (LO) Vic 61, 62by, 63 (ss)

David Combe SA 68 (LO) Fed 69, 72 (ss*); SA 70 (ss*)
Bob McMullan Fed 72 (local cm) Fed 74, 75, 77, 80 (ss); WA 74, 77 and 80 (ss)
Bob Hogg Fed 66 (vol); Vic 67 (can) Fed 83, 84 (LO) Fed 69by (cm); Vic 76, 79, 82 (ss); Fed 77, 80 (ss)
Gary Gray Fed 74 (vol) NT 83, Fed 84 (LO) Fed 87, 87by, 90, 93 (HO); Vic 88, WA 89 (HO)
Geoff Walsh Fed/Vic (vol) Fed 83, 84, 90 (LO) WA 83 (HO*)
Tim Gartrell Fed 90 (vol) Fed 96 (MP) Fed 93 elect (tu); Fed 98 (HO*), 01 (HO)
Karl Bitar Fed 93, 96 NSW 95, 99 (vol) NSW 99, 03 (HO*), 07 (HO)

Liberal With party ‘on the ground’ With party ‘in office’ With party organisation

Tim Pascoe Fed 74 (HO)

Tony Eggleton Fed Sen 64 (min); Fed 66, 69, 74
LO)
Andrew Robb Fed 90 (LO)
Lynton Crosby SA 82 (can) Qld 92 (sd); Fed 93 (sd); Fed 96 (HO)
Brian Loughnane Vic 85, 88, 92; Fed 87,90, 93 Fed 98 (min) Fed 96 (HO*); Vic 01by (cm); Vic 02 (sd)
(local cm)

Election campaigns indicated by Fed (Federal) or state + year.

by = by-election; can = candidate; cm = campaign manager; local cm = campaign manager in individual electorate min = ministerial staffer; MP –
member of parliament staffer; sd = director; sen = Senate; ss = state secretary - ss* acting; tu = with trade union; vol = volunteer; HO = Federal Head
Office as eg deputy/assistant; HO* = Federal Head Office below deputy level; LO = in leader’s office

169
Table 6: National Secretaries and Federal Directors: Age at Appointment and Years in Office

ALP Age Years

at appointment in office
Arch Stewart 48 10
Daniel McNamara 49 21
Patrick Kennelly 46 8
Jack Schmella 46 6
F E Chamberlain 61 3
Cyril Wyndham 33 6
Mick Young 33 3
David Combe 30 8
Bob McMullan 34 7
Bob Hogg 51 6
Gary Gray 35 7
Geoff Walsh 47 3
Tim Gartrell 32 5
Karl Bitar 36 3
Liberal Age Years
at appointment in office
Don Cleland 44 6
Robert Willoughby 43 18
Bede Hartcher 50 3
Tim Pascoe 34 1
Tony Eggleton 42 17
Andrew Robb 40 6
Lynton Crosby 41 6
Brian Loughnane 50 7+

170
Table 7: ALP Federal Conference Rules: Secretary’s Term of Office

Secretary in office Conference year and location Secretary’s method of selection and terms and performance
Kennelly 1951 Canberra Rule 5: “The General Secretary shall be the permanent Officer of the Federal Executive,
subject to good conduct, satisfactory performance of duty, and adherence to the Policy
and Objects of the Party. His services shall be terminable by the Federal Executive or by
the General Secretary himself by one month’s notice by either party.”
Wyndham 1963 Perth “Good conduct rule” (now 7 b (iii)) amended to include: “In the event of a vacancy
occurring in the position of Federal Secretary, the Federal Executive may appoint an
acting Secretary, who shall hold office until the next Conference is held, when the
position shall be filled by Conference.”
Young 1969 Melbourne “Administrative Decisions. The following decisions were adopted by the 1969 Federal
Conference in relation to the future functions of the Federal Secretariat …
2. Notwithstanding Rule 7 (b) (iii) the part-time Federal Secretary continue in office
pending further consideration by the Federal Executive after consultation with the State
Branches. … ”
Combe 1973 Surfers Paradise Administrative decision (above) deleted
1975 Terrigal Casual vacancy provision deleted
McMullan 1981 Melbourne Good conduct provision extended to “Assistant National Secretary”
Status re Conference and Executive extended to “Assistant National Secretary”
1984 Canberra Reference to “Assistant National Secretary” deleted
Resolution on David Combe “pain and distress”
1986 Hobart “Good conduct” provision deleted
7 (a) (iv) National Secretary “shall be elected by the National Conference” and 7 (b) (i)
“shall be subject to re-election at every second Conference”
Gray 1994 Hobart Rule 7 (b) (iii): “casual vacancies for the position … of National Secretary shall be filled
by a ballot of the National Executive”

171
Table 8: Key Agency Relationships of Federal Head Offices, 1972-2010

ALP Federal/ Advertising Agency Market Research Liberal Party Advertising Market Research
Federal
National (and principal) Agency Federal Director Agency Adviser / Agency
Election
Secretary
Mick Young Hansen-Rubensohn- Marplan, Spectrum Bede Hartcher No national agency
1972 McCann-Erikson (Sim International
Rubensohn)
David Combe Hansen-Rubensohn- ANOP (Rod Bede Hartcher Berry Currie Quantum Market
1974 McCann-Erikson Cameron and Research (George
Margaret Gibbs Camakaris)
David Combe Mullins, Clarke and Ralph ANOP Tony Eggleton Masius Wynn Roy Morgan
1975 (Malcolm Macfie) Williams and D’Arcy
MacManus
David Combe Mullins, Clarke and Ralph ANOP Tony Eggleton Masius Wynn Roy Morgan
1977 Williams and D’Arcy
MacManus
David Combe Forbes Macfie Hansen ANOP Tony Eggleton D’Arcy-MacManus Roy Morgan
1980
(Malcolm Macfie) and Masius
Bob McMullan Forbes Macfie Hansen ANOP Tony Eggleton D’Arcy-MacManus Roy Morgan
1983
and Masius
Bob McMullan Forbes Macfie Hansen ANOP Tony Eggleton D’Arcy-MacManus Roy Morgan; Brian
1984
and Masius Sweeney and Assoc
Bob McMullan John Singleton Agency ANOP Tony Eggleton D’Arcy, Masius, Roy Morgan
1987
(John Singleton) Benton and Bowles
Bob Hogg John Singleton Agency ANOP Tony Eggleton George Patterson Roy Morgan
1990
Bob Hogg John Singleton Agency Australian Andrew Robb George Patterson Roy Morgan
1993 Community
Research *
Gary Gray John Singleton Agency UMR (John Utting) Andrew Robb ‘The Team’ ** Mark Textor
1996
Gary Gray Saatchi and Saatchi UMR Lynton Crosby ‘The Team’ Mark Textor
1998 (Sandra Yates, Luke
Dunkerley
Geoff Walsh Saatchi and Saatchi plus UMR Lynton Crosby ‘The Team’ Mark Textor
2001 Shannon’s Way (Bill
Shannon)
Tim Gartrell Shannon’s Way plus UMR Brian Loughnane ‘The Team’ Mark Textor
2004
Rhythm and Shoes

172
 (Graeme Woodlock)
Tim Gartrell STW Communications UMR plus Visibility Brian Loughnane ‘The Team’ Mark Textor
2007
Group (Neil Lawrence) (John Mitchelmore)
Karl Bitar McCann Erikson (Jonathan UMR Brian Loughnane Ted Horton, Mark Mark Textor
2010
Brown) plus Cutting Edge Pearson and Paul
(Ray Smith) Leeds

* Karen Luscombe and Jim Malonus

** Toby Ralph and John King (DDB Needham) plus Ted Horton and Mark Pearson (Republic)

Sources: Mills, S (1986); Young, S (2004) for advertising agencies to 2001; various news reports thereafter.

173
Table 9: Methods of Centralising Public Funding Receipts

Election ALP Liberal Party

year
1984 Apportionment statement claims national organisation spending in Apportionment statement lodged, claiming national organisation
all states + ACT/NT, pro rata according to the number of House of spending in 5 states according to the actual costs of advertising
Representatives seats. and advertising production provided therein.

State and territory branches authorise AEC to direct 16% of their

receipts to the national secretariat.
1987 Apportionment statement for 8 states and territories, covering 98 Apportionment statement for all states + ACT covering 92 per cent
per cent of total spending. of total spending.
1990 States and territories lodge nil spending returns while national Two states (Vic and Qld) lodge nil spending returns while national
organisation lodges apportionment statement claiming organisation lodges apportionment statement for all states + ACT
responsibility for 100% of spending in all states + ACT/NT. claiming responsibility for 76% of spending.
1993 Apportionment statement covers only 8 per cent of spending in Apportionment statement covers 71% of spending in all states
NSW Vic and ACT
1996 Federal office receives all payments following redirection State and territory divisions claim and receive all funds
agreements with all states and territories
1998 Federal office receives all payments following redirection State and territory divisions claim and receive all funds
agreements with all states and territories
2001 Federal office receives all payments following redirection State and territory divisions claim and receive all funds
agreements with all states and territories
2004 Federal office receives all payments following redirection Federal office receives all payments following redirection
agreements with all states and territories agreements with all states and territories
2007 Federal office receives all payments following redirection Federal office receives all payments following redirection
agreements with all states and territories agreements with all states and territories
2010 Federal office receives all payments following redirection Federal office receives all payments following redirection
agreements with all states and territories agreements with all states and territories

Source: Australian Electoral Commission Funding and Disclosure Reports

174
 Appendix Four

Interview Outline

General approach: Broad concrete questions about your experience and activities as head of
the party org, to generate comparisons across elections, parties, officials – NOT, what do you
think of this hypothesis? NOR, tell me about this specific event in this campaign? Details will
emerge from responses to general questions

Personal Political Background

 How and why did you come to be involved in politics? Why and when did you join the Labor/
Liberal Party?
 Describe your early experience in the party and in election campaigns?
 Prior to becoming nat sec/fed dir, what was your experience of working [inside or outside] the
party’s ‘head office’?
 How and why and by whom were you appointed/ elected? Was it consensual/ contested?

The Party Organisation

 On your Day One as nat sec/fed dir, what was the overall state of the party organisation: for
example, strengths and weaknesses, resources, personnel, relations between/among head
office, state branches, leader’s office.
 Your last day when you finished, what was the overall state of the party organisation? Better
or worse?
 [And as far as you are aware what changes have subsequently taken place in the overall state
of the party organisation?]
 What was your role as nat sec/fed dir?
 How did this change through time? differ from your predecessor/ successor?
 What were your key relationships (most important, most sensitive) as nat sec/fed dir? Were
these relationships personal or institutional?
 What were your major achievements during your time as national sec/dir? What were the
major frustrations/ unfulfilled wishes over the time?
 What took up most of your time (that you wish had not)? What did you give less time to than
it deserved?
 Did you regard yourself as a political/ campaign professional? What does the term mean to
you?

Campaign practices

Separately for each federal campaign as nat sec/fed dir:

 Was the election winnable/ ‘up for grabs’ at the start of the campaign? i.e. was the campaign
important to the result? Were there any particular turning points in the campaign? Or points
when you were worried/ confident about the outcome?
 What did the party try to achieve in this campaign?
 How would you describe your own role in this campaign? What did you personally try to
achieve in this campaign?
Resources:

 What party resources (including personnel) were at the party’s disposal – in the head office, in
the leader’s office, elsewhere? How were they organised?
 Who constituted the central campaign planning committee, what was its function and what
was your role on it? How were conflicts resolved?
 What external consultants were engaged by head office? What role did they play and to whom
were they accountable?

175
Practices

 What lessons did you take into the campaign from the previous one – and what lessons did
you take from this into the next? What worked well and what would you do differently?
 What were the three or four most important improvements in your campaign craft for this
election – e.g. did you use any new campaign tools (such as polling), make any innovations in
communications (advertising style), improve the organisational arrangements?
 And what were your major sources of innovation and learning for your campaign practices:
state campaigns, previous Fed campaign, international practice, the other party etc?
 What did the other party do that impressed you in this campaign? To what extent did you
monitor campaign practices of the other party?
 How did campaigning in your time differ from what you see today?

Campaign reports, speeches – identify and access

176
177
 Bibliography

Aberbach, J. D., Chesney, J. D., & Rockman, B. A. (1975). Exploring Elite Political Attitudes: Some
Methodological Lessons. Political Methodology, 2, 1-27.
Aberbach, J. D., & Rockman, B. A. (2002). Conducting and Coding Elite Interviews. PS: Political
Science and Politics, 35(4), 673-6.
Agranoff, R. (1972). The New Style of Campaigning: The Decline of Party and the Rise of Candidate
Centred Technology. In R. Agranoff (Ed.), The New Style in Election Campaigns. Boston
Holbrook Press.
Aimer, P. (1979). Menzies and the Birth of the Liberal Party. In C. Hazlehurst (Ed.), Australian
Conservatism: essays in twentieth-century Australian political history. Canberra: ANU Press.
Aldrich, J. H. (2006). Political Parties In and Out of Legislatures. In R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Binder & B. A.
Rockman (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Anon. (1967a). Australian Political Chronicle May-August 1967. Australian Journal of Politics &
History, 13(3), 416.
Anon. (1967b, 23 December 1967). The Ordeal of Tony Eggleton. The Australian, p. 10.
Anon. (1969, 24 May 1969). Financial report. The Canberra Times.
Australia. (1984). Memorandum showing the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, as amended by the
Commonwealth Electoral Legislation Amendment Act 1983. Canberra: Australian Govt. Pub.
Service.
Australian Centre for Public Communication. (2008). E-Electioneering - Use of New Media in the 2007
Australian Federal Election Sydney: University of Technology.
Australian Electoral Commission. (1986). Election Funding and Financial Disclosure: Elections 1984,
Final Report. Canberra: Government Printer.
Australian Electoral Commission. (1991). Election Funding and Financial Disclosure Report for the
Elections for the House of Representatives and the Senate held on 24 March 1990. Canberra:
Australian Govt. Pub. Service.
Australian Electoral Commission. (1995). Election Funding and Financial Disclosure Report for the
Elections for the House of Representatives and the Senate held on 13 March 1993. Canberra:
Australian Govt. Pub. Service.
Australian Electoral Commission. (1997). Funding and Disclosure Report Following the Federal
Election held on 2 March 1996. Canberra: Australian Electoral Commission, Funding and
Disclosure Branch.
Australian Electoral Commission. (2000). Funding and Disclosure Report following the Federal
Election held on 3 October 1998. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.
Australian Government. Special Minister for State. (2008). Electoral Reform Green Paper: Donations,
Funding and Expenditure.
Australian Labor Party. (1964). Central Executive Report, Victorian Branch.
Australian Labor Party. (1965). Central Executive Report 1964-65, submitted to the ALP Annual
(Victorian) State Conference.
Australian Labor Party. (1966). Central (State) Executive Report 1965-6, as submitted to the 75th
anniversary ALP Annual (Victorian) State Conference 1966.
Australian Labor Party. (1969, 28 July 1969). Official Reports of the 28th Commonwealth Conference,
Chevron Hotel, Melbourne.
Australian Labor Party. (1994). Platform Resolutions and Rules as Approved by the 40th National
Conference 1994.
Australian Labor Party. (2007). Campaign Manual 2007. Canberra: Australian Labor Party.
Ayres, P. (1987). Malcolm Fraser, a Biography. Richmond: William Heinemann Australia.

178
Barber, S. (2005). Political Strategy: Moden Politics in Contemporary Britain: Liverpool Academic
Press.
Barnes, A. (1969, 5 April 1969). Numbers against Joe. The Age.
Barney, J. B., & Arikan, A. (2006). The Resource-based View: Origins and Implications. In M. A. Hitt, R.
E. Freeman & J. S. Harrison (Eds.), The Blackwell Handbook of Strategic Management:
Blackwell Publishing, Blackwell Reference Online. 13 December 2011
<http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode?id=g9780631218616_chunk_g97
806312186169.
Barton, R. (1981, 21 July). Labor's new secretary is in it to win. The Sydney Morning Herald.
Bathgate, L., Crosby, L., & Henderson, I. (1996). New Campaigning Strategies. In M. Simms (Ed.), The
Paradox of Parties: Australian Political Parties in the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin.
Bean, C., McAllister, I., & Warhurst, J. (1990). The Greening of Australian Politics : the 1990 Federal
Election. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire.
Bean, C., Simms, M., Bennett, S., & Warhurst, J. (1997). The Politics of Retribution : the 1996
Australian Federal Election. St. Leonards, NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin.
Beazley, K. (1983). House of Representatives Hansard, 2 November 1983.
Blair, T. (2010). A Journey. London: Hutchinson.
Blewett, N. (1973). Labor 1968-72: planning for victory. In H. Mayer (Ed.), Labor to Power: Australia's
1972 election. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Blewett, N., & Jaensch, D. (1971). Playford to Dunstan. Melbourne: F W Cheshire.
Blumenthal, S. (1980). The Permanent Campaign. Boston: Beacon Press.
Blumler, J., & Kavanagh, D. (1999). The Third Age of Political Communication: Influences and
Features. Political Communication, 16(3), 209-30.
Blyth, M., & Katz, R. S. (2005). From Catch-all Parties to Cartelisation: the Political Economy of the
Cartel Party. West European Politics, 28(1), 33-60.
Botsman, P. (2011). Democracy: an Interview with Cyril S. Wyndham (available at
http://www.workingpapers.com.au/publishedpapers/2890.html) Peter Botsman's Working
Papers, Retrieved 3 July 2012
Bracks, S., Carr, B., & Faulkner, J. (2011). Review 2010: 2010 National Review, Report to the ALP
National Executive. Barton, ACT: Australian Labor Party.
Braund, V. (1978). Themes in Political Advertising, Australian Federal Election Campaigns 1949-1972.
Unpublished MA Thesis, University of Sydney.
Brenchley, F. (1973). ALP plans a Federal HQ office to replace Mick Young's briefcase. Australian
Financial Review.
Brett, J. (1992). Robert Menzies' Forgotten People. Chippendale [N.S.W.]: Macmillan Australia.
Brians, C., Willnat, L., Manheim, J., & Rich, R. (Eds.). (2011). Empirical Political Analysis (8th ed.).
Boston: Longman.
Broder, D. (1972). The Party's Over: the Failure of Politics in America New York: Harper & Row.
Burnham, P., Gilland, K., Grant, W., & Layton-Henry, Z. (Eds.). (2008). Research Methods in Politics
(2nd ed.). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Burns, N. (1993). Oral History: National Library of Australia, Oral History Collection.
Burrage, M., Jarausch, K., & Siegrist, H. (1990). An Actor-based Framework for Studying Professions.
In M. Burrage & R. Torstendahl (Eds.), Professions in Theory and History - Rethinking the
Study of the Professions. London Sage.
Butler, D. (1974). The Canberra Model: Essays on Australian Government. New York: St Martin's
Press.
Bynander, F., & 't Hart, P. (2007). The Politics of Party Leader Survival and Succession: Australia in
Comparative Perspective. Australian Journal of Political Science, 42(1 (March)), 47-72.
Cameron, C. (1990). The Cameron Diaries. North Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Campbell, R. (1991, 1 November 1991). 'Bit of a dill' Hogg spared conviction over donations.
Canberra Times.

179
Carty, R. K., Cross, W., & Young, L. (2000). Rebuilding Canadian Party Politics. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Cassidy, B. (2010). The Party Thieves: the Real Story of the 2010 Election. Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press.
Cavalier, R. (2010). Power Crisis: the Self-Destruction of a State Labor Party. Port Melbourne, Vic:
Cambridge University Press.
Chamberlain, F. E. (1964). A Selection of Talks and Articles on Australian Labor Party Principles.
Perth: Western Australian Branch, Australian Labor Party.
Chamberlain, F. E. (1998). My Life and Times. Osborne Park, WA: Optima Press.
Chen, P., Gibson, R., & Geiselhart, K. (2006). Electronic Democracy? The Impact of New
Communications Technologies on Australian Democracy. Canberra: Australian National
University.
Cockburn, M. (1987, 5 December 1987). Right Rules Hogg Out for ALP Job. Sydney Morning Herald.
Coleman, R. (1981, 12 October). Australia Council's new boy takes up the challenge. Sydney Morning
Herald.
Cook, P. (1986). McNamara, Daniel Laurence (1876 - 1947) Australian Dictionary of Biography (Vol.
10): Melbourne University Press.
Coorey, P. (2012, 26 September). 'Labor has lost its purpose - and soul'. Sydney Morning Herald.
Costar, B., & Hughes, C. A. (Eds.). (1983). Labor to Office: the Victorian State Election 1982.
Blackburn, V: Drummond.
Crawford, R. (2004). Modernising Menzies, Whitlam and Australian Elections. The Drawing Board: An
Australian Review of Public Affairs, 4(3: March 2004), 137-61.
Crisp, L. F. (1955). The Australian Federal Labour Party, 1901-1951. London: Longmans.
Crosby, L. (1996). The Liberal Party. In M. Simms (Ed.), The Paradox of Parties, Australian Political
Parties in the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin.
Crosby, L. (1998 (23 October)). Speech to the National Press Club, Canberra. Retrieved from
http://australianpolitics.com/1998/10/23/lynton-crosby-1998-election-analysis.html
Crosby, L. (2000). The Liberal Party. In M. Simms & J. Warhurst (Eds.), Howard's Agenda: The 1998
Australian Election (pp. 64-70). St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Crosby, L. (2002). The Liberal Party. In J. Warhurst & M. Simms (Eds.), 2001: The Centenary Election.
St Lucia, Q: University of Queensland Press.
Cross, M. (2002). Schmella, John Matteo (Matthew) (1908-1960) Australian Dictionary of Biography
(Vol. 16). Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Dalton, R. J., Farrell, D. M., & McAllister, I. (2011). Political Parties and Democratic Linkage: How
Parties Organise Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dalton, R. J., & Wattenberg, M. P. (2000a). Unthinkable Democracy. In R. J. Dalton & M. P.
Wattenberg (Eds.), Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial
Democracies. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dalton, R. J., & Wattenberg, M. P. (Eds.). (2000b). Parties without Partisans: Political Change in
Advanced Industrial Democracies. New York: Oxford University Press.
Davey, P. (2010). Ninety Not Out: the Nationals 1920-2010. Sydney: UNSW Press.
Davis, G. (1992). Prime Ministers and Parties. In P. Weller (Ed.), Menzies to Keating: the Development
of the Australian Prime Ministership. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Devine, F. (2002). Qualitative Methods. In D. Marsh & G. Stoker (Eds.), Theory and Methods in
Political Science (2nd ed.). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dore, C. (1998 (14 March), 14 March 1998). Party agents out of funds loop. The Australian.
Duthie, G. (1984). I had 50,000 Bosses: Memoirs of a Labor Backbencher 1946-1975. Sydney: Angus
and Robertson.
Duverger, M. (1951 (trans. 1964)). Political Parties, their Organization and Activity in the Modern
State (3rd ed.). London: Methuen.
Edwards, J. (1996). Keating: The Inside Story. Ringwood, Vic: Viking.

180
Ellis, U. (1958). The Country Party: a Political and Social History of the Party in New South Wales.
Melbourne: E W Cheshire.
Epstein, L. (1977). A Comparative Study of Australian Parties. British Journal of Political Science, 7(1
(January)), 1-21.
Errington, W., & van Onselen, P. (2007). John Winston Howard. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University
Press.
Farrell, D. M., Kolodny, R., & Medvic, S. (2001). Parties and Campaign Professionals in a Digital Age:
Political Consultants in the United States and their Counterparts Overseas. Harvard
International Journal of Press/Politics, 6(4), 11-30.
Farrell, D. M., & Webb, P. (2000). Political Parties as Campaign Organisations. In R. J. Dalton & M. P.
Wattenberg (Eds.), Parties without Partisans - Political Change in Advanced Industrial
Democracies. New York: Oxford University Press.
Faulker, J., & MacIntyre, S. (Eds.). (2001). True Believers: the Story of the Federal Parliamentary Labor
Party. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Faulkner, J. (2001). Parliamentary Debates, Senate, 21 August 2002: Commonwealth of Australia.
Fisher, J., & Webb, P. (2003). Political Participation: the Vocational Motivations of Labour Party
Employees. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 5(2), 166-87.
Foot, K., & Schneider, S. (2006). Web Campaigning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Frame, T. (2005). The Life and Death of Harold Holt. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin.
Freudenberg, G. (1977). A Certain Grandeur. Melbourne: Macmillan.
Freudenberg, G. (1991). Cause for Power: the Official History of the New South Wales Branch of the
Australian Labor Party. Leichhardt, NSW: Pluto Press.
Furlong, P., & Marsh, D. (2010). A Skin not a Sweater: Ontology and Epistemology in Political Science.
In D. Marsh & G. Stoker (Eds.), Theory and Methods in Poilitical Science. Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Ganz, M. (2010). Leading Change: Leadership, Organisation and Social Movements. In N. Nohria & R.
Khurana (Eds.), Handbook of Leadership Theory and Practice (pp. 527-68). Boston: Harvard
Business Press.
Gartrell, T. (2005). The Australian Labor Party. In M. Simms & J. Warhurst (Eds.), Mortgage Nation:
the 2004 Australian Election. Perth, WA: API Network.
Gauja, A. (2006). From Hogan to Hanson: The Regulation and Changing Legal Status of Australian
Political Parties. Public Law Review, 17, 282-99.
Gauja, A. (2008). State Regulation and the Internal Organisation of Political Parties: The Impact of
Party Law in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Commonwealth and
Comparative Politics, 46(2), 244-61.
Gibson, R., & Rommele, A. (2001). A Party-Centred Theory of Professionalized Campaigning.
Press/Politics, 6(4), 31-43.
Gibson, R., & Rommele, A. (2009). Measuring the Professionalisation of Political Campaigning. Party
Politics, 15(3), 265-93.
Gibson, R., & Ward, I. (2002). Virtual Campaigning: Australian Parties and the Impact of the Internet.
Australian Journal of Political Science, 37(1), 99-129.
Ginsberg, B. (1986). The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes State Power. New York: Basic
Books.
Glover, J. (2008, 2 May 2008). The Jeeves to Johnson's Bertie Wooster: the man who may have got
him elected. The Guardian.
Golding, P., & Elliott, P. (1979). Making the News. London: Longman.
Goodin, R. E. (1996). Institutions and their Design. In R. E. Goodin (Ed.), Theory of Institutional
Design. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goot, M. (2002). Rubensohn, Solomon (Sim) (1904 - 1979) Australian Dictionary of Biography (Vol.
16). Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

181
Goot, M. (2006). The Australian Party System, Pauline Hanson's One Nation and the Party
Cartelisation Thesis. In I. Marsh (Ed.), Political Parties in Transition? Sydney: Federation
Press.
Goot, M. (2007). Election Studies. In B. Galligan & W. Roberts (Eds.), The Oxford Companion to
Australian Politics. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Gordon, M. (1991, 23 June ). Libs keep Eggleton's leave pay. The Age.
Gordon, M. (2002, 2 December 2002). Top Libs defend Loughnane as contender for federal job. The
Age.
Graham, B. D. (1966). The Formation of the Australian Country Parties. Canberra: ANU Press.
Grattan, M. (1990, 14 May 1990). Liberal plan to sway pressure groups. The Age.
Gray, G. (1996). Labor and the 1996 Federal Election. The Sydney Papers, Winter 1996.
Greener, I. (2005). The Potential of Path Dependence in Political Studies. Politics, 25(1), 62-72.
Grice, A. (2005, 26 March). Lynton Crosby: maestro of the dark arts. The Independent.
Griffen-Foley, B. (2003). Party Games: Australian Politicians and the Media from War to Dismissal.
Melbourne: Text Publishing.
Grossman, M. (2009). Going Pro? Political Campaign Consulting and the Professional Model. Journal
of Political Marketing, 8(2), 81-104.
Hager, N. (2006). The Hollow Men : a Study in the Politics of Deception. Nelson, N.Z.: Craig Potton
Pub.
Hall, P., & Taylor, R. (1996). Political Science and the Three New Instititionalisms. Political Studies,
44, 936-57.
Hallaj, E. (2012). The Australian Labor Party. In M. Simms & J. Wanna (Eds.), Julia 2010: the Caretaker
Election. Canberra: ANU E Press.
Hancock, I. (2000). National and Permanent? : the Federal Organisation of the Liberal Party of
Australia 1944-1965 Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Press.
Hancock, I. (2002). John Gorton: He Did it His Way. Sydney: Hodder.
Hancock, I. (2006). John Carrick: The Influence of Head Office. In K. Turner & M. Hogan (Eds.), The
Worldly Art of Politics. Annandale, NSW: Federation Press.
Hancock, I. (2007). The Liberals: a History of the NSW Division of the Liberal Party of Australia.
Annadale, NSW: Federation Press.
Harrison, L., & Deicke, W. (2001). Conducting Interviews in Political Research. In L. Harrison (Ed.),
Political Research: An introduction (pp. 89-104). London: Routledge.
Hartcher, P. (2009). To the Bitter End. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.
Haupt, R., & Grattan, M. (1983). 31 Days to Power: Hawke's Victory. Sydney: George Allen and
Unwin.
Hawke, B. (1994). The Hawke Memoirs. Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia.
Hellmann, O. (2011). Political Parties and Electoral Strategy: the Development of Party Organisation
in East Asia. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Henderson, G. (1998). Menzies' Child, The Liberal Party of Australia: 1944-1994 (Revised ed.).
Sydney: HarperCollinsPublishers.
Hewett, J. (1993, 2 July). Life after the Party. Australian Financial Review.
Hill, T. (1975, 21 August). The new-look man at the helm. The Herald (Melbourne).
Hogg, B. (1993 (24 March)). Speech to National Press Club, Canberra. Retrieved from
https://legacy.owa.usyd.edu.au/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parl
Info/search/display/display.w3p;adv=yes;orderBy=customrank;page=0;query=Id%253A%252
2media%252Ftvprog%252FLE610%2522;rec=0;resCount=Default
Hogg, B. (2002). The Ethics of Public Opinion. In D. Burchall & A. Leigh (Eds.), The Prince's New
Clothes: Why do Australians Dislike their Politicians? Sydney: University of New South Wales
Press.
Hogg, B. (2003). Hawke the Campaigner. In S. Ryan & T. Bramston (Eds.), The Hawke Government, a
Critical Retrospective. North Melbourne: Pluto Press.

182
Holland, I. (2002). Members of Parliament Staff Act: Accountability Issues. Canberra: Parliamentary
Library.
Holmes, J., & Sharman, C. (1977). The Australian Federal System. Hornsby NSW: George Allen and
Unwin Australia.
Horne, D. (1980). Time of Hope: Australia 1966-72. Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Hudson, W. J. (1993). Casey, Richard Gavin Gardiner (1890–1976) Australian Dictionary of Biography
(Vol. 13). Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Hughes, A., & Dann, S. (2010). Australian Political Marketing: Substance Backed by Style. In J. Lees-
Marshment, J. Stromback & C. Rudd (Eds.), Global Political Marketing (pp. 82-95). London:
Routledge.
Hughes, C. A. (1963). Australia. Journal of Politics, 25(3), 646-63.
Hughes, C. A. (1990). The Rules of the Game. In C. Bean, I. McAllister & J. Warhurst (Eds.), The
Greening of Australian Politics: the 1990 Federal Election. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire.
Hughes, C. A. (1992). Australia and New Zealand. In D. Butler & A. Ranney (Eds.), Electioneering - A
Comparative Study of Continuity and Change. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hunt, D. (2004). Report of the Inquiry into the Centenary House Lease by Hon David Hunt AO QC
Royal Commissioner. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.
Igo, S. E. (2007). The Averaged American : Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public.
Cambridge, Mass. ; London: Harvard University Press.
Institute of Politics. (2008). Campaign for President: the Managers Look at 2008. Lanham: Rowman
and Littlefield Publishers.
Jackman, C. (2008). Inside Kevin 07. Carlton: Melbourne University Press.
Jaensch, D. (1983). The Australian Party System. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin.
Jaensch, D. (1994). Power Politics: Australia's Party System (3rd ed) (3rd ed.). Sydney: George Allen
and Unwin.
Jaensch, D. (2006). Party Structures and Procedures. In I. Marsh (Ed.), Political Parties in Transition.
Sydney: Federation Press.
Johns, G. (2006). Party Organisations and Resources: Membership, Funding and Staffing. In I. Marsh
(Ed.), Political Parties in Transition? Sydney: Federation Press.
Johnson, D. W. (2001). No Place for Amateurs: How political consultants are reshaping American
democracy. New York: Routledge.
Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Reform. (1983). First report, September 1983. Canberra:
Parliament of Australia
Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Reform. (1999). Report on Conduct of the 1998 federal
election and matters related thereto (Transcript of Public Hearings).
Jones, K. (2008). Professional Politicians as the Subjects of Moral Panic. Australian Journal of Political
Science, 43(2), 243-58.
Juddery, B. (1968, 30 October 1968). Liberal apparatchik with his own views. The Canberra Times,
pp. 12,3.
Jupp, J. (1964). Australian Party Politics. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Jupp, J. (1982). Party Politics: Australia 1966-81. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin.
Kaldor, A. (1968). Liberal and Labor Press Advertising. Australian Quarterly, 40((2) June), 40-58.
Katz, R. S., & Mair, P. (1993). The Evolution of Party Organisations in Europe: The Three Faces of
Party Organisation. American Review of Politics, 14(Winter), 593-617 (Reprinted in Wolinetz,
S. (ed) Political Parties, Ashgate Dartmouth, 1998).
Katz, R. S., & Mair, P. (1995). Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The
Emergence of the Cartel Party. Party Politics, 1(1), 5-28.
Katz, R. S., & Mair, P. (2009). The Cartel Party Thesis: a Restatement. Perspectives on Politics, 7(4
(Dec)).
Kavanagh, D. (1995). Election Campaigning: the new marketing of politics. Oxford: Blackwell
Publishers.

183
Kelly, N. (2011). Australian Electoral Administration and Electoral Integrity. In J.-C. Tham, B. Costar &
G. Orr (Eds.), Electoral Democracy: Australian Prospects. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University
Press.
Kelly, P. (1984). The Hawke Ascendancy: A Definitive Account of its Origins and Climax. Sydney:
Angus and Robertson.
Kelly, P. (1992). The End of Certainty: the Story of the 1980s. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin.
Kelly, P. (2009). The March of Patriots: The Struggle for Modern Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne
University Press.
Key, V. O. (1964). Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups (5th ed.). New York: Crowell.
King, G., Keohane, R. O., & Verba, S. (1994). Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in
Qualitative Research. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kirchheimer, O. (1966). The Transformation of the Western European Party Systems. In J. La
Palombara & M. Weiner (Eds.), Political Parties and Political Development. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Latham, M. (2005). The Latham Diaries. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Lawson, K., & Merkl, P. (1988). When Parties Fail: Emerging Alternative Organisations. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Lawson, V. (1996). Goldberg, Frank (1889-1958) Australian Dictionary of Biography (Vol. 14).
Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Lees-Marshment, J. (2001). Political Marketing and British Political Parties: the Party's Just Begun.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Lees-Marshment, J. (2006). Political Marketing Theory and Practice: a Reply to Ormrod's Critique of
the Lees-Marshment Market-Oriented Party Model. Politics, 26(2), 119-25.
Lees-Marshment, J. (2009). Political Marketing: Principles and Applications. London: Routledge.
Lees-Marshment, J. (2011). The Political Marketing Game. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Lees-Marshment, J., Rudd, C., & Stromback, J. (Eds.). (2011). Global Political Marketing. Abingdon,
UK: Routledge.
Liberal Party of Australia. (1946a). The Federal Constitution of the Liberal Party of Australia: Federal
Secretariat of the Liberal Party.
Liberal Party of Australia. (1946b). Speakers' Notes. Sydney: Federal Secretariat.
Lilleker, D. (2003). Interviewing the Political Elite: Navigating a Potential Minefield. Politics, 23(3),
207-14.
Lilleker, D., & Lees-Marshment, J. (2005). Political Marketing: a Comparative Perspective.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Lilleker, D., & Negrine, R. (2002). Professionalization: Of What? SInce When? By Whom?
Press/Politics, 7(4), 98-103.
Lincoln, A. (1953). Campaign Circular from the Whig Committee. In R. P. Basler & Abraham Lincoln
Association (Eds.), The Collected Works (1824-1865). New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ.
Press.
Linton, M. (1985). The Swedish Road to Socialism (Fabian Tract 503): Fabian Society,London.
Lipset, S. M., & Rokkan, S. (1967). Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An
Introduction. In S. M. Lipset & S. Rokkan (Eds.), Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-
National Perspectives (pp. 1-64). New York: Free Press.
Litchfield, S. (1984). The Federal Secretariat. In G. Brandis, T. Harley & D. Markwell (Eds.), Liberals
Face the Future: Essays on Australian Liberalism. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
Littig, B. (2009). Interviewing the Elite – Interviewing Experts: Is There a Difference? In A. Bogner, B.
Littig & W. Menz (Eds.), Interviewing Experts. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lloyd, C. (1990). The 1990 Media Campaign. In C. Bean, I. McAllister & J. Warhurst (Eds.), The
Greening of Australian Politics. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire.

184
Lloyd, C. J., & Reid, G. S. (1974). Out of the Wilderness: the Return of Labor. North Melbourne: Cassell
Australia.
Logue, P. (1988, 11 March 1988). Labor splits over support for Bob Hogg. The Australian.
Loughnane, B. (2005). The Liberal Campaign. In M. Simms & J. Warhurst (Eds.), Mortgage Nation:
The 2004 Australian Election. Perth: API Network.
Loughnane, B. (2007 (19 December)). Speech to the National Press Club, Canberra. Retrieved from
http://australianpolitics.com/2007/12/19/liberal-party-director-analyses-election-
defeat.html#more-57
Loughnane, B. (2012). The 2010 Federal Election: the Liberal Party. In M. Simms & J. Wanna (Eds.),
Julia 2010: the caretaker election. Canberra: ANU E Press.
Love, P. (1990). Stewart, Archibald (1867 - 1925) Australian Dictionary of Biography (Vol. 12, pp. 84):
Melbourne University Press.
Love, P. (2007). Kennelly, Patrick John (Pat) (1900 - 1981) Australian Dictionary of Biography (Vol. 17,
pp. 619-20). Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Loveday, P., Martin, A. W., & Parker, R. S. (Eds.). (1977). Emergence of the Australian Party System.
Sydney: Hale and Iremonger.
Lowndes, V. (2010). The Institutional Approach. In D. Marsh & G. Stoker (Eds.), Theory and Methods
in Political Science (3rd ed., pp. 60-79). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lynch, R., Baines, P., & Egan, J. (2006). Long-Term Performance of Political Parties: Towards a
Competitive Resource-Based Perspective. Journal of Political Marketing, 5(3), 71-92.
Mackerras, M. (1972). Australian General Elections Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
Mahoney, J. (2010). After KKV: the New Methodology of Qualitative Research. World Politics, 62(1),
120-47.
Maley, M. (2000). Conceptualising Advisers' Policy Work: The Distinctive Policy Roles of Ministerial
Advisers in the Keating Government 1991-96. Australian Journal of Political Science, 35(3),
449-70.
Mancini, P. (1999). New Frontiers in Political Professionalism. Political Communication, 16(3), 231-
45.
Manning, H. (2009). Swinging Voters in the Electoral Landscape, from the Late 1960s to the Present.
Australian Quarterly(September-October).
March, J., & Olsen, J. (1984). The New Institutionalism: Organisational Factors in Political Life.
American Political Science Review, 78(3), 734-49.
March, J., & Olsen, J. (2006). Elaborating the 'New Institutionalism'. In R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Binder & B.
A. Rockman (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Marquand, D. (2004). Decline of the Public: the Hollowing-out of Citizenship. Cambridge: Polity.
Marr, D. (1984). The Ivanov Trial. Melbourne: Nelson.
Marr, D., & Wilkinson, M. (2004). Dark Victory. Crows Nest, N.S.W.: Allen & Unwin.
Marsh, I. (1976). Policy Making in the Liberal Party: The Opposition Experience. Australian Quarterly,
48(3), 5-17.
Marsh, I. (2006). Australia's Political Cartel? The Major Parties and the Party System in an Era of
Globalisation. In I. Marsh (Ed.), Political Parties in Transition? Sydney: The Federation Press.
Martin, A. W. (1999). Robert Menzies, a Life (Vol. 2). Melbourne, Vic: Melbourne University Press.
May, A. L. (1968). The Battle for the Banks. Sydney: Sydney University Press.
May, E. R., & Fraser, J. (1973). Campaign '72: the Managers Speak. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Mayer, H. (1973). Labor to Power: Australia's 1972 election. Sydney: Angus & Robertson on behalf of
the Australasian Political Studies Association.
Mayer, H. (1980). Big Party Chauvinism and Minor Party Romanticism. In H. Mayer & H. N. Nelson
(Eds.), Australian Politics: a Fifth Reader. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire.

185
Mayer, H., & Rydon, J. (1954). The Gwydir By-election, 1953 : a Study in Political Conflict. Canberra:
Australian National University.
McAllister, I. (1992). Political Behaviour: Citizens, Parties and Elites in Australia. Melbourne:
Longman Cheshire.
McAllister, I. (2011). The Australian Voter: 50 Years of Change. Sydney: UNSW Press.
McAllister, I., & Warhurst, J. (1988). Australia Votes: the 1987 Federal election. Melbourne [Vic.]:
Longman Cheshire.
McMullan, B. (1984). Campaign Director's Report, 1984 Federal Elections. Canberra: National
Secretariat, Australian Labor Party.
McMullan, B. (1986,13 April). Transcript of Speech. Paper presented at the Fabian Society,
Melbourne (mimeo).
McMullin, R. (1991). The Light on the Hill : the Australian Labor Party, 1891-1991. Melbourne:
Oxford University Press.
Medvic, S. (2003). Professional Political Consultants: an Operational Definition. Politics, 23(2), 119-
27.
Medvic, S. (2006). Understanding Campaign Strategy: 'Deliberate Priming' and the Role of
Professional Political Consultants. Journal of Political Marketing, 5(1/2), 11-32.
Megalogenis, G. (2008). The Longest Decade. Melbourne: Scribe Publications.
Mendelsohn, H., & Crespi, I. (1970). Polls, Television,and the New Politics. Scranton: Chandler.
Menzies, R. G. (1967). Afternoon Light: Some Memories of Men and Events. Melbourne: Cassell
Australia.
Michels, R. (1911 (trans. 1966)). Political Parties: a Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies
of Modern Democracy. New York: Free Press.
Millett, M. (1994, 31 October 1994). Taxpayers hit with $30m election bill. Sydney Morning Herald.
Mills, S. (1986). The New Machine Men: Polls and Persuasion in Australian Politics. Ringwood, Vic.,
Australia ; New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books.
Mills, S. (1993a, 1 February 1993). The battle of the mailbox. Australian Financial Review.
Mills, S. (1993b). The Hawke Years: the Story from the Inside. Ringwood, Vic.: Viking.
Mills, S. (1999). Polling, Politics and the Press 1941-1996. In A. Curthoys & J. Schultz (Eds.),
Journalism: Print, Politics and Popular Culture. St Lucia, Q: University of Queensland Press.
Mills, S. (2012a). Campaigns and Campaign Funding. In R. Smith, A. Vromen & I. Cook (Eds.),
Contemporary Politics in Australia: Theories, Practices and Issues. Sydney: Cambridge
University Press.
Mills, S. (2012b). The Party Official as Political Marketer: the Australian experience. In J. Lees-
Marshment (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Political Marketing. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Mills, S. (2012c, 12 July 2012). Richard Casey's Forgotten People. Inside Story. Retrieved from
http://inside.org.au/richard-casey-forgotten-people/
Mills, S., & Tiffen, R. (2012). Opinion Polls and the Media in Australia. In C. Holtz-Bacha & J.
Stromback (Eds.), Opinion Polls and the Media: Reflecting and Shaping Public Opinion.
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mintzberg, H. (1998). Crafting Strategy. In H. Mintzberg, J. B. Quinn & S. Ghoshal (Eds.), The Strategy
Process (Rev European ed., pp. 110-21). Harlow: Pearson Educational.
Miragliotta, N. ( 2011, 14-15 July 2011). Pre-selection Reform: Two Recent Australian Experiments
with Primaries. Paper presented at the Challenges of Electoral Democracy Workshop
Melboune University.
Moore, M. (1995). Creating Public Value. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Morling, T. (1994). Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Leasing by the Commonwealth of
Accommodation in Centenary House. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia.
Muir, K. (2008). Worth Fighting For: Inside the Your Rights at Work campaign. Sydney: UNSW Press.
Murphy, D., Joyce, R. B., & Hughes, C. A. (Eds.). (1980). Labor in Power: the Labor Party and
Governments in Queensland, 1915-57 St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press.

186
Murray, R. (1970). The Split: Australian Labor in the Fifties. Melbourne: Cheshire.
Neat, G. (1987). The New Politics: The Campaign Revolution facing the Liberals: Wilkes Printers (Qld).
Negrine, R. (2005). Professionalism and the Millbank Tendency: a Response to Webb and Fisher.
Politics, 25(2), 107-15.
Negrine, R. (2007). The Professionalisation of Political Communication in Europe. In R. Negrine, P.
Mancini, C. Holtz-Bacha & S. Papathanassopoulos (Eds.), The Professionalisation of Political
Communication. Bristol: Intellect.
Negrine, R., Mancini, P., Holtz-Bacha, C., & Papathanassopoulos, S. (Eds.). (2007). The
Professionalisation of Political Communication. Bristol: Intellect Books.
Nelson, H. N. (1993). Cleland, Sir Donald Mackinnon (1901-1975) Australian Dictionary of Biography
(Vol. 13, pp. 440-1). Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Newton, S. (1993). Maxwell Newton. South Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press.
Nimmo, D. (1970). The Political Persuaders: the Techniques of Modern Election Campaigns.
Englewood: Prentice Hall.
Norris, P. (2000). A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Post-industrial Societies. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
O'Cass, A. (2001). Political Marketing, an Investigation of the Political Marketing Concept and
Political Market Orientation in Australian Politics. European Journal of Marketing, 35(9/10),
1003-25.
O'Leary, Z. (2010). The Essential Guide to Doing your Research Project. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
O'Neill, G. (1984, 18 October 1984). Set to become one of Labor's heroes. West Australian.
O'Reilly, D. (1987, 30 June). The Liberals' quiet calm force. The Bulletin.
O'Reilly, D. (2007). The New Progressive Dilemma. Australia and Tony Blair's Legacy. Basingstoke:
Palgrave MacMillan.
O'Shaughnessy, N. (2001). The Marketing of Political Marketing. European Journal of Marketing,
35(9/10), 1047-57.
O'Toole, K. (1979). Liberals in the Market Place. In P. Hay, I. Ward & J. Warhurst (Eds.), Anatomy of
an Election. Melbourne: Hill of Content.
Oakes, L. (1976). Crash Through or Crash: the Unmaking of a Prime Minister. Richmond, Vic:
Drummond.
Oakes, L. (1981, 24 July 1981). End of a Labor entrepreneur. The Age, p. 13.
Oakes, L. (2008). Man with a Mission Power Plays. Sydney: Hachette Australia.
Oakes, L., & Solomon, D. (1973). The Making of an Australian Prime Minister. Melbourne: Cheshire.
Oakes, L., & Solomon, D. H. (1974). Grab for Power: Election 74. Melbourne: Cheshire.
Oliver, B. (2007). Chamberlain, Francis Edward (Joe) (1900-1984) Australian Dictionary of Biography
(Vol. 17): Melbourne University Press.
Ormrod, R. (2006). A Critique of the Lees-Marshment Market-Oriented Party Model. Politics, 26(2),
110-8.
Orr, G. (2010). The Law of Politics. Sydney: The Federation Press.
Orr, G., Williams, G., & Mercurio, B. (2003). Realising Democracy: Electoral Law in Australia.
Annandale, N.S.W.: Federation Press.
Overacker, L. (1952). The Australian Party System. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Overacker, L. (1968). Australian Parties in a Changing Society, 1945-1967. Melbourne: F W Cheshire.
Panebianco, A. (1988). Political Parties: Organization and Power (M. Silver, Trans.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Papadakis, E. (1990). Minor Parties, the Environment and the New Politics. In C. Bean, I. McAllister &
J. Warhurst (Eds.), The Greening of Australian Politics: the 1990 Federal Election. Melbourne:
Longman Cheshire.
Parkin, A. (1983). Party Organisation and Machine Politics: the ALP in Perspective. In A. Parkin & J.
Warhurst (Eds.), Machine Politics in the Australian Labor Party. North Sydney: George Allen
and Unwin.

187
Parkin, A., & Patience, A. (Eds.). (1981). The Dunstan Decade: Social Democracy at the State Level.
Melbourne: Longman Cheshire.
Parkin, A., & Warhurst, J. (2000). The Labor Party: Image, History and Structure. In J. Warhurst & A.
Parkin (Eds.), The Machine: Labor Confronts the Future. St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin.
Parkin, A., & Warhurst, J. (Eds.). (1983). Machine Politics in the Australian Labor Party. North Sydney:
George Allen & Unwin.
Pascoe, T. (2010). Oral History. Canberra: National Library of Australia, Oral History Collection.
Peake, R. (2001, 22 November). Local campaigning won election - Libs. Canberra Times.
Peisley, M., & Ward, I. (2001). Parties, Governments and Pollsters: a New Form of Patronage?
Australian Journal of Political Science, 36(3), 553-65.
Penniman, H. (1977). Australia at the Polls: the National Elections of 1975. Canberra: Australian
National University Press.
Penniman, H. (1979). The Australian National Elections of 1977. Washington: American Enterprise
Institute for Public Policy Research.
Penniman, H. (Ed.). (1983). Australia at the Polls: the National Elections of 1980 and 1983. North
Sydney: George Allen & Unwin Australia.
Pierce, R. (Ed.). (2008). Research Methods in Politics: a Practical Guide. London: Sage.
Pierson, P. (2004). Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Pitney, J. J. (2000). The Art of Political Warfare. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Plasser, F., & Plasser, G. (2002). Global Political Campaigning: a Worldwide Analysis of Campaign
Professionals and their Practices. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Plouffe, D. (2009). The Audacity to Win: the Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic
Victory. New York: Viking.
Polsby, N. (1983). Consequences of Party Reform. New York: Oxford University Press.
Polsby, N., & Wildavsky, A. (1984). Presidential Elections: Strategies of American Electoral Politics
(6th ed.). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Porter, C. (1981). The 'Gut Feeling'. Ascot, Qld: Boolarong Publications.
Porter, M. (1979). How Competitive Forces Shape Strategy. Harvard Business Review, 57(2), 137-45.
Porter, M. (2008). The Five Competitive Forces that Shape Strategy. Harvard Business Review, 86(1),
79-93.
Public Policy Forum. (1989). The Campaign Managers. The 1988 New South Wales Election Campaign
- by the people who ran it.
Quinn, J. B. (1998). Strategies for Change. In H. Mintzberg, J. B. Quinn & S. Ghoshal (Eds.), The
Strategy Process (Revised European ed., pp. 5-13). Harlow: Pearson Education.
Ramsden, J. (1980). The Making of Conservative Party Policy: The Conservative Research Department
since 1929. London: Longman.
Ramsey, A. (1993, 1 May). Number Cruncher's Colourful Rise. Sydney Morning Herald, p. 25.
Ramsey, A. (1996, 4 May). Farewell to One of those Rare Blithe Spirits. Sydney Morning Herald, p. 39.
Ramsey, A. (2009). The Jam Man Cometh A Matter of Opinion. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.
Ranney, A. (1978). The Political Parties: Reform and Decline. In A. King (Ed.), The New American
Political System. Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
Rawlinson, M. (1983). The Liberal Party. In H. R. Penniman (Ed.), Australia at the Polls: the National
Elections of 1980 and 1983. Sydney: American Enterprise Institute.
Rawson, D. W. (1961). Australia Votes: the 1958 Federal Election. Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press, on behalf of the A.N.U.
Rawson, D. W., & Holtzinger, S. (1958). Politics in Eden-Monaro: The Personalities and the
Campaigns. Melbourne: Heinemann on behalf of the Australian National University.
Reid, A. (1971). The Gorton Experiment. Sydney: Shakespeare Head Press.
Reith, P. (2011). Review of the 2010 Federal Election. Canberra: Liberal Party of Australia.

188
Rhodes, R. A. W. (2009). In Search of Australian Political Science. In R. A. W. Rhodes (Ed.), The
Australian Study of Politics. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rhodes, R. A. W., & Wanna, J. (2009). The Executive. In R. A. W. Rhodes (Ed.), The Australian Study of
Politics. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Richardson, G. (1994). Whatever it Takes. Sydney: Bantam.
Robb, A. (1993 (1 April)). Speech to the National Press Club, Canberra. Retrieved from
http://australianpolitics.com/downloads/1993/93-04-01_andrew-robb_national-press-
club.pdf
Robb, A. (1996a). Is there a Gender Gap in Australia? In M. Simms (Ed.), The Paradox of Parties,
Australian Political Parties in the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin.
Robb, A. (1996b). Lessons from the 1996 Campaign. The Sydney Papers, 1996(Autumn).
Robb, A. (1997). The Liberal Party Campaign. In C. Bean, M. Simms, S. Bennett & J. Warhurst (Eds.),
The Politics of Retribution. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin.
Robertson, J. (1974). J H Scullin: a Political Biography. Nedlands, WA: University of Western Australia
Press.
Rose, C. (2010). How to Win Campaigns: Communications for Change (2nd ed.). London: Earthscan.
Sabato, L. J. (1981). The Rise of Political Consultants. New York: Basic Books.
Sanders, E. (2006). Historical Institutionalism. In R. A. W. Rhodes, S. Binder & B. A. Rockman (Eds.),
The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Savva, N. (2010, 8 November 2010). Finances see Lib tensions explode. The Australian.
Scammell, M. (1995). Designer Politics: How Elections are Won. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Scammell, M. (1997). The Wisdom of the War Room: US Campaigning and Americanization.
Cambridge MA: Joan Shorenstein Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard
University.
Senior, P. (2008). Electoral Impact of Televised Leaders' Debates on Australian Federal Elections.
Australian Journal of Political Science, 43(3), 443-64.
Seymour-Ure, C. (1974). The Political Impact of the Mass Media. London: Constable.
Sharman, C., & Moon, J. (2003). One System or Nine? In J. Moon & C. Sharman (Eds.), Australian
Politics and Government: the Commonwealth, the States and the Territories. Port
Melbourne, Vic: Cambridge University Press.
Simms, M. (2009a). The Campaigns. Australian Cultural History, 27(2), 87-96.
Simms, M. (2009b). Political Parties. In R. A. W. Rhodes (Ed.), The Australian Study of Politics.
Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
Simms, M. (2009c). Preface. Australian Cultural History, 27 (2), 79-83.
Simms, M., & Wanna, J. (2012). Julia 2010: the Caretaker Election. Available from
http://epress.anu.edu.au/?p=169031
Simms, M., & Warhurst, J. (2005). Mortgage Nation: the 2004 Australian election. Perth: API
Network.
Simms, M., & Warhurst, J. (Eds.). (2000). Howard's Agenda: the 1998 Australian Election. St Lucia,
Qld.: University of Queensland Press.
Slipper, P. (2001). Parliamentary Debates House of Representatives, 9 Augst 2001: Commonwealth
of Australia.
Smark, P. (1967a, 19 May). I had a rich rewarding life ... The Australian, p. 9.
Smark, P. (1967b, 24 May). Wyndham, the frustrated reformer. The Australian, p. 9.
Smith, J. K. (2009). Campaigning and the Catch-All Party: The Process of Party Transformation in
Britain. Party Politics, 15(5), 555-72.
Smith, R., & O'Mahoney, J. (2006). The Cartel Parties and Electoral Barriers. In I. Marsh (Ed.), Political
Parties in Transition? . Sydney: Federation Press.
Snow, D. (1997, 22 November 1997). Machiavelli's Companion. Sydney Morning Herald.
Snow, D. (2008, 16 August 2008). Lessons for Nelson in unlikely win. Sydney Morning Herald.

189
Somes, T. (1996). The Legal Status of Political Parties. In M. Simms (Ed.), The Paradox of Political
Parties: Australian Political Parties in the 1990s. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin.
Sorauf, F. (1968). Party Politics in America. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.
Sorell, J. (1968, 2 October). Cerebral Cyril, Labor's Mighty Atom. The Herald (Melbourne), p. 2.
Souter, G. (1976, 5 March 1976). Speech Day at John Curtin House. Sydney Morning Herald.
Starr, G. (Ed.). (1980). The Liberal Party of Australia, A Documentary History. Richmond, Vic:
Drummond/Heinemann.
Stephens, S. W. (1969, 1 February 1969). Half a Lifetime in Liberal Politics. The Advertiser (Adelaide),
p. 2.
Stockwell, S. (2005). Political Campaign Strategy: Doing Democracy in the 21st Century. Melbourne:
Australian Scholarly Publishing.
Strangio, P. (2012). Neither Power nor Glory: 100 Years of Political Labor in Victoria 1956-1956.
Carlton: Melbourne University Press.
Strangio, P., & Dyrenfurth, N. (Eds.). (2009). Confusion: the Making of the Australian Two-Party
System Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Stromback, J. (2009). Selective Professionalisation of Political Campaigning: a Test of the Party-
Centred Theory of Professionalised Campaigning in the Context of the 2006 Swedish
Election. Political Studies, 57(1), 95-116.
Summers, A. (1982). Bob McMullan has looked all around the country: politics are about winning.
Australian Financial Review.
Tenscher, J., & Mykkanen, J. (2012). Two Levels of Campaigning: An Empirical Test of the Party-
Centred Theory of Professionalisation. Paper presented at the IAMCR.
Tenscher, J., Mykkanen, J., & Moring, T. (2012). Modes of Professional Campaigning: A Four-Country
Comparison in the European Parliamentary Elections 2009. International Journal of
Press/Politics, 17(2), 145-68.
Tham, J.-C. (2010). Money and Politics: the Democracy We Can't Afford. Sydey: UNSW Press.
Thelen, K., & Steinmo, S. (1992). Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics. In S. Steinmo, K.
Thelen & F. Longstreth (Eds.), Structuring Politics: Historical institutionalism in comparative
analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thorburn, H. (Ed.). (1991). Party Politics in Canada (6th ed.). Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice Hall.
Tiernan, A. (2007). Power without Responsibility: Ministerial Staffers in Australian Governments from
Whitlam to Howard Sydney NSW: University of New South Wales Press.
Tiffen, R. (1989). News and Power. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Tiffen, R. (2008). Australia: Gladiatorial Parties and Volatile Media in a Stable Polity. In J. Stromback
& L. L. Kaid (Eds.), The Handbook of Election News Coverage Around the World. New York:
Routledge.
Tingle, L. (2010, October 2010). The art of the pollster. Australian Financial Review Magazine, pp. 69-
73.
Tiver, P. G. (1978). The Liberal Party: Principles and Performance. Milton Q: Jacaranda Press.
Trent, J. S., & Friedenberg, R. V. (2004). Political Campaign Communication, Principles and Practices
(5th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
Uhlmann, C. (1995, 26 August). Bob McMullan. Canberra Times.
van Biezen, I., Mair, P., & Poguntke, T. (2012). Going, Going, ... Gone? The Decline of Party
Membership in Contemporary Europe. European Journal of Political Research, 51(1), 24-56.
van der Ven, A. H., & Poole, M. S. (1995). Explaining Development and Change in Organisations.
Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 510-40.
van Onselen, P., & Errington, W. (2004). Electoral Databases: Big Brother or Democracy Unbound?
Australian Journal of Political Science, 39(2), 349-66.
Vromen, A. (2010). Debating Methods: Rediscovering Qualitative Analysis. In D. Marsh & G. Stoker
(Eds.), Theory and Methods in Political Science (3rd ed.). Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

190
Walsh, G. (2002). The Australian Labor Party. In J. Warhurst & M. Simms (Eds.), 2001: The Centenary
Election. St Lucia Q: University of Queensland Press.
Walter, J. (1986). The Ministers' Minders: Personal Advisers in National Government. Melbourne:
Oxford University Press.
Ward, I. (1991). The Changing Organisational Nature of Australia's Political Parties. Journal of
Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, XXIX, 153-74.
Ward, I. (1999). The Early Use of Radio for Political Communication in Australia and Canada: John
Henry Austral, Mr Sage and the Man from Mars. Australian Journal of Politics and History,
45(3), 311-29.
Ward, I. (2003). 'Localizing the National', the Rediscovery and Reshaping of Local Campaigning in
Australia. Party Politics, 9(5), 583-600.
Ward, I. (2006). Cartel Parties and Election Campaigns in Australia. In I. Marsh (Ed.), Political Parties
in Transition? Sydney: Federation Press.
Ward, P. (1977, 19-20 November 1977). David Combe, numbers man. The Australian.
Warhurst, J., & Simms, M. (2002). 2001: the Centenary Election. St Lucia, Qld.: University of
Queensland Press.
Watson, L. (1979). The United Australia Party and its Sponsors. In C. Hazlehurst (Ed.), Australian
Conservatism: Essays in Twentieth-Century Australian Political History. Canberra: ANU Press.
Webb, P. (1992). Election Campaigning, Organisational Transformation and the Professionalisation of
the Labour Party. European Journal of Political Research, 21, 267-88.
Webb, P., & Fisher, J. (2003). Professionalism and the Millbank Tendency: the Political Sociology of
New Labour's Employees. Politics, 23(1), 10-20.
Webb, P., & Kolodny, R. (2006). Professional Staff in Political Parties. In R. S. Katz & W. Crotty (Eds.),
Handbook of Party Politics (pp. 337-47). London: Sage Publications.
Weber, M. (1919). Politik als Beruf ('The Profession and Vocation of Politics', 1994). In P. Lassman &
R. Speirs (Eds.), Weber: Political Writings. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Weller, P. (Ed.). (1975). Caucus Minutes, 1901-1949: Minutes of the Meetings of the Federal
Parliamentary Labor Party. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Weller, P., & Grattan, M. (1981). Can Ministers Cope? Australian Federal Ministers at Work.
Richmond: Hutchinson.
Weller, P., & Lloyd, B. (Eds.). (1978). Federal Executive Minutes 1915-1955: Minutes of the Meetings
of the Federal Executive of the Australian Labor Party. Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press.
West, K. (1965). Power in the Liberal Party: a Study in Australian Politics. Melbourne: F W Cheshire.
Whitington, D. (1961, October 7). Directors of the Liberals: Professionalism in the Party's Federal
Politics. Nation.
Whitlam, G. (1985). The Whitlam Government 1972-1975. Ringwood: Penguin Books.
Wilkinson, M. (1996). The Fixer: the Untold Story of Graham Richardson. Port Melbourne: William
Heinemann Australia.
Williams, M. H. (2009). Catch-All in the Twenty-First Century? Revising Kirchheimer's Thesis 40 Years
Later. Party Politics, 15(5), 539-41.
Williams, P. (1997). The Victory: the Inside Story of the Takeover of Australia. St Leonards, N.S.W:
Allen & Unwin.
Williams, P. (2011a, 26 July 2011). By some accounts, the Liberals are divided. Australian Financial
Review.
Williams, P. (2011b, 19 July 2011). Liberals accused of funding secrecy. Australian Financial Review.
Williams, P. (2011c, 18 July 2011). Revealed: the bitter feud in the Liberals. Australian Financial
Review.
Wise, R. (1982, 25 May 1982). David Combe's ballot demise revives row. Australian Financial Review.
Wright, T. (1994, 1 November 1994). Politicians to the aid of the Party. Sydney Morning Herald

191
Wring, D. (2002). Conceptualising Political Marketing: a Framework for Election-Campaign Analysis.
In N. O'Shaughnessy & S. Henneberg (Eds.), The Idea of Political Marketing. Westport:
Praeger.
Wring, D. (2005). The Politics of Marketing the Labour Party. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Wyndham, C. (1964). The Unbridgeable Gap - between Democratic Socialism and Communism:
Australian Labor Party.
Wyndham, C. (1965a). Democratic Socialism Today - a paper by Cyril S Wyndham to the Young Labor
Association, Noosa Heads, Queensland: Australian Labor Party, New South Wales branch.
Wyndham, C. (1965b). National Civic Council: a Closer Look. Canberra: Australian Labor Party,
Federal Secretariat.
Wyndham, C. (1966a). The Future of the ALP. Australian Quarterly, 38 (2), 29-40.
Wyndham, C. (1966b). Percentage of Formal Primary Votes received by Respective Parties for
Australia and for Each State, 1946-1966. Canberra: Australian Labor Party, Federal
Secretariat.
Wyndham, C. (1968). Labor Party Advertising - The Correct Perspective. Australian Quarterly, 40 (3),
19-25.
Young, M. (1974). Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 16 July 1974: Commonwealth of
Australia.
Young, M. (1986). The Build-up to 1972 The Whitlam Phenomenon. Ringwood, Vic: McPhee Gribble /
Penguin Books.
Young, S. (2002). Spot On: The Role of Political Advertising in Australia. Australian Journal of Political
Science, 37(1), 81-97.
Young, S. (2003, 29 Sep - 1 Oct). Scare Campaigns: Negative Political Advertising in Australia. Paper
presented at the Australasian Political Studies Association, University of Tasmania, Hobart.
Young, S. (2004). The Persuaders: Inside the Hidden Machine of Political Advertising. North
Melbourne: Pluto Press Australia.
Young, S. (2007). Policy-Making in a 'Cold Climate' of Ruling Party Benefit: Party Government and the
Regulation of Government Advertising in Australia. Australian Journal of Political Science,
42(3), 489-502.
Young, S., & Tham, J.-C. (2006). Political Finance in Australia: a Skewed and Secret System. Canberra:
Australian National University. School of Social Sciences. Democratic Audit of Australia.

192