LUNCH WITH JENNIFER BYRNE

1 September 2004

Mark Textor

When John Howard speaks you can be sure that the dark master of federal pollsters will be standing somewhere in the shadows.

Mark Textor is not just the Liberal Party’s master pollster, as so often billed; he is its only pollster, a key strategist in the federal government’s past three election victories. And his day is not unfolding well. Two opinion polls on the front pages show growing support for the Labor opposition, and the children-overboard affair – casting serious doubts on the integrity of “Honest John” Howard – is bubbling along briskly. What to say?

Plenty, starting with a redefinition of honesty: not a “technical thing” (whatever that means) but a matter of behaving in a consistent and understandable way. So, as Mark Textor sees it, if the electorate discovered the Howard government was hatching a secret plan to massively increase interest rates, in contradiction of its own policy, it would be marked down heavily – in fact, it would be a complete disaster. But if a senior public servant accuses the prime minister of ignoring clear advice regarding a boatload of refugees’ treatment of their children, and whether they were or were not thrown overboard, well ...

“Did someone many years ago say something to a guy that we’ve never heard of who allegedly said this and is now saying at the 11th hour – what? What’s this about? So I guess the best way to describe that particular issue is, it’s very marginal.

“The thing about dishonesty is its effect, that at the end of the day you don’t know where someone’s coming from, right? That’s dishonesty, if you’re acting essentially in an inconsistent way, so they have no idea about your behaviours, whether they can rely on you next. But if the important issues are – and they are – maintaining stable interest rates and protecting Australia, then if you’re maintaining a true path on that, that is the truth.”

So “truth” in politics has a lot of latitude? “That’s a negative way to describe it. Honesty is important to people, the letter-of-the-law honesty is important, but the most important thing is a kind of consistency honesty. And that is, ‘OK, I’m voting for this person to run a country, not to ruin my life, to control interest rates – are they being true to their word on that?’”

There’s another question, he says: does this issue have a personal consequence? Because if it doesn’t, whatever the truth of the children-overboard advice, it won’t resonate. “Whether someone’s being honest to you about financial management, that has a real consequence on you ... whether someone handed someone a memo or not, or said something to someone or not, is really irrelevant.”

As for those two bad polls: “Running a poll during an Olympics is insanity. I mean, people are watching the telly – I was, Christ, it’s normal behaviour. You’re not thinking about your imminent decision are you? You’re thinking about Thorpie, all those empty seats, you’re watching Roy and H.G. – you’re thinking about a whole bunch of different things.”

In any case, who has ever known a pollster to put much faith in a rival’s work? They are a fiercely competitive bunch – “we don’t like each other,” Textor says simply. “Most pollsters have awful egos.” Each claims broader samples, more representative focus groups, quicker results, shrewder interpretations, although Textor would have to be one of the few who claims less influence than he actually has.

He’s a core member of John Howard’s political team, among the inner circle called in before the election was announced on Sunday, a dark master of the art of polling – dark, because he’s known for his ability to find a hot-button issue then press it, repeatedly (what some call wedge politics; he says it’s simply finding the point of difference from one’s opponents), and master because he’s been at it 18 years with a healthy though not unbroken string of successes.

He’s been in serious training for next month’s election since the last one ended. It’s part of his job, he says, to cut through all the chatter and rewriting of history which happens after either victory or defeat, and provide sound advice on how – in a phrase he winces about using, but does, often – to “move forward”.

The other and inevitably most fascinating part of his job is to take soundings from the community in the form of focus groups, information he then analyses and reports back to the party and its leaders. This is the slightly magical part of the business, which really tests a pollster’s skills, since what people say in these groups is not always the same as what they mean. You have to be a great listener, a good interpreter, have a solid grasp of the political environment and, on top of that, a sense of what your masters are willing to hear and respond to. The fact Textor is still there, still heeded, with those three victories behind him, suggests he’s pretty damned good at the job.

So what does he advise John Howard and his team, this bald man with the dark goatee dressed in head-to-toe black, with the finest of scars on his cheek? Textor has been described as looking like a reformed bikie but it’s the wrong vehicle, he’s actually a cyclist, and carries a small foldable racing bike with him on business trips. The scar is a remnant of a highway accident when, in 1990, he slammed into the side of a truck on his bike: Textor looks tough but the truck won and he fractured an arm, had facial reconstruction; he mentions the scar I hadn’t noticed as soon as we sit down.

Big surprise, he’s not saying what he’s telling John Howard, though he is dead keen to argue the familiar accusation that the PM and his policies are poll-driven. If he says it once over lunch, he says it half a dozen times: Howard is his own man, running his own agenda.

“Everyone remembers the times when Howard’s followed the polls, but fails to remember the times when he hasn’t,” Textor says. “The privatisation of Telstra, the GST debate, various stages of the Iraq conflict where, while he’s been sensitive to public opinion, he hasn’t necessarily followed it, he’s taken his own way. I remember him saying publicly once, ‘When I announced the GST I think my polls had a heart attack’.” Did Textor advise him against? “I never reveal my advice but it was always, as you know, a very difficult issue but he did it anyway.”

And Tampa? The waterfront dispute? “They’re decisions he would have made whatever the polls would have said.” Did the poll results support his natural predilection? “Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t; he takes it as another source of information for the positions he takes.” In short, Textor runs a mile from being seen as a svengali, and claims “it’s never been the case where you sort of dream up some issue and say, look this is really hot – it’s a completely opportunistic view.” Isn’t it an opportunistic business? “No it’s not.”

“Motives are important, why you are doing this. And the reason that’s important is they want to know there’s a reason beyond politics you’re doing it. That this idea has heritage and history, it’s grounded somewhere.”

Conviction politics? “Yes, and the most successful politicians these days are conviction politicians.”

The most useful pollsters – he doesn’t say this directly, but you can’t miss it – are those who keep their mouths shut and their ears open. He’ll give colourful examples of politicians being wilfully tin-eared about the public mood but never implicates a Liberal politician. He pokes fun at pollsters who, when quizzed about current events, reply – and he puts on a deep, self-important voice: “‘Well, it’s clear that this represents a sea change in public opinion’ ... How many times over the last 10 years has a commentator or a pollster talked of a ‘sea change’ in public opinion? I remember there was allegedly a sea change when people marched across the bridge for reconciliation. There was supposedly a sea change in public opinion just before the Iraq war in terms of people opposing Howard’s view allegedly, which they didn’t necessarily.”

There’s no such thing as a simple, clear set of numbers; they’re always ambiguous, a little foggy. “Most of the time it’s quite difficult to get a handle on public opinion, true public opinion – I don’t mean 73% say this, I mean what in their hearts are they thinking.” And it’s often not what we imagine, or what “the Canberra commentariat” focuses upon. The attack on the elites, for instance.

“One assumption is that everybody out there in middle Australia is cranky about the elites. Not really. Silly buggers, they can do what they want. The voters get concerned only when elitist behaviour affects them.” And the waterfront – “an important moment in Australian life, but it wasn’t necessarily the biggest issue out there in the boondocks.”

Textor is comfortable with the boondocks, having grown up in Darwin, “in a normal household in a normal school, a middle-Australian school, in a multicultural community – not multicultural in a trendy sense, but truly multicultural – in a street full of families”. His father was a patrolman who rose to deputy police commissioner.

The Territory didn’t have its own university then, so he flew south to study economics in Canberra, and scored a cadetship at the Australian Bureau of Statistics. He was 22 and knew zilch about politics when a friend mentioned that the then-NT chief minister Marshall Perron was advertising for an adviser. After a while, he was asked to run a few polls.

“I looked at one or two books, and I kind of worked out the basis of sampling and what we needed to ask, then started running focus groups.” So, fundamentally taught himself? “Yes. I absolutely taught myself everything. It was crystallised somewhat by working with Richard Wirthlin, who polled for Ronald Reagan and George Bush], it helped having a survey research background with the ABS, but, yeah, I did.”

It was a tough place to start, a great place where you could drink and cuss and express a view. He got into trouble over the use of push-polling, planting negative messages in the form of questions, which has been well trawled but remains a sensitive point because, he says, it paints him “as some sort of road warrior, willing to take stupid risks in order to get someone to win a campaign”. Ridiculous, he says, although he acknowledges some information in the poll “was perhaps inaccurate in retrospect”.

He’s been with the federal party since the early 1990s and hasn’t really thought what happens to him if they lose office. The association with power isn’t important, he says, but the work’s interesting; his life would perhaps become less interesting. Are pollsters, themselves, powerful? “We like to think we are. But my experience – without being too sharing and caring about it – is that at the end of the day, the trick is to try to give advice relative to what you know to be the political realities.”