"From the Left" by Chris Trotter
First published in the Dominion Post on 4th July 2008.
Why Crosby/Textor? That's the question I'd like John Key to answer.
There are plenty of public relations firms and advertising agencies right here in New Zealand, Mr Key, to which you could have turned to for political advice. Plenty of former politicians and conservative academics who would quite happily have donated their best thinking to you free, gratis and for nothing. And the people employed by your own party, and in you own office, what are they - chopped liver?
And, so, I ask again: why Crosby/Textor?
Why employ a duo of political strategists notorious throughout the English-speaking world for running political campaigns which conceal much more than they reveal, and whose undeniably potent subliminal messages are drawn from those parts of the human psyche at furthest remove from conscious rational thought?
Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor, if their campaigns are at all representative of their personal attitudes toward the democratic process, do not appear to place much stock in the rationality of the voting public. On the contrary, they seem to regard the voters' conscious thoughts as something akin to those frothy fringes found at the high-tide mark on windy beaches.
Of much more interest to the Crosby/Textor team is what lies beneath our conscious thoughts: all those barely acknowledged aversions and forbidden impulses lurking in the unlit regions of our subconscious minds.
It is to identify these - the dark creatures of our id - the they spend so much time poring over the videotapes and transcripts of their infamous focus groups.
Because it is not in the well considered verbal responses of respondents, but in their raised eyebrows, tightened jaws, and guilty smirks, that Crosby/Textor take inspiration for the content of their clients' campaigns. Those half-serious, half joking things people say to cover their most embarrassing or unworthy thoughts - these are the clues and cues that lead them on.
One of Crosby/Textor's most durable themes is the primeval fear of the "other".
In 2001 this fear manifested itself in a leaky boatload of economic refugees desperately seeking asylum in the "Lucky Country" - Australia. The Liberal government of John Howard, advised by Crosby/Textor, could have appealed to what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature", and given sanctuary to the pathetic human flotsam on the Norwegian freighter Tampa. Instead, he played to white Australia's deep-seated historical aversion to the phantasmagoric Asian hordes hellbent on over-running the great empty continent to their south.
The Liberal's winning image was of "Little Johnny Howard", fists clenched and flanked by Aussie flags, over the dog-whistle slogan: "We decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come."
Mark Textor - the pollster - had a lot of experience in exploiting his countrymen's fear of "the other".
Andrew Coward, who worked alongside Textor in Northern Territory elections, described his handling of "the race issue" in David Marr and Marian Wilkinson's book Dark Victory:
"We studied it very carefully from year to year, including the attitudes of people who came [to live in the Northern Territory], and found about 80 per cent of people who would describe themselves as Labor in another state would have an anti-black view, and many of them would vote for another party if, during an election campaign, they had the pants scared off them.
"Come election time, based on this research, the CLP [Country Liberal Party] sends a message to the electorate which essentially says, "You might not like us but if you elect the other mob, they'll give the rest of the place away to the blacks'."
The better angels of human nature would not appear to play much (if any) role in the wedge politics favoured by the Crosby/Textor school of electioneering.
I was, of course, encouraged to learn of Mr Key's promise that neither he nor his party will resort to "dirty" political tactics in the forthcoming general election; that he will fight it out with Labour fairly and squarely on the issues.
Democracy as an exercise in rational debate, rather than the mobilisation of our worst fears and deepest hatreds. That's very good news. But if this really is the sort of election campaign Mr Key intends to run, I ask again: Why Crosby/Textor?
Because, as the Russian playwright Anton Chekov observed: "Hang a gun over the fireplace in Act One, and someone's got to fire it by Act Three."