Crosby Textor group’s influence on the Liberals has been pervasive. Is it time to cut the link?

This piece is part of a series. Find the full series here.

When Scott Morrison moved into the prime minister’s office in 2018 Australia had no idea of the wall-to-wall onslaught of Crosby Textor-style politics that awaited it. 

One of Morrison’s first appointments was Yaron Finkelstein. Finkelstein came to the prime minister’s office as Morrison’s principal private secretary directly from his job as CEO of Crosby Textor’s Australian operations. Finkelstein had been with C|T for over a decade, working first as the firm’s director of strategy. 

Down the road in Canberra, another former senior C|T operative, Andrew Hirst, was already running the show as the Liberal Party’s federal director. Like Finkelstein, Hirst had worked previously in Liberal ministerial offices before his role as head of C|T’s Canberra office.

Morrison had first to negotiate the unwinnable election of 2019. To do so the Liberal campaign called on the services of more C|T types. These included Catherine Douglas, a C|T campaign expert and now the firm’s Australian managing director as well as digital campaigners Topham-Guerin, closely allied with the C|T stable.

C|T operative Isaac Levido was drafted in from the firm’s Washington office. C|T’s local research arm carried out the fieldwork.  

The C|T dominated group came up with the slogan “The Bill You Can’t Afford” to kill off the ALP campaign which had proposed changes to franking credits and negative gearing.

The 2019 election was pivotal not only for Morrison and the Liberal Party but for C|T too. After all, the firm’s business model relies on having a friendly government in power.

And in Morrison C|T had a fellow traveller: a marketing man who lived by polling and who was ready, willing and able to deliver for the client, whoever that may be. 

Over the following three years Morrison and C|T proved to be the perfect fit, so much so that it was impossible to know where the Morrison government began and ended. Was the Morrison government an extension of C|T or vice-versa?

Wherever the boundary was, the C|T prime ministership proved to be a disaster not only for the Liberals but for Australia’s political governance norms.

Let us count the ways.

The endless campaign

Under Morrison government became a 24-hour-a-day political campaign without end. There was the constant stream of photos: Morrison in hi-vis gear, Morrison driving a truck, Morrison at the footy, Morrison cooking samosas, Morrison having his hair washed. Who could forget the endless Morrison-as-national-leader shots, as the PM got down to work?

The wedge politics

There was the captain’s pick of anti-trans campaigner Katherine Deves to contest the seat of Warringah in 2022, and Morrison’s use of the religious discrimination bill in the final days of his government to portray Labor as anti-religion. But his most audacious pre-election wedge was his announcement of the AUKUS agreement, widely seen as an attempt to corner Labor on the US alliance and its commitment to defence spending. The Albanese-led opposition was briefed on the AUKUS agreement just hours before Morrison’s announcement. 

As Crikey has revealed, C|T’s United States office is the lobbyist for the defence company which builds the very nuclear-powered submarines which lie at the heart of the AUKUS deal.

The relentless electioneering via pork-barrelling

Morrison’s proclivity to use public money for political electoral purposes first became apparent with the “sports rorts” affair where evidence emerged of a colour-coded spreadsheet of grants tracking back to the prime minister’s office.

It was only the beginning of a stream of grants programs that were skewed for the purpose of keeping political power.

Time to cut the link?

Extraordinarily, even on May 21, the day of the 2022 election, Morrison was prepared to reach for a refugee boat arrival — a quintessential old-time wedge issue — as a last desperate attempt to cling to power.  

The Morrison government represented the final distilled essence of the Liberal Party under C|T influence dating back over 25 years: a government obsessed with politics and power and which saw its role as doing the bidding of elite business interest groups.

Despite the electoral loss, the Liberal Party saw fit to use the services of Finkelstein for the party’s NSW election campaign.

It lost that election too, leaving only one Liberal government standing in Australia, and a federal opposition — nearly all of whose members have grown up with the C|T way of doing politics — with no apparent plan.

Might it be time for the Liberal Party to abandon its C|T dependency? It would appear that the question hasn’t even been asked, so entwined are the two.