A broken policy system which had “21-year-old ideologues” at the helm led to a situation where the Abbott government’s policies were wildly divergent from the Liberal party’s, campaign strategist Mark Textor said.

Textor was speaking at Universities Australia’s higher education forum on how groups can lobby more effectively in the existing, economically-austere environment.

The Liberal party insider and pollster said rather than economic austerity, voters had lost faith in the political system following several years of revolving door leadership.

“What we’ve had is an austerity of hope,” he said. “They’re not quite sure where hope lies.”

Wide-ranging changes introduced by Tony Abbott, such as the potential deregulation of universities, were the result of a broken political system where considered and experienced policy wonks were overlooked, Textor argued.

“During the time of great estrangement during the Abbott years, the reality is people who are close to the machine like myself thought that many of the reforms ... we were getting were completely out of step,” he said. “Don’t assume the government’s agenda and the political agenda are the same because governments aren’t political parties and their agendas are quite different.”

Instead, “21-year-old pimply theorists from the IPA [Institute of Public Affairs] and the Australia Institute” with little real-world experience have been running the show, Textor said.

“The policy process is dried up and kaput,” he said. “There are too many scattered ideologues with agendas and the process is broken to get politicians in the right place.”

Despite the bleak assessment of politics at the moment, Textor said advocates have an opportunity to thrive, as they can fill the hope deficit with considered policy initiatives.



He used the example of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which emerged with bipartisan support after lobbyists managed to get both sides of politics to agree to the principle of the initiative.

Textor has been critical of Abbott in the past, telling ABC shortly after Abbott lost his job to Malcolm Turnbull in September that the former prime minister’s failure to articulate an economic policy led to his downfall.

“The absence of that enunciation of a key, clear strategy created a vacuum. And into that vacuum came all these other minor things,” he told Four Corners.

“So rather than those things being a distraction, I saw them as a symptom of people’s concern about a lack of an economically adaptive strategy that would take us forward.”