2028

by Ken Saunders

  The Prime Minister did not forget or forgive cock-ups of this magnitude.

  ‘Expect a sneering comment at the least,’ the director warned Renard. ‘I have told Minister Langdon of the contents of your surprising letter. He will have gone straight to the Prime Minister with it. I’m not sure who will attend the meeting, but the Prime Minister has only a few cabinet colleagues he truly values.’ Her tone was casual. ‘One is the Treasurer, Alan Chandos. Chandos is an ideal treasurer for the PM. He is creative and clever, but he is content simply to be treasurer. He rakes it all in and leaves the Prime Minister to spend it wherever.

  Renard had the impression the director enjoyed gossiping along these lines. He relies on his talented Health Minister, Donna Hargreaves, but she is disliked by the rest of the cabinet.‘And Senator O’Rourke is his other ideal minister. She’s held several important cabinet posts and has run them all superbly. Where Chandos likes numbers, she likes knowledge. She knows how things work, who does what, how to get results, who to rely on in a crunch and whose heads should roll, if that is what is needed. And again, the Prime Minister can trust her because she does not seek to be prime minister. Her accent, I think, restrains her from greater ambition.’

  Everyone had heard Olga O’Rourke’s heavy accent—or, if they hadn’t, they had heard the many comedians who imitated it. O’Rourke was the senator’s married name. As Olga Kurbakova she had moved to Australia with her parents from the Soviet Union back in 1985. Since then she had learned everything possible about Australia except how to sound like an Aussie. Olga O’Rourke had the accent of a cartoon Soviet-era spy. There was no way the people of Australia, even at their multicultural best, could vote that accent to be their prime minister.

  ‘Be totally honest with her,’ Fiona advised. ‘She will know if you are lying. Don’t expect Minister Langdon to like us much either. He may feel that the limitations of our intelligence-gathering took off his left leg. Although that did help to get him a cabinet post, it wouldn’t be polite to point that out.’

  ‘When do I … we—’ Renard swallowed ‘—meet the Prime Minister?’

  A light flashed on the director’s desk. ‘Immediately, it would seem.’ She stood and clapped her hands together. ‘Gather up your things, Renard. We must head over to parliament. It isn’t done to keep the Prime Minister waiting.’

  ...

  ‘Where the hell are they, Russ?’ the Prime Minister asked his Minister for Security and Freedom. Three people were in the room: Russ Langdon, the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister’s campaign manager, Lister St John, the man who had masterminded the PM’s three election victories, although the verb was Lister St John’s choice more than the Prime Minister’s. Theirs was a marriage of convenience. Lister St John was capable of doing his bit as campaign manager well enough to get Fitzwilliams elected; Fitzwilliams had proven capable of hiring him to do so. What they had in common was an underlying contempt for each other.

  ‘Fill me in while we wait,’ Lister requested irritably. ‘I’ve rather a lot on. We are launching a surprise election tomorrow, after all.’

  The PM’s ability to tolerate St John waned considerably whenever he adopted that tone of voice.

  ‘Who are the damned Luddites,’ St John now demanded, ‘and how is it that they bloody matter?’

  ‘You don’t remember?’ Langdon asked. ‘The media was full of them eight or nine years ago.’

  ‘Lister was overseas throughout 2019 and 2020,’ the Prime Minister told Langdon. He turned to his campaign manager. ‘It was when you thought you were too big for small-time elections such as those held in our fair land. You were going to carve a big name for yourself by helping make Senator Bolen the president of the United States.’

  The Edward Bolen primary campaign in 2020 had become a textbook case for political campaigns having gone not so much wrong as straight into the pits of hell. The Prime Minister turned back to Russ Langdon. ‘It was Lister here who was behind Senator Bolen’s famous “I Have a Nightmare” speech.’

  ‘You tried to help Edward Bolen become president?’ Langdon whispered. ‘He was a psycho.’

  ‘Just tell me about the Luddites!’ Lister snapped.

  ‘Fine,’ the Prime Minister said. Raising Senator Bolen had been a petty thing to do, but Lister St John did not have a natural affinity for humility. ‘On 1 April 2019, some two thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven Australian citizens—’ Fitzwilliams still remembered the figure clearly ‘—went into their respective state registries of births, deaths and marriages and changed their name by deed poll to Ned Ludd. They were from across the whole country, not seemingly connected to each other or politically active. One month later, the Luddite Party registered as an official federal election party with two thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven party members all named Ned Ludd.’

  ‘A prime number,’ Langdon pointed out.

  The other two men looked at him, puzzled.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Fitzwilliams asked.

  ‘Two thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven is a prime number,’ Langdon repeated.

  ‘You mean like pi?’ the Prime Minister asked uncertainly.

  ‘No, that’s irrational,’ Langdon replied with a tsking sound that made the Prime Minister bristle. As if in response to the PM’s bristling, Langdon shifted his artificial leg and winced. ‘Irrational numbers go on to infinity without repeating,’ he explained. ‘Prime numbers are only divisible by one and themselves.’

  ‘Do you mean to say,’ Lister St John scoffed, ‘that nothing else divides into two thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven?’

  ‘Yes,’ Russ answered.

  ‘What about seventeen?’ St John queried.

  ‘What about seventeen?’ Langdon shot back.

  ‘Does it divide into two thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t! Two thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven is a prime number.’

  ‘You haven’t tried,’ Lister St John accused. ‘Try dividing it by seventeen or twenty-nine or a hundred and fourteen. Something must divide into it.’

  ‘Nothing divides into it,’ Russ answered, louder than before. ‘It’s a prime number!’

  The Prime Minister felt he should intervene. ‘Russ, what makes you think two thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven is one of these prime numbers?’

  ‘I don’t just think two thousand eight hundred and eighty-seven is a prime number,’ Langdon said through gritted teeth. He sounded exasperated. It struck Fitzwilliams that the man had handled having his leg being blown off with greater equanimity. ‘It is a prime number! I know what I’m talking about.’

  The Prime Minister had only received a pass in high school maths. It disturbed him that Langdon, of all people, was carrying on very much like someone with a high distinction.

  ‘Let’s get back on topic,’ Lister cut in. ‘What have the Luddites ever done? I’ve never heard of them.’

  ‘Since then—’ the PM let out a slow breath ‘—nothing. They have done nothing other than maintain their status as an officially registered party.’

  ‘Until today,’ Langdon piped up. ‘I mean tomorrow. Tomorrow, they have two demonstrations planned—both here in Canberra, one at three thirty and the other at seven. The time of the PM’s press conference to announce the snap election after leaving the Governor-General’s residence and the time of the cabinet rally outside parliament. It could not be coincidental.’

  Lister St John cleared his throat. ‘I don’t like it—but with the Demonstration Protection Act, I expect they won’t be able to disrupt our plans.’

  The Demonstration Protection Act of 2022 had been rushed through in the aftermath of the Melbourne GPO bombing. The Fitzwilliams government had announced the cessation of direct mail delivery for standard letters. The usual suspects—those redundant categories of the elderly and ABC Radio listeners—had mustered in one of their lost-cause protests. Unfortunately for the greyhairs present, their protest neatly fitt
ed the category of a soft target. A terrorist blew himself and eight others up right in the middle of their desultory chant:

  Megaphone: What do we want?

  Crowd (out of sync): Postal letter direct delivery!

  Megaphone: When do we—

  Ironically, the explosive belt was delivered to the terrorist by parcel post only the day before.

  The massacre created outrage and Prime Minister Fitzwilliams rose to the occasion. He spoke movingly of a nation unbowed and of the fundamental right of Australians to free speech. His speechwriter had him cite Voltaire and he vowed that his government would defend every Australian’s right to protest. He concluded with an improvised clenched-fist shout of: ‘Two, four, six, eight, Australians still will demonstrate!’ That image had been emblazoned onto t-shirts, a rare feat for a Liberal prime minister. It was an outstanding performance considering the Prime Minister truly loathed demonstrations and demonstrators.

  Olga O’Rourke, then attorney-general, had crafted the legislation. After laudable opening first paragraphs citing fundamental rights came the reams of protection clauses. To prevent terrorist infiltration of legitimate demonstrations, all participants in a demonstration had to register three weeks ahead of time and undergo police checks (that took four to eight weeks). Once approved, it was necessary to book an appointment for a Demonstration Participant photo ID. Only demonstrators with Demonstration Participant IDs could be admitted into the approved DMZ (Demonstration Mustering Zone). Placards were allowed, but had to be reviewed seventy-two hours in advance by the Protective Office to ensure that the protest signs did not contain material in violation of the Incitement to Terrorism Act of 2021. There would be x-ray security searches of all demonstrators entering the DMZ. The act contained a bewildering host of additional measures. Fitzwilliams was awestruck. Olga O’Rourke might have left the Soviet Union when she was only fifteen, but she had a Brezhnev-era flair for mind-numbing bureaucracy.

  The Prime Minister had been utterly sick of ratbag demonstrators. He couldn’t invite the most innocuous G20 leader to the country without budgeting for forty thousand hours of police special duty and sealing off half a city centre. The premiers always moaned about it. ‘Next time you want to meet with the US president,’ the NSW Treasurer had once snarled at him, ‘do it in Coober Pedy, not Sydney.’

  The legislation, while effusively defending the right to protest, had plunged potential demonstrators into a bureaucratic labyrinth. So beautifully, she had done this all in the name of protecting them. Anarchists, Trotskyites, hippies—all of them were hopeless at filling out forms. Anyone wanting to organise a mass demonstration would need a staff of administrative assistants to nag these layabouts to bring in their original birth certificates, passports and one hundred points of identification. It would be practically impossible to shepherd everyone through the approval process. Since 2022, nothing controversial had marched the streets of Canberra. And Attorney-General O’Rourke had achieved all this using only the highest-sounding, most principled language.

  There was a sound at the door and both the ASIO party and Olga O’Rourke appeared. Seats were shuffled about. Olga produced a package of Scotch Finger biscuits and had trouble tearing it open. Prime Minister Fitzwilliams waited impatiently.

  Fiona Brennan currently had a level of public popularity that Fitzwilliams felt ASIO chiefs should not cultivate. He had planned to rebuke her with, ‘I thought you’d assured me that the Luddites were just a postmodern joke,’ but did not want the comment lost amid the presentation of the biscuits. Then he remembered it hadn’t been Fiona Brennan who said that to him but his own appointment, ASIO Director Heinrich, the one who during Senate estimate hearings had so embarrassingly confused their allies in Central Asia with the rogue states of the region.

  ‘There are those,’ Brennan began, ‘who presumed that the Luddite Party, given its long years of inactivity, was simply a postmodern joke. In 2019, nearly three thousand people changed their names by deed poll to Ned Ludd. They registered as a political party, and then did nothing further. Were they just a joke? Back then, we attempted to find out. Sixteen office staff of ASIO, Renard here among them, changed their names by deed poll to Ned Ludd and applied to join the party. All were accepted.’

  ‘And what have they asked you to do since 2019, Renard?’ Olga probed.

  Renard shook his head. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I would get one email per year but it was … social.’ He hesitated, knowing it would sound silly. ‘It was always about the annual movie night.’

  The Prime Minister let out a sigh, remembering.

  ‘Once a year we’d receive a message to watch a particular movie. There were no other instructions.’

  ‘What sort of movies?’ Langdon asked.

  ‘Any sort. The first year it was Planet of the Apes, the next year a Japanese movie based on King Lear, then the 2021 reboot of Predator, followed by something with Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock as grandparents that I don’t remember the name of.’

  ‘During those years ASIO also conducted surveillance and monitored communications of Luddite party members,’ Fiona added.

  ‘And what did you find?’ Olga asked.

  ‘I can answer that,’ the Prime Minister cut in. ‘They found that they spent thirty-six million dollars conducting surveillance on a group of people who did nothing other than hold an annual movie night.’ There had been hell to pay for that in the closed-door ASIO review. The PM was obliged to jettison yet another ASIO appointee and distribute a bewildering array of enticements and threats to the Greens MP on the committee to stop her leaking the details.

  ‘Thank you, Prime Minster,’ Fiona said sweetly. ‘He’s right. The surveillance turned up nothing. The Ned Ludds did not communicate with each other in any way we detected. They use their original names for work and life. Only when officially required—passport applications, tax returns and so on—do they use the Ned Ludd name. The Luddite party had no website, did not run any candidates or campaign on any issue. They were silent. We were concerned by this and suspected a black hole connection.’

  ‘What do you mean by black hole?’ Lister St John asked.

  ‘The black holes were a variety of unlikely small businesses that were simply off the modern radar,’ Fiona explained. ‘They first appeared around this time. They typically would have no website, no email address, sometimes not even a telephone. These were places where it was as though the twenty-first century and a good part of the twentieth had never happened. We suspected Compink of setting many of these up.’

  No one in the room was comfortable with Compink, the corporate arm of the Communist Party of China. In Compink’s early days, ASIO was still able to investigate its activities thoroughly. Since then, it had reregistered as Compink Australia, listed on the ASX and hence was protected from ASIO’s prying eyes by the full weight of Australian corporate law, although Fiona Brennan still found ways around that.

  ‘Black holes were obviously security voids,’ the ASIO director continued. ‘Electronic communication traffic couldn’t be monitored, as there was none. Servers couldn’t be hacked because they didn’t exist. Anything could have been going on there.’ She turned towards her junior employee. ‘Renard was sent to investigate one, a small “bookshop” in the inner west of Sydney where he introduced himself simply as Ned. It was—’ she decided to get the matter out of the way ‘—part of ASIO’s 20:20 Vision initiative.’

  The Prime Minister drew in a breath. Fiona Brennan had tossed that out as if she wanted him to comment. He exhaled. ‘I’m glad that 20:20 Vision managed to do something other than set off an orgy in the Melbourne financial district.’ He had to let something out. It wasn’t good to keep such things inside.

  ‘Was there any link to Compink?’ Olga asked.

  ‘In some black holes yes, but not in Renard’s. Despite its peculiar nature—it sells only books by Dickens and serves gruel—that shop is, remarkably enough, a legitimate business. After 20:20 Vision was abruptly cancelle
d, Renard continued to monitor the place. On his own time,’ she added, lest someone wanted to defend the taxpayer and his or her dollar. ‘Nothing of interest to ASIO ever emerged from the bookshop until last week. A letter had been dropped off for Renard in anticipation of his dining there. The letter,’ she said, donning her glasses, ‘reads: Prepare. We shall run in the upcoming election and we intend to win. Yours, Ned Ludd.’

  Fiona handed the sheet to Russ Langdon, who looked at it briefly then passed it to the Prime Minister.

  ‘Since this letter arrived,’ Fiona resumed, ‘the Luddites have done two things—well, possibly more, but so far we have detected only two. First, they have set up a website.’

  ‘That seems a contradiction,’ the Prime Minister observed. ‘Luddites aren’t supposed to like technology.’

  ‘Not necessarily, Prime Minister,’ Olga corrected him. ‘The historical Luddites, those in 1812 and 1813, were selective. They didn’t oppose all machinery. In Nottinghamshire, for instance, they smashed only a specific new device: a wide-frame, stocking-making machine that produced a second-rate product. They feared the production of inferior stockings would ruin the entire trade. It was a form of quality control, if I might use a twenty-first century expression, conducted by the workers themselves.’

  The Prime Minister gave her his how-do-you-know-these-things? look.

  ‘High school course on Pre-Bolshevik Working-Class Movements,’ she told the room. ‘The Luddites may want us to see them the way you think of them—as people too inept to learn to work common devices such as Gargantuans and Genie phones—but that may be a red …’ she paused to recall which fish the English phrase required, ‘herring.’

  ‘What’s with the Ned Ludd name?’ Langdon asked. ‘I take it Ned is a reference to Ned Kelly. What’s the Ludd part supposed to mean?’

  Olga shook her head. ‘Not our famous bushranger. Ned Ludd is also historical. The Luddites used to send threatening letters to the stocking manufacturers telling them to dismantle their wide-frame machines or else. They always signed them Ned Ludd. Ned Ludd did not exist and anyone could write a letter in his name. Having a fictitious leader caused the authorities great difficulty when they attempted to track down the actual ringleaders.’