The Liberal party’s campaign director, Tony Nutt, has defended the government’s decision not to go negative against Bill Shorten and Labor in the 2016 election, arguing it would have driven voters to support non-major party candidates.
In a message largely targeted for internal consumption, Nutt told the National Press Club the Liberal campaign was not “undermined by being positive” – which is a view some government MPs hold – and argued the broadly positive messaging helped deliver the government a narrow victory.
Nutt, who on Thursday delivered the traditional campaign wash-up, said the opposition leader was already “a net negative for Labor and so the job of the campaign, with limited resources, was not to tell people something they already knew and thought”.
Nutt’s analysis about the key strategic calls in the lead-up to and during the eight-week poll are his first public commentary on the recent campaign, which has, thus far, largely been defined by internal critics who have complained of dysfunction in national headquarters, poor messaging and a lack of functional field resources.
Nutt also declared Labor’s Medicare privatisation assault on the government a “cold-blooded lie” – borrowing a phrase from American Democrat Harrold Ickes.
Nutt became visibly emotional when recounting Labor’s targeting of “highly vulnerable people” during the campaign, like his elderly relatives, and he called on the ALP to “pledge never again to behave in that way”.
But Nutt was presented with a range of scenarios where the Liberal party had campaigned on highly misleading statements such as Labor’s carbon price leading to $100 lamb roasts, the alleged wiping out of Whyalla courtesy of carbon pricing and the oft-repeated “budget emergency” that featured heavily in the 2013 election campaign.
The Liberal party director attempted to draw a distinction between rhetorical arguments made during policy debates – “contestable public policy phrases” – and the Medicare privatisation, which he said was never going to happen.
“Last time I looked, during Labor’s period in office, they had a carbon tax and, last time I looked, Tony Abbott won the 2013 election in part dealing with that issue and the tax was repealed. So there actually was a tax,” Nutt said.
“Now you can debate a particular point about legs of pork or something, fair point. But there actually was a tax and it actually was repealed. What we’re talking about here is a cold-blooded lie.
“Nobody in this room or watching television today thinks that Medicare was going to be privatised, could be privatised or will ever be privatised.”
Nutt also stood by the campaign messaging deployed controversially by the LNP backbencher George Christensen, who said Syrian refugees should not settle in his north Queensland community. “I suspect that Mr Christensen’s campaign reflects his public policy views on a range of issues,” he said.
He also denied the Liberal party had attempted to smear the then Labor candidate for Cowan, the deradicalisation expert Anne Aly, during the campaign, despite the fact West Australian ministers including Michael Keenan and Julie Bishop contended she did not support the government’s national security efforts and tried to secure reduced jail time for a “hate preacher”.
“I don’t accept that anyone was smeared,” Nutt said.
Nutt said he took ultimate responsibility for key calls during the campaign and said he would contribute constructively to a campaign review now under way.
He used the speech to paint a picture about the government’s fortunes in the lead up to the election being called in budget week, 2016.
Nutt said that, after Abbott’s election in 2013, “a number of important objectives were achieved” but he noted that “a number of political difficulties” presented themselves in 2014-15, which led to the “re-formation” of the government with Malcolm Turnbull at the helm.
Nutt said Turnbull’s ascension improved the government’s fortunes “but community expectations of quick solutions to difficult issues reached unrealistic levels.”
He said the GST debate, which Turnbull took on in the latter part of 2015 and the early part of 2016, had to be prosecuted but, “as the government worked its way through a cacophony of demands and high expectations”, the community became unsettled.
Nutt said the government had to demonstrate it had a positive agenda through the handing down of the budget and campaign on that, rather than focus extensively on the deficiencies of opponents.
“Simply reciting the past sins of Labor and the Greens or drawing attention to the undesirable aspects of a possible Labor/Greens minority government would not be a sufficient or workable strategy unless the government met voter’s expectations about itself,” Nutt said.
“Otherwise the vote would be splintered and recycled by independent and minor parties to the detriment of the Coalition.”
Nutt was asked about whether foreign donations should be banned and he said future reform on campaign finance needed to be approached cautiously because the area was complex and “because sometimes, in campaign finance reform, it’s outrage in search of evidence”.
He was also asked about the Liberal party’s lack of a field operation in 2016, which is a common complaint among government MPs who felt outgunned by grassroots operations run by Labor, the trade union movement and activist groups such as GetUp.
The government has signalled it wants a looming review of campaign finance reform to take into account the activity of third-party groups.
He noted that progressive political parties were “professionalising themselves all the time and the Liberal party needs also to professionalise itself further”.
“Excellent work was done in Victoria by the Victorian division with their call centre, for instance, which was used to great effect in the number of key seats – Deakin, for instance.
“So the Liberal party’s doing a lot of work in that area but we need a lot of resources. And we need to do more to get those resources, to have those structures and have those capacities.”
He also said business groups would need to step up their campaigning capacity to offset the influence of trade unions and progressive activists.
After the speech, Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff, Peta Credlin, told Sky News the speech was an assessment you’d give “about a devastating loss when it wasn’t your campaign.”
Credlin said it was hard to pin the result on Nutt when all the strategic calls were made by Malcolm Turnbull, and she suggested Turnbull was comprehensively outgunned by Shorten and Labor’s ground operation, particularly in New South Wales, which she characterised as “quite exceptional.”
She said the speech Nutt couldn’t give on Thursday was the speech assigning blame to Turnbull. “The leader’s got to have ticker, the leader has got to know exactly who they are and what they stand for, they’ve got to have conviction, and I think that was sorely lacking in the campaign.”
Credlin queried Nutt’s rationale that a negative campaign would not have worked. “When you’ve lost 14 seats and three Senate positions, it might have worked, it might have got you a better result. You won with a one seat majority – come on – I would have had a crack at some of those things.”
She said no-one in the 2016 campaign sort advice from people she characterised as “old hands” – meaning either herself or her husband, Brian Loughnane, a former director of the Liberal party. “I didn’t get a call, and I doubt Brian got many calls either. They knew everything, but knew nothing.”
