by Ken Saunders
At Compink Australia, Wilson Huang stopped the video at almost exactly the same point that Fiona Brennan had. Amy was sleeping with the Luddite candidate. It was an unanticipated development.
Wilson Huang didn’t like using moles. This was for practical rather than ethical reasons. Moles were just regular workers, after all. They chucked sickies, their children got conjunctivitis or they dozed away at their desks because they’d been up all night watching Wimbledon. Half the time they weren’t there and the other half they weren’t alert. With the exception of Loki, moles weren’t good value for money.
Wilson had always let Amy think Odin was his mole within ASIO, but Odin was much better than that. Odin was a straightforward business arrangement Wilson had negotiated with Australia Post. He’d deduced that ASIO must be using the postal service’s drones to carry out national surveillance. His contract with Australia Post was simple. Wilson didn’t need to know everything ASIO knew. He just needed to know what they knew about Compink Australia. He supplied Australia Post with an electronic photo profile of each of his employees. They then provided him with a duplicate of any material they gave ASIO in which one of his own employees featured. It was a totally confidential relationship he had fostered with Australia Post and he was very satisfied with it.
Amy Zhao was his right hand at work. He knew her. If she was sleeping with the Luddite candidate it would only be because … well, if she wanted information from the Luddites, she would have simply found it out. No, if she was sleeping with him, she must have fallen for him. ‘Lucky fellow,’ he said aloud. Wilson chuckled. ASIO would see only a Compink Agent sleeping with a Luddite candidate and would be having who knew what sort of anxiety attacks about it. Wilson pictured Fiona Brennan running her fingers through her perfectly coiffed hair till it resembled an Einstein-like mess. He laughed again.
...
Lister St John sat in the dressing room of the Ken Kendall Kenetics Show (‘the show where sparks fly!’) at Network Seven. ‘Bastard,’ Lister St John thought. He’d won three elections for Fitzwilliams. The Prime Minister owed him big, yet he had refused to pay out his contract. For that, Lister snorted, Fitzwilliams would pay dearly.
Ken Kendall was one of those photogenic, lightweight hosts current affairs shows like. The Ken Doll, as Lister sometimes called him, thought of himself as the one who asked the tough questions. Lister would have no trouble controlling the interview.
He would disclose his revelations reluctantly for Kendall. Yes, the Prime Minister can be a petty man, he would admit. He’d reveal how shocked he’d been when Fitzwilliams said Russ Langdon getting his leg blown off was the best thing Langdon had ever done for the Liberal Party. Fitzwilliams hadn’t actually said that; Lister had—but Fitzwilliams hadn’t told him he was out of line for making the comment. Lister would speak of the chaos in the PM’s team and how Fitzwilliams had let that psycho Russian bitch, Olga O’Rourke, assault him.
Bitch. Lister stopped at the word. Shows like Kendall’s liked a bit of foul language—it made them think they were edgy—but they didn’t like the language to be too uncouth. He could say, ‘At times, I thought Fitzwilliams was off with the fucking fairies,’ but he couldn’t say, ‘Fitzwilliams is a fucking fuckhead who should get fucked,’ even though that was certainly true. Lister recalled his ‘fucking Garry Kasparov’ quip followed by that psycho Olga launching herself at his throat. Fitzwilliams had watched approvingly, he seethed. ‘I resigned from the Liberal campaign team, Ken,’ he tried saying aloud, testing a few light-hearted descriptors, ‘because Fitzwilliams’ team were fucking off the wall … fucking loose cannons … a fucking battery of loose fucking cannons.’ Was that last one perhaps a bit too much? A knock at the dressing room door interrupted further deliberation.
He opened the door and immediately took a defensive step backwards. ‘What do you want?’ he snarled, holding back the ‘you Russian bitch’.
Senator Olga O’Rourke smiled.‘I understand you’re disappointed that we didn’t pay out what remained of your contract, Lister, but—’ she raised her eyebrows at him ‘—you were the one who resigned. You can’t really expect to be paid for deserting your post.’
Lister laughed derisively. ‘Is that the best you can do? Plead? You should’ve paid up, Olga.’ He couldn’t be bothered to add an insulting elaboration. ‘In a few minutes, I’m going out there to tell all those tales you and Fitzwilliams would rather not have told.’
Olga gave him a school teacher-like look of disappointment. ‘Lister, when you tell tales, it’s difficult to predict where they’ll end, but also difficult to know where they’ll begin.’
Lister furrowed his brow. ‘What’s that? Some kind of threat? Who are you to advise me on what stories to tell?’ His mind searched for something she might find offensive. ‘Fee-a-door Dos-toy-bloody-ev-ski?’ he mocked, banging on a heavy ocker accent to mutilate the name. ‘I bet you’d like me to forget the time you tried to strangle me,’ he sneered.
Olga shook her head. ‘I came to remind you that being reasonable might be your best option in the circumstances.’
‘Yeah,’ he drawled, ‘I’ll bear it in mind. Now if you don’t mind, could you fuck off?’ He shut the door in her face.
God, she made him mad. That composed cunning she always affected. She was just Fitzwilliams’ trained rat, doing his dirty work, and yet she always treated Lister as if he was a lowlife. He stopped himself. She’d wanted to distract him, rattle him. He had to stay focused. He’d promised Kendall an exclusive, the insider’s story, and he would deliver. ‘A fucking battery of loose cannons,’ he said aloud.
The show’s runner came to take him to the edge of the studio set where guests wait to be introduced. He could hear the voice of the previous guest being interviewed.
‘Yes, I have met your prime minister,’ he heard an American accent say. ‘I told him I thank … chhlkk … was appreciative that the Australian government was kind enough to let me visit this fine country of yours given my, er, chequered past.’
Lister St John froze.
‘And no, we did not discuss the election, but while I don’t wish to intrude on Australian politics, I do wish him well. Prime Minister Fitzwilliams has been a good friend of America.’
There was no mistaking that voice. Lister St John’s mind was racing but, unfortunately, only around in circles. How the fuck had psycho Senator Bolen got into the country and how the fuck was it that he was going to be sitting right next to him on the fucking Ken Kendall fucking Kenetics Show? There was no time to think. Fuck!
‘You’re on,’ the runner said. ‘He introduced you.’
Lister St John didn’t move.
‘Get on!’ the runner hissed. He gave Lister a shove.
Lister made his way to the designated seat. Ken Kendall asked Lister his first question but Lister didn’t catch it. Senator Bolen gave Lister a wink.
...
Prime Minister Fitzwilliams finished watching the clip. The look of stark terror on Lister St John’s face every time Senator Bolen spoke was hilarious. His ex-campaign manager had sussed the situation instantly. If Lister told tales, Fitzwilliams had Senator Bolen on the spot ready to do a bit of reminiscing—career-ending reminiscing in Lister’s case. Whatever stories Lister had planned to tell, he shelved them all, deciding, as his emergency fallback position, to opt for the folksy, ex-campaign-manager, long-years-together-with-the-Prime-Minister, amusing-stories-to-tell schtick. He was hopeless at such a style.
The self-important Ken Kendall was almost as amusing to watch. Kendall had been promised meat by Lister and was being served pap. You could see his anger as the probes he made for the promised revelations disappeared in the goop of Lister’s tepid anecdotes. Olga had reported to Fitzwilliams that the furious producer of the show had vowed afterwards that Lister would never appear on Network Seven again. The Lister St Johns of the world often had a lucrative sideline in being ‘pundits’ for the networks when they couldn’t find any proper work to do. It
looked like Lister might have derailed that future gravy train as well.
For the first time in the campaign, Fitzwilliams tasted triumph. Granted it was against his own ex-campaign manager, not Labor or the Luddites. It was a splendid triumph though and, of all his opponents, against the one who deserved it most.
He would have watched it again had Russ Langdon and Georgia Lambert not entered the room along with the bodyguard duo of Quentin and Leon. Did he really need bodyguards in his office? Who were they protecting him from? Langdon?
Georgia Lambert turned on the big screen in the room. ‘An interesting development, Prime Minister.’
On the screen appeared Roslyn Stanfield in her AFL outfit on an oval somewhere. Stanfield really put her boot into the kick that followed, the upward thrust of her leg lifting her completely into the air. The kick was not well aimed though, drifting off to the left. The goal umpire tapped the post several times and reluctantly signalled ‘behind’.
‘Definitely a behind,’ Langdon observed.
‘Whether it was a goal or a behind isn’t what’s important,’ Georgia cut in.‘Look at Roslyn Stanfield,’ she instructed. The Labor leader gave a good-natured you-can’t-kick-them-all shrug. Her smile was tight—very tight, more like a grimace. Georgia moved the clip back to just before the kick. ‘Don’t follow the ball this time,’ she instructed. ‘Watch her face.’
Stanfield did her run-up and put her full force into the kick. As the camera left her to follow the ball, her face was momentarily a mask of pain.
‘She’s done her hamstring,’ Leon diagnosed.
Olga O’Rourke entered the room quietly. Fitzwilliams’ bodyguards were occupied with the leg injury of the Labor leader on the screen and appeared not to have noticed her arrival. It was fortunate that Olga wasn’t a heavily armed terrorist, Fitzwilliams thought.
‘That was three days ago,’ Georgia informed them. ‘Since then, Stanfield has tried seven more of her Campaign Kicks, as she calls them.’ Georgia chuckled, slightly gruesomely Fitzwilliams thought. ‘One goal, five behinds and one boundary. You should have seen the face of the umpire who had to wave the boundary call.’
‘She’s playing injured!’ Langdon cackled, but quickly collected himself. Playing injured was the sort of thing you did in the AFL code. Respect should be shown.
‘Five behinds and a boundary. Labor will be pulling Stanfield off that field pretty quick smart,’ Georgia predicted. ‘With two weeks until the election, she won’t be putting that particular boot into us again.’
Georgia’s tone turned grim. ‘To less happy news: eighty-three per cent of voters are now claiming to be supporting us, up five per cent from before Easter. The situation is so confused. Baxter Lockwood reports that some of our most loyal voters are now telling pollsters they’re voting Labor.’
‘Why on Earth would they do that?’ Fitzwilliams asked.
‘Because telling a pollster you’re voting Liberal has become tantamount to supporting the Luddite Lie. We’re flying blind, Prime Minister,’ Georgia told him bluntly. ‘I now believe everything rests on the leaders’ debate. I’m confident that you can handle Roslyn Stanfield on Sunday. However, I’m increasingly concerned the Luddite is the greater danger.’
Liberal candidates had already tangled with Luddites at local Meet the Candidate nights and the Luddites had been getting the better of them. Luddite candidates tended to be smart and well-informed—qualities, Fitzwilliams admitted, that left half his caucus badly outgunned. He’d asked (ordered, actually) certain of his less-gifted candidates to avoid Meet the Candidate nights altogether. They were getting clobbered out there.
The Luddites were unpredictable opponents. In the middle of a debate, Luddite candidates could spring some complex major reform to the business-as-usual structures of government. Put on the spot, it was hard for a government MP to find the necessary holes in Luddite proposals. And because the Luddite candidates were independent of each other and didn’t campaign on the same things, the central campaign team couldn’t pass on clear instructions to their MPs on how best to counterattack Luddite ideas.
Georgia Lambert levelled her eyes on the Prime Minister. ‘The Ned Ludd you’re up against in the debate is the candidate we first saw, the one who called the election and told people to lie to pollsters.’
Fitzwilliams closed his eyes at the memory of the day: the off-script scrambling, the impromptu tennis match, the storm, Langdon’s fall off the stage, being sealed inside the Stadlet. That had been the opening salvo of the Luddites, and in the weeks since, Fitzwilliams hadn’t managed a single decent shot back at them. In military terms—and elections lent themselves to such terms—Luddite skirmishers had been harassing his troops relentlessly and Fitzwilliams had let those troops down.
‘This Ned Ludd has campaigned locally on bicycle rights,’ Georgia reported. ‘She’s the head of an organisation called Bicyclism Australia.’
That, at least, Fitzwilliams found reassuring. A cycling activist was probably just a greenie campaigning for the Luddites because the Australian Greens were in receivership. Fitzwilliams knew he could handle Greens. For all their irritating carping, Fitzwilliams missed having the Greens around this time. The Greens were always easily ridiculed, while their pedantic, ‘principled’ stances made Labor’s core constituency uneasy. Besides that, when you were tired—and you did get really tired during a campaign—you could drop all the issues and just have a go at the Australian Greens as ‘leftie latte drinkers’, ‘chardonnay socialists’. When you were so fatigued you couldn’t think straight, let alone recall your party’s policy on tree-plantation subsidies, you could simply dismiss the whole braying lot of the Australian Greens for eating mung beans.
‘I would caution against presuming that Ned Ludd will debate you on cycling issues, Prime Minister,’ his campaign manager warned as if reading his thoughts. ‘The only thing I predict with certainty is that she’s going to hit you with something we can’t predict.’ Georgia Lambert was no longer even making a pretence of hiding her disquiet.
‘What do you recommend then?’
‘Normally, before a leaders’ debate, I’d recommend using Saturday and Sunday to prepare. Rehearse your policy explanations, do practice drills.’ She folded her arms. ‘I’d do none of that this weekend.’ Georgia sighed. ‘Stick with the strategy of hitting them in the four areas we discussed before.’ These were positions advocated by four different Luddite candidates that the firm of Baxter Lockwood indicated would be most unpopular with the electorate. ‘Other than that …’ Georgia was clearly thinking it out as she went along, ‘you’re going to have to improvise against them. Let’s get you some improv theatre coaching.’
Fitzwilliams groaned softly, having once sat through a whole evening of puerile improv theatre. His government could sponsor some pretty damn stupid things through the Arts Council, and the Improv Theatre National Championships had been a painful three-hour example.
‘As you’ll need to be in Canberra this weekend for the debate,’ Russ Langdon piped up, ‘why not campaign in Eden-Monaro? Eden-Monaro is the bellwether electorate. Since 1972, it has unfailingly elected an MP from the party that wins the election.’
‘No, it hasn’t,’ Fitzwilliams corrected him. ‘It went to the opposition in the 2016 election.’
‘That one doesn’t count,’ Langdon replied. ‘The point is everyone still thinks of Eden-Monaro as the bellwether seat.’
‘Campaign in Eden-Monaro because everyone thinks it’s a bellwether seat even though it isn’t?’ Fitzwilliams asked.
‘You’re missing the point, Prime Minister,’ Langdon replied. Fitzwilliams remarked yet again the degree to which Langdon had changed during this election. Two months ago, he couldn’t have imagined Langdon telling him he misunderstood anything. ‘We stage a huge rally in Eden-Monaro this weekend,’ Langdon proposed. ‘Bus in supporters if needed. Make the nation believe we’re strong in Eden-Monaro. For years voters have been told that Eden-Monaro will elect the p
arty that wins the election and it does … usually. Look strong in Eden-Monaro and we will look like the party on the road to victory.’
Early in the election, Fitzwilliams had hoped to claim underdog status, traditionally a favoured campaign position. After all the setbacks of the campaign, he’d become alarmed that the Liberal–National Coalition might actually have become the underdog. He agreed they needed to do something. ‘How are we travelling in Eden-Monaro?’ he asked Georgia.
She consulted her Gargantuan. ‘Worse than the national average, Prime Minister. Eighty-eight per cent say they intend to vote for us. Baxter Lockwood had an interesting finding a few years back as to Eden-Monaro, a throwaway question at the end of a survey that asked Australians to define the word “bellwether”. Sixty-two per cent of respondents said, “Errrr,” but the other thirty-eight per cent replied, “Eden-Monaro.” The only time people hear the word is during federal election campaigns and always in association with that electorate. No one knows where the word comes from.’
‘Medieval English,’ Olga spoke up. ‘A bell tied to a ram to lead a flock. Wether was a word for ram.’ As everyone in the room stared at her, she presumed they wanted her opinion. ‘I agree with Russell: campaign in Eden-Monaro,’ she recommended.
‘Book the largest hall in Eden-Monaro,’ Fitzwilliams ordered. ‘Round up the usual suspects,’ he told Georgia, meaning the party faithful, the kind of people who would applaud even if he read the text of Finnegans Wake at them—so long as there were free sandwiches afterwards. ‘We’ll win Eden-Monaro this weekend or, if nothing else, make the nation think we’re going to win Eden-Monaro.’ He savoured his sudden return to decisiveness.
‘I have some good news,’ Olga announced. ‘Lister St John cancelled his interview for tonight and boarded a plane to London this morning. So long as former Senator Bolen remains with us in Australia, we’re unlikely to see Lister back.’
Fitzwilliams clenched a fist with satisfaction. One enemy fled. Another hamstrung. It was time—time long overdue, Fitzwilliams determined—to take on the Luddites.