“Crosby Textor the Lib strategists who brought us children overboard, Brexit, Abbott’s election and the referendum are advising a week of silence for us, bless,” GetUp CEO Larissa Baldwin-Roberts tweeted after Yes23 campaign co-chair and Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman Rachel Perkins posted a statement — “from Indigenous Australians who supported the Voice referendum” — calling for a “week of silence” following the No vote on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
“When they get back I have questions, Are they running Dutton’s election campaign and was this Incompetence or sabotage?”
Whether Baldwin-Roberts is fair in her assessment of who came up with the week of silence, it points to the strange role played in the referendum by Crosby Textor.
A storied history
Crosby Textor, the campaigning and polling group formed by Mark Textor and Sir Lynton Crosby and now rebranded as C|T Group, has ascended to a mythic figure on both sides of the aisle of 21st-century Anglosphere politics. As Baldwin notes, C|T Group has a reputation for incredible electoral successes and moral turpitude, dating back, in Crosby’s case, to at least 2001, when then-prime minister John Howard benefited from lies about refugees throwing their children into the sea and fears around terrorism to claim a victory that had looked unlikely earlier that year. Much of what has happened in Australian (and UK) conservative politics can be traced back to the influence of C|T Group or its proteges.
Thus the significant involvement of Textor in particular and C|T Group in general in the Yes campaign was supposed to be an indication of a hard-headed, ruthless conviction, a sign that whatever needed to be done to achieve cut through with the public would get done. The weekend showed just how that worked out, with less than 40% of Australia endorsing change.
Pleasing nobody
The second part of Baldwin-Roberts’ pointed question — whether C|T Group was going to stroll back into its day job trying to get hard-right governments into power when the next federal election rolls around — seems up in the air. According to reporting in The Australian, several Liberal MPs, both conservative and moderate, are saying they want nothing to do with C|T Group going forward, partly due to their work opposing Liberal Party policy on the Voice, and, possibly more worryingly for the veteran campaigners, a view they are losing their touch:
I didn’t need to see their effort on this. I saw their effort on the 2022 election and the 2016 election. They have been wrong more often than they have been right. I can guarantee they won’t be getting much work going forward. I can assure you there is no love for Crosby Textor from the leadership team on the right.
Between this and the wipeout for Scott Morrison’s government in 2022, is C|T Group losing its grip on Australian politics? All we’ll note is that, in the above reporting, the MPs in question displayed sufficient respect for the target of their ire to remain anonymous (except incurable renegade Senator Gerard Rennick, bless him). As for C|T Group, a spokesman told The Australian: “We will not be responding to opportunistic comments that are clearly based on a misunderstanding of our role in the campaign.” Plus, we do note that a certain theme has found itself in the media postmortems — that the real problem with the campaign was Labor’s “refusal to compromise“.
