What Mark Textor, Australia's most famous pollster, did next

When Malcolm Turnbull calls the next election, the Liberals will go into battle missing one of their long-time generals.

While Mark Textor — party pollster and campaign strategist — is still deciding how he will spend his first campaign in 30 years observing from the sidelines, he is certain of one thing.

“I say to my mates, ‘If I end up on a political panel during an election come around to my house with a f---ing gun and shoot me’."

Pollster Mark Textor on his 80-hectare farm in Goulburn.Credit: Janie Barrett

Textor is Australia’s most famous pollster — he and his London-based business partner Lynton Crosby are synonymous with John Howard’s victories and conservative wins around the world, from New Zealand’s John Key to Britain’s Boris Johnson and David Cameron. He's also known for coming up with Tony Abbott's election-winning slogans in 2013.

The pair talk less about their losses — Campbell Newman in Queensland, for instance — and their unsuccessful experiences. Indeed, little has been heard from “Tex” since the disastrous results of two of the last campaigns he worked on: the re-election of Britain’s Theresa May (a hung parliament in 2017) and Malcolm Turnbull in 2016 (he was returned with a one-seat majority).

Textor says there was no “line in the sand” moment for his change of course.Credit: Janie Barrett

The next federal election, which is due in 2019, "will be the first campaign since '93 that I won't be there, so it will be a bit strange", says Textor.

But he is adamant he won't be backseat driving. “Have you ever heard the term ‘seagull manager?’ Well you don't want to be one of those where you fly in, drop s--- on people and fly out - and pinch their chips!"

He won't be a complete outsider, either. "I'll probably get feedback direct from colleagues rather than watch, rather than being a punter," he says.

Textor is the first and youngest of the three founders of political research firm Crosby Textor to retreat from the political front line. His work will now be in the boardroom, increasing the company's international footprint, which already spreads from Australia to Europe (Britain and Italy), the United States and the United Arab Emirates.

He says there was no “line in the sand” moment for his change of course, but a “gradual process” and “a natural progression into new things”.

"As the youngest I thought I’d do it the earliest,” the 52-year-old tells Fairfax Media.

“Since the election of the Abbott government I’ve really not been involved in day-to-day work for political clients,” he says, claiming to have rarely stepped inside Parliament House since the Coalition won power in 2013.

Cory Bernardi is not even in the party anymore, who cares about Cory Bernardi? He's a nobody

Mark Textor

But Textor’s new terrain is hardly far from Canberra. He can’t remember how long ago he purchased his 80-hectare farm in Goulburn (“about three or four years ago”) but does remember having to “nip out” mid-presentation to bid on the parcel of land, which he describes as “rough as guts”.

"One of the things that's nice about coming to a smaller community is that you understand that the pace is not slower but different,” he says. "When someone comes around to your house — say someone dropping off some drenching products or fixing my diesel motor — in Sydney or Melbourne you'd have a very perfunctory conversation, but in the real community you'll have a 20-minute conversation about everything — cars, the weather, how their kids are doing, all sorts of things — and that is actually quite lovely."

Mark Textor describes his parcel of land in Goulburn as “rough as guts”.Credit: Janie Barrett

For the last two years, Textor has spent roughly eight months of the year rearing 200 sheep, about 20 cattle and agisting a few rescue horses. “I just got the s---s with the city,” he says of his tree change from Sydney’s north shore. "I mean how many people in the city know that this far west, basically the ground is dry and there's no feed this winter?"

The Turnbull and May campaigns

However Textor’s shift from campaign headquarters to the Crosby Textor boardroom comes after the near-disasters for Turnbull and May. They were the last two campaigns Textor is known to have been involved in, and he and Crosby were subsequently targeted by some within the political parties they worked for who felt the Crosby Textor model of building presidential-style campaigns around leaders armed with three-word slogans (“Jobs and growth”, “Strong and stable”) was bust.

Textor disputes that this is the company’s model but did claim authorship of Abbott’s election-winning 2013 cry. "I came up with ‘Stop the boats, end the waste, stop the big new taxes’," he says. "But the focus on a slogan is a false premise. There are so many things that happen in a campaign these days that aren't a slogan."

Slogans aside, the results of the Turnbull and May campaigns have damaged the Crosby Textor brand in both countries.

There have been questions about the data underpinning those slogans. MPs from both Britain’s Conservative Party and the Liberal Party in Australia told Fairfax Media that resources were diverted to the wrong seats. In Britain, that left marginal seats vulnerable and led to the loss of seats the Tories had never ceded to Labour before.

In Australia, MPs privately complain that their electorates were overlooked for spending because research said their seats were safer than they proved to be on election night.

The West Australian MP Andrew Hastie summed it up after the election when he told his local newspaper that there was a huge “disconnect” between the national campaign and what he was picking up on the doorstep. He questioned whether Textor had ever visited his electorate.

For his part Textor, who ridiculed a rival’s data correctly forecasting May’s hung parliament disaster, stands by his firm’s numbers. “Our research is famed for being hyper-accurate and has never been proved to be inaccurate.”

But this cannot be cross-checked as Crosby Textor never releases its raw data, not even to clients.

Liberal Party federal director Andrew Hirst says the party continues to use Crosby Textor and says Textor’s advice at the next election will be missed.

“Textor isn’t just a pollster, he is a world-class strategist,” said Hirst. “He’s still one of the best political brains going around.”

Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor in 2015.Credit: Janie Barrett

That political genius is what has earned Textor so many get-out-of-jail-free cards when he has made controversial statements, including when he compared Indonesia’s foreign minister Marty Natalegawa to a “1970s Filipino porn star” in a 2013 tweet. The slur was front-page news in Jakarta and was criticised by Abbott in Parliament as “tacky”.

While that could be considered a case of tweeting before thinking, others suggested premeditation. Former prime minister John Howard believed Textor was the source of a devastating 2007 leak of a "confidential dossier" drawn up by Crosby Textor that warned of "crashing voter support" from people who viewed Howard as "old and dishonest”.

When contacted this week, Howard was full of praise for Textor, whom he said was an “excellent pollster”.

“I enjoyed working with him, I retain good personal relations with both Mark Textor and Lynton Crosby," he says. "I certainly bear him no malice.”

And Howard suggested MPs, rather than their pollster, are as much authors of their victories as they are their losses.

“The tone of an election campaign in a parliamentary system is always set by the parliamentary leadership,” he said.  “I and my senior colleagues were entitled to claim credit for our electoral successes between 1996 and 2007, just as we must accept responsibility for our defeat in 2007.”

'Textor jumped the political shark'

Not all are as forgiving as Howard. After the 2016 election, when Turnbull was returned with just a one-seat majority, conservatives, who viewed Textor’s recent public advocacy for same-sex marriage and Indigenous recognition as a breach of professionalism, took their opportunity.

"A pollster can never serve two masters": Senator Cory Bernardi has criticised Mark Textor.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Liberal defector and Australian Conservatives founder Cory Bernardi sums up the views of a rump of MPs who think Textor is past his use-by date.

"Textor jumped the political shark when he became a social activist in preference to a dispassionate pollster," he says. "He repeatedly dismissed the conservative base as irrelevant whilst advocating his own political peccadilloes like gay marriage, Indigenous recognition and climate change.

"Whatever genius he convinced others he once had was diminished in a haze of self-indulgence that was never called out by the Liberal Party groupies," Bernardi says. "A pollster can never serve two masters and unfortunately I think he ended up using the Liberal Party to serve his own political agenda."

Textor says his personal views never mixed with his professional advice: "An allegation that in some way I became a social activist in relation to my professional duties is pure fantasy.”

He is equally scathing of Bernardi, who since peeling off from the Liberals has not enjoyed the electoral success he might have hoped. "Cory Bernardi is not even in the party anymore, who cares about Cory Bernardi? He's a nobody. He didn't even reach double digits [in the SA state elections].”

Textor and Turnbull would be of the same mind in their views of Bernardi – if they spoke. But Textor can’t recall when he last spoke to the Prime Minister.

Asked if Turnbull will win the next poll, Textor declined to make a prediction. “I’m not going to join the punditry, I hope he does,” he says.

Despite his reluctance to make a call, it’s unlikely this is the last we will see of Mark Textor. While he enjoys the country life, farming is a stop-gap rather than a permanent career change.

“I’m going to do something next, but I’m not going to pretend I know what it is yet,” he says.