Senator FAULKNER (12:58 PM)—The Labor Party has on a number of occasions in this chamber raised serious issues about the behaviour, history and ethics of the Liberal Party's pollster, Mark Textor. We have done this for two reasons. Firstly, Mr Textor's sordid history raises serious concerns about his fitness to obtain the many government research contracts which increasingly appear to be going his way. Revelations about his past behaviour in the Northern Territory and as the pollster behind the disgraceful Canberra by-election push polling scandal show his actions to be unethical, illegal and immoral.
Secondly, we raise these matters to expose—and by exposing we hope to end—the disturbing rise of wedge politics of which Mark Textor is an unashamed practitioner. Wedge politics operates on the cynical and shameful political calculation that you can win in politics only when you divide the community. His research methodology is designed to identify, exploit and inflame division for the benefit of his political clientele.
Understandably, Mark Textor is not happy with the attention he is getting over the allegations we have brought into this place. He and his political masters are best served by his ongoing anonymity and lack of accountability. His defence has been a mixture of flat denial and counterattack in the face of overwhelming and irrefutable evidence. Mark Textor thinks he is a brilliant pollster who strikes fear into the heart of the Labor Party. He no doubt delights in that self-delusion. His defenders in the Liberal Party also claim that we are out to get him because he is a strategic genius. He is and they are sadly misguided.
The Labor Party is not frightened of Mark Textor. We regard him as far from brilliant. We are not intimidated by his strategic genius, because we see no evidence that he possesses any. The only genius uncovered in Mark Textor's polling in 1998 should be attributed to the Labor Party campaign. If you believe his figures published in the Bulletin, Labor's primary vote jumped by seven points over the course of the campaign period.
We were also intrigued by the Liberal's failure to exert pressure on Labor in a number of areas where our own research showed us to be a little vulnerable. We waited and waited, but the assault never came. Instead, we watched as the Liberal Party resorted to polluting the letter boxes of elderly Australians with direct mail on our capital gains tax policy—a scare campaign that singularly failed to make a dent in our support, even amongst the groups it targeted.
We object to Mark Textor because as a market researcher and pollster he is ethically unscrupulous, unprofessional and—judging by his outlandish poll numbers published in the Bulletin before last year's election—incompetent. As a concrete example of Mark Textor's unethical and unprofessional research methods, the Labor Party has obtained videotapes of focus groups Mark Textor conducted in 1993 in the Northern Territory as director of his front company, Territory Focus Consulting. Territory Focus Consulting had entered into a contract with the Northern Territory government to conduct focus group research into community perceptions of government policy and programs.
The use of taxpayers' money for government research can be for legitimate purposes. An example would be the testing of community perceptions on the provision of health or education services using legitimate research methods. This was clearly not the case with the research performed under the contract Textor signed with the Northern Territory Chief Minister's Department on 14 April 1993 and through which Textor was paid $740 a day of Northern Territory taxpayers' money. The contract, issued without any tender process, was hastily put together at the behest of the Country Liberal Party. It was arranged by Mr Paul Cowdy, who at the time worked for CLP Chief Minister Marshall Perron. Textor wrote to Paul Cowdy on 19 April 1993 in an attempt to present the research as a bona fide use of taxpayers' money. Cowdy also witnessed Textor's signature on the $740 a day contract. Cowdy now sits at the right hand of the current CLP Chief Minister, Denis Burke, as his senior political adviser. Andrew Coward, the confessed co-conspirator, supervised the contract as the key operative in Marshall Perron's office.
We have stated earlier that this contract was a sham. The videotapes of the 1993 focus groups now provide graphic evidence that this contract represents a blatant and improper abuse of the established convention that taxpayers' money should not be used for covert party political purposes. The videos—of two separate focus group discussions held on the same day in April 1993—show that Mark Textor relentlessly pursued political lines of inquiry, such as:
Who is the Chief Minister and how would you describe him? Have you heard of the Leader of the Opposition before today? If there were one word to describe him, what would it be? So we are on Brian Ede—what do you think of him? How would you describe him? Why is land rights a bad thing? Would you vote for the crowd that is in or the crowd that is out? Just before I give you your dough, let's go around the table. If you had to make a hard decision, which way would you go?
This is the stuff of political focus groups, pure and simple. And it should have been paid for by the end user of the research data—the Northern Territory Country Liberal Party. This is simply a more direct version of the 1990 strategy devised by Mark Textor and enacted by Brian Sweeney and Associates where Northern Territory taxpayers paid the overwhelming majority of the cost of the focus groups and where two reports resulted, with the more useful and detailed report going exclusively to the CLP.
The videos also show Textor testing out divisive issues to be slotted into CLP wedge politics campaigns, with direct questions on land rights, ownership and control of national parks and excessive government interference in the Territory's unrestricted lifestyle. He was teasing out language and concepts for the use of the CLP in the 1994 election. He was doing it on the payroll of the Northern Territory government in direct breach of at least section 45 of the Northern Territory Self-Government Act.
As he grilled these unsuspecting participants for their political insights, in a room nearby on closed-circuit television sat a number of CLP political operatives, including Andrew Coward from the Chief Minister's office. Think about this for one moment—a party official sitting in on party-political focus group research corruptly commissioned by the Northern Territory government and funded out the pockets of taxpayers.
And now we come to the lies. In the course of the focus group sessions, Mark Textor wilfully lied repeatedly. He lied about his client. He claimed on one occasion that he was working for businesses down south and on another that he had no client at all but would sell the research to the highest bidder once completed. In fact, when specifically asked whether he was working for the Liberal or Labor governments, he explicitly denied that. In fact, his nominal client was the Northern Territory government—at least that is who paid his fee. His real client was the CLP.
He lied about the video. He claimed that the video was for his use only and would be taped over or destroyed immediately after the session was completed. In fact, it was not a stand-alone video recorder but a closed-circuit television beamed into a neighbouring room for the benefit of interested but unidentified onlookers. And the video was never taped over or destroyed but was kept indefinitely in the files of the CLP.
He lied about himself. He claimed he knew nothing about the Northern Territory, having, he said, only spent six months there a few years ago. In fact, Mark Textor was born and raised in Darwin. It was where he cut his political teeth. As a member of the Market Research Society of Australia, he is bound by the professional code of conduct that governs the industry. Under these guidelines Mark Textor is not obliged to reveal his client, and that is fair enough. But creating fictional clients to appease concerned participants is a clear breach. Lying about his own personal history was simply gratuitous dishonesty.
A market researcher is permitted to take video recordings of his focus groups, but only when he or she explicitly spells out what they intend to do with them and gains approval from the interviewees. He is also obliged under the guidelines to inform the group if a closed-circuit television is in use and, if so, who is watching. He did neither. As a market researcher he is further obliged to protect the security of the tapes and thereby the privacy of the participants. The fact that in 1999 we have obtained copies of the five-year-old tapes amply illustrates that he failed to do this as well.
Irresponsibly, Mark Textor plied the participants with alcohol—no doubt in an attempt to elicit their innermost feelings—and then stood by as many pulled out their car keys and made their way home. Mark Textor was consistently and flagrantly in breach of the code of professional conduct that governs his profession. He lied, allowed unauthorised parties to witness the proceedings, failed to protect the privacy of the participants and calmly watched them leave to drive home, intoxicated from the alcohol he provided.
This new evidence shows he is a market researcher of the most unethical, irresponsible and deceitful kind who, through his actions, has brought his profession into disrepute. Along with Andrew Robb, Mark Textor has been forced to pay a price for his corrupt and despicable actions as a Liberal Party political operative, specifically in paying substantial damages and apologising to the Labor Party candidate in the 1995 Canberra by-election. This was a specific admission that Mark Textor and the Liberal Party had used push polling techniques during an election campaign.
There have been more recent examples of the Liberal Party using these abhorrent push polling methods, where personally damaging lies are knowingly peddled to sway individuals' voting intentions under the guise of polling activity. The Labor Party is aware of at least two instances where this has been used by the Liberal Party recently—during the by-election in the NSW state seat of Sutherland and in Drummoyne during the current NSW state election campaign.
Similarly, the Labor Party has a range of serious questions regarding the federal government contracts going to Mark Textor's main company, Australasian Research Strategies. For instance, just before the 1998 election Mark Textor received contracts to undertake polling research in two highly political and controversial areas—namely, community attitudes on the environmental issues for the Natural Heritage Trust and on industrial relations issues for the research document attached to the leaked Reith letter to the Prime Minister.
In regard to this very recent polling, we ask the Howard government: how much did these two research contracts cost the Commonwealth taxpayer? Was a proper competitive tendering process undertaken for these contracts? Was there any political interference in this tendering, the contracting, or the drafting of the tasks to be undertaken? And, most importantly, how can Commonwealth taxpayers be assured that the highly political data gathered by Mark Textor and paid for by the Commonwealth taxpayer was not passed on to the Liberal Party for use in the 1998 federal election campaign?
The evidence we have outlined today demonstrates the tactics used in recent years by Mark Textor and the Liberal Party in abusing Commonwealth taxpayers' money to conduct blatantly political research. We now require the Howard government to come clean on how these fraudulent tactics have been used to spend public funds on political research for the 1998 federal election campaign. If the government will not come clean on these matters, it is our view that parliament may need to seek full details of Mr Textor's taxpayer funded political research through a wide-reaching parliamentary inquiry. The Labor Party is not raising these questions through partisan politics motivated by jealousy or self-interest on our part. Indeed, it is in our interest that the Liberal Party continues to rely on such wildly inaccurate polling. The true act of partisanship here would be for the coalition to continue to protect and defend Textor when that defence taints them with the very corruption and moral bankruptcy that he represents.
