“Other questions were just as derogatory,” Mr Parish told this reporter in 1995. “People believed it. Questions were put as facts by an independent polling organisation, not as political propaganda.”

Mr Parish lost his seat to the Country Liberal Party.

The Country Liberal Party’s poll¬ster in the 1994 NT campaign was Mark Textor. Textor had learned his craft at the feet of Republican pollster Richard Wirthlin during the Ronald Reagan campaign.

The man who sent Textor there was the then federal director of the Liberal Party, Andrew Robb.

“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,” ALP Senator John Faulkner told parliament in 1999.

“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,” he said in the Senate.

In that Canberra by-election, which involved Mark Textor as an adviser to the Liberal Party, the Roy Morgan polling company asked voters if they would be more or less likely to vote for the Labor candi¬date if they knew she was adversely named in a government inquiry, had suggested the poor might take up arms to fight against the rich, and had been director of the Labor Club before it went bankrupt.

The Labor candidate, Sue Robinson, won a defamation settle¬ment and apology from the Liberal Party. Mark Textor and his business partner Lynton Crosby have since worked on four federal campaigns for the Liberal Party – Crosby was John Howard’s campaign director, and the pair advised Howard in the so-called Tampa election – as well as the Tories in the UK and the National Party in New Zealand.

The Country Liberal Party in Darwin used Crosby-Textor as its “pollsters” at the last NT election, and came within a whisker of winning government.

As revealed exclusively by The Independent Weekly in August 2007, the Rann Labor Government inexplicably put these once-exclusively Liberal pollsters on the public payroll in South Australia.

Senior Labor figures in Canberra and Adelaide were outraged by that disclosure. Lynton Crosby is a former state secretary of the Liberal Party in Queensland.

As Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd savagely attack on the pair.

“When the lights are burning late down at Crosby-Textor, it is a sure sign and symbol that life is not proceeding swimmingly in the (Howard) Government ranks,” Mr Rudd told parliament.

Premier Mike Rann’s Labor Government then hired Crosby-Textor to work on the $8 billion air warfare destroyers project, which Rann used as a campaign issue for his re-election in 2006.

The Liberal strategists were hired by Rann to lobby the Federal Government for the destroyer program to come Adelaide. The money was paid through the wholly SA Government-owned Port Adelaide Maritime Corporation.

This means the Liberal lobbyists were paid by Labor through the public purse.

“They have got very good contacts in Canberra,” Rann’s media secretary told The Independent Weekly at the time.

“They’ve been quite helpful to us.”

Far from being dis¬missed after SA won the destroyer contract, Rann continued to pay Crosby-Textor through the Maritime Corporation. Crosby-Textor was hired for $18,000 plus $3000 a month for “strategic market research on commercial and government activities that may impact on the Corporation in delivering its objectives”, according to corporation documents.

“Yes, we’ve kept them on,” the Premier’s office confirmed in 2007.

Our investigations showed a relationship existed between senior Rann advisers and Crosby-Textor executives before the firm was officially employed by the Labor Government. The firm’s connections reached to the highest echelon in Rann’s administration.

One of Rann’s closest economic and business advisers, Robert Champion de Crespigny, was chairman of Crosby-Textor’s research and strategic business while being paid to chair Rann’s Economic Development Board.

de Crespigny accepted the appointment as chairman of Crosby-Textor Research Strategies Results Pty Ltd on September 4, 2002, and served on Rann’s cabinet committee and development board from their inception until March, 2006.

And one of SA Treasurer Kevin Foley’s most trusted advisers left to work with that same part of the Crosby-Textor business, Research Strategies Results Pty Ltd.

The Treasurer’s former media secretary, John Kent, was a Crosby-Textor director until early 2007, when he became the communica¬tions manager for the Victorian grand prix.

And now push polling has come to South Australia.

“It was a Saturday afternoon about four o’clock when I got the phone call,” the elderly female victim told The Independent Weekly yesterday.

“A woman said she was from Nationwide Market Research. At first they were general ques¬tions, age bracket and sex and so on. Halfway through, questions started relating to (State Opposition Leader) Isobel Redmond. They said that Isobel Redmond would let (convicted child murderer) Bevan Spencer von Einem out of jail, and would that mean she is weak on law and order?

“Now I happen to know that Isobel Redmond hadn’t meant that. I’d heard what she’d said. She was speaking in the context of Ronnie Biggs, someone old and sick and about to die.

“I started feeling very uncomfortable.

“Then she asked about the Paul Nemer shooting, and if I knew she acted for him. The question had a statement in front of it.”

The Labor member for Morialta, Lindsay Simmons, conceded poll¬ing had been done by the ALP in her electorate.

The Independent Weekly attempted to contact Nationwide Market Research, but the phone call was not answered.

ALP state secretary Michael Brown said the party had done research in Morialta and other seats, but not push polling.

“I’ve seen the questions,” he said.

“To my knowledge we’ve never done push polling.”

Mr Brown declined to share the questions with The Independent Weekly, or to reveal their wording.

Nationwide Market Research has apparently been involved in push polling in a Brisbane City Council election, where the ALP tried to smear the Liberal Lord Mayor during what was ostensibly a poll.

Labor campaign direc¬tor Anthony Chisholm denied the charge of push polling but said he would not comment on internal party research or who conducted it.

“The Queensland branch of the ALP has never engaged in push polling and is not about to start,” he said.

This week, Premier Mike Rann used almost the same words.

“We don’t do push polling, never have done push polling,” Mr Rann said.

There are six months until the next election. Don’t leave the home phone off the hook. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for you.