A key Liberal party strategist has described the ABC’s collaboration with Guardian Australia on the Indonesian spying story as a “blow job” and accused the national broadcaster’s Canberra bureau of engaging in “puerile behaviour”.

The pollster Mark Textor argued on Thursday that the ABC’s actions could cost it an arm and a leg. The comments add to the growing debate over the national broadcaster’s performance and the implications for future funding under the Abbott government.

In a post on his private Facebook account, widely shared by others on Twitter, Textor said: “The ABCs blow job to the Guardian looks to have cost them an arm. Their canberra bureau journalists's purile behavior will next cost them a leg.”

Textor, who provides polling and campaign strategy services to the Liberal party and is the business partner of Lynton Crosby, who is currently advising the UK Conservative party, shut down his personal Twitter account in November last year after his tweeting in the midst of the dispute between Australia and Indonesia over the spying revelations, published jointly by Guardian Australia and the ABC.

“Apology demanded from Australia by a bloke who looks like a 1970s Pilipino [sic] porn star and has ethics to match #Fairfax demands appeasement,” Textor wrote at the time, which led the opposition to ask Abbott about the tweet in parliamentary question time.

Asked by News Corp about his latest social media post – which was republished on Twitter by an ABC journalist – Textor said it was “more self-serving, self-obsessed gossip-based journalism from the ABC's besieged Canberra bureau”.

An Abbott government backbencher, Craig Laundy, urged his colleagues to change the channel if they did not like the ABC’s output, arguing the taxpayer-funded national broadcaster had the right to report the news without fear or favour.

Laundy, the first-term Liberal member for Reid in New South Wales, said the debate about the ABC’s news coverage had motivated him to speak up in defence of free speech.

The intervention comes amid fresh discussion over perceptions of unbalanced coverage on the ABC, triggered by Tony Abbott’s declaration on Wednesday that many people felt the national broadcaster instinctively took “everyone's side but Australia's”.

Abbott’s criticism of the ABC’s coverage – particularly asylum seeker mistreatment claims and Australia’s past attempts to spy on the Indonesian president – fuelled a growing media and culture war.

Rupert Murdoch’s Sydney tabloid, the Daily Telegraph – a strident critic of the ABC, the Greens and the former Labor government – led its front page on Thursday with the headline “The ABC of treachery”. News Corp’s national broadsheet, the Australian, splashed with the news the ABC could be stripped of its Australia Network contract to broadcast to the Asia-Pacific region and could also face government efficiency dividends on its budget.

In contrast, rival newspaper publisher Fairfax Media’s front-page reports focused on communication minister Malcolm Turnbull’s defence of the ABC’s independence from political interference. While arguing the prime minister had the right to critique the ABC, Turnbull said the broadcaster was accountable to its board rather than politicians.

“What's the alternative ... the editor-in-chief [of the ABC] becomes the prime minister?” Turnbull said. “Politicians, whether prime ministers or communications ministers, will often be unhappy with the ABC ... but you can't tell them what to write.”

Laundy took to Facebook to declare that free speech was one of the great things about living in a democracy. He said he believed the ABC should “probably not” have collaborated with Guardian Australia last year to reveal Australian spy agencies’ past attempts to target the Indonesian president’s phone, and should “definitely not” have run the vigorously disputed claims about the Australian navy mistreating asylum seekers.

“However – as a proud Liberal, they ABSOLUTELY have the right to do so without fear or favour. The best part of ‘freedom of the press’ is that you get a HUGE variety of views – just as you get in society,” wrote Laundy, who last year defeated the Labor MP for Reid, John Murphy, a strident critic of the Murdoch press.

“My advice to those who don't like the job the ABC are doing, my colleagues included, is to do what those living in a democracy have been doing since ‘Adam was a boy’ … change the channel, the dial, or the website you visit. And before the howls of ‘but they're funded by the taxpayer’ breaks out – stop and think about how vast Australia is, and diverse it's media needs are, as well as how commercially ‘unviable’ the media markets are outside of our major cities … ie rural Australia.”

In a later interview on ABC News 24, Laundy said he felt the ABC story about claims the navy burned asylum seekers was “un-Australian”, while the publication of the spying story based on the disclosures of Edward Snowden was a “line ball” decision.

The social services minister, Kevin Andrews, said the ABC should be “open to constructive criticism about its performance as it would be about the performance of other people and other institutions in Australia”.

“What goes around comes around," Andrews said on Thursday.

The north Queensland-based Liberal National party senator Ian Macdonald said he had long believed the ABC’s news coverage lacked balance, and extended the criticism to include its treatment of climate change science.

“You report the news that this is every scientist in the world who has this view; whereas clearly the facts are not that, but you rarely hear from people like Bob Carter or others who have a different view,” Macdonald said during an interview with ABC Radio National on Thursday.

“I don’t care what you say and which facts you report as long as they are balanced and as long as we don’t have weeks and weeks and weeks of news stories on some alleged indiscretion by the navy with never a murmur of all the good things the navy do every day of the week.”

Macdonald said hundreds of constituents asked him when the government was “going to get rid of the ABC”. Macdonald said ABC local radio was invaluable, but he had a problem with the output from the major cities. “There are so many people who say to me this is a clear left-Green agenda and it’s not what we pay our taxes for,” he said.

The acting opposition leader, Tanya Plibersek, accused the government of engaging in a "very petty tit-for-tat exchange with our national broadcaster".

Plibersek acknowledged she had concerns about the release of the Snowden documents about intelligence gathering, but the problem was the security breach rather than the act of journalists reporting on material that entered the public domain.

“I don’t think journalists should be self-censoring; I don’t think they should be a trumpet for the government of the day,” she told Sky News on Thursday.

The Greens leader, Christine Milne, said it was not the role of the media to engage in “propaganda for Australia”. Milne said Abbott, as a former journalist, should know the responsibility of the media to fearlessly present the news.

