2028

by Ken Saunders

  ‘Helped put,’ Jiang corrected modestly.

  ‘And Jiang wrote the “Transylvania paraphernalia” program!’ Sam added.

  ‘I’ve been a Luddite a long time,’ Jiang informed Amy. ‘I only did the work for you as a sideline.’

  Amy was flabbergasted. Olivia, the woman Jiang had introduced, reached over and gave her a hug. ‘What was that for?’ Amy asked, somewhat bewildered by the embrace.

  ‘I know what it’s like to employ Jiang,’ Olivia replied.

  ‘Transylvania paraphernalia?’ Renard asked. ‘That’s what Kate had to say on the radio. I never understood what that was about.’

  Renard didn’t hear the answer. Another roar engulfed the room. Everyone in Low Expectations was jumping about in an explosion of hugging and kissing. Across the screen was written:

  Elected—Ned Ludd—Sydney

  Luddite Party of Australia—Gain

  ‘Elected!’ bellowed Kate. ‘We did it!’

  ‘One term only,’ Renard declared, pointing a finger at Kate. ‘You’re the candidate next election. You can run my MP’s office until then …’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Are you drinking beer?’ he accused.

  The voice on the television announced: ‘We’re going live outside the Sydney electorate headquarters of the Luddite Party …’

  ‘Headquarters?’ Old Ned asked. ‘Does he mean here?’

  ‘… to talk to a spokesperson for the Luddites there.’

  Old Ned looked around. ‘Who’s this spokesperson? We’re all inside.’

  The screen switched to outside Low Expectations. A scruffy-looking man wiped his hands on his apron and intoned: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness …’

  ‘It’s my boss!’ Kate cried. The owner of Low Expectations was being broadcast by drones on national television.

  ‘Get out there,’ Old Ned coughed at Renard, ‘before he recites the whole bloody first chapter at them!’

  ...

  The Luddites had pulled ahead significantly, elected or leading in fifty-seven seats, with the Liberal–National Coalition on forty-one and Labor thirty-seven. The Governor-General would almost certainly be obliged to give the Luddites the first chance to form a minority government.

  ‘Fucking hell!’ Jesse declared.

  ‘Yeah!’ Gunnar agreed. ‘Crazy stuff!’

  ‘No, I meant fucking hell—’ Jesse pointed excitedly ‘—as in, fucking hell, look who just came into the pub.’

  Ned Ludd … the Ned Ludd: Nude Ned, Bicycle Ned, Debater Ned, Dragonbreath Posters Ned had just run into the pub with three others, all of them laughing.

  Both men drew their cameras with the speed of gunslingers.

  ...

  Was it a workable minority government? Talking heads belaboured the point for thirty minutes while the numbers firmed. Luddite sixty-seven, Liberal forty-seven, Labor forty-three, Independent one. Fitzwilliams’ cabinet had been all but obliterated. He couldn’t continue as leader, but Fitzwilliams would have to wait for now; it was Roslyn Stanfield’s moment to face the camera.

  The entry of the defeated leader was traditionally one of the set pieces of election night. The cameras track backwards as the leader moves through the parting crowd, smiling bravely, stopping for a word here and there with a member of the faithful, the audience applauding relentlessly while the more ambitious among them contemplate the personal implications should the leader resign.

  Network Seven’s Roving Roboter had a good line on Stanfield.

  ‘Fuckers!’ Allison heard her chief technician hiss. Network Nine had deliberately rolled their Roboter to block their view again. ‘I’ve had it with them,’ the technician snarled. ‘Two can play that game!’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Allison asked.

  The technician threw his Roboter’s control throttle forward. ‘Ramming speed, Captain!’ he shouted.

  ...

  ‘What on earth was that?’ Fitzwilliams gaped at the image on the television screen.

  Roslyn Stanfield was sprawled on the floor, clutching her knee, what looked like a giant traffic cone bearing Network Nine’s logo on top of her. Her stunned bodyguards lifted the thing off her and pushed another machine away. Stanfield was helped to her feet but her left leg gave way when she tried to put weight on it.

  ‘ACL I’d say, from the way she’s holding her leg,’ Leon assessed. ‘Anterior cruciate ligament,’ he added for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the abbreviation.

  ‘You’re uncommonly well informed on injuries,’ Fitzwilliams observed. ‘Leon diagnosed Stanfield’s hamstring pull just from watching it on YouTube,’ he told Beatrice beside him.

  ‘Cruciate?’ Beatrice commented. ‘Isn’t that one of the unforgiveable curses in Harry Potter?’

  ‘I think you’ll find that was the Cruciatus Curse, ma’am,’ Leon replied.

  Beatrice turned to Fitzwilliams. ‘I was making a joke, but it’s reassuring that your bodyguards are ready for anything, even Lord Voldemort.’

  On-screen, Stanfield threw an arm over each of her bodyguards and used them like crutches to make her way to the stage. Fitzwilliams shook his head. ‘Stanfield and Langdon ought to form a party together,’ he suggested. ‘The Workers’ Comp Party.’

  Stanfield proceeded to deliver what Fitzwilliams considered to be one of the bravest and most mundane speeches he’d ever heard. Brave because she was clearly in deep pain. Mundane because her gritty resilience summoned only cliché after cliché. She accepted the people’s verdict, she thanked the tireless effort of the Labor volunteers who’d campaigned, the mums and dads, the young, the retired, the nurses, the single parents, the … You’d have thought the whole nation had risen as one to pass out Labor Party brochures. She would fight to defend Labor’s values. This was the party of Curtin, Chifley and Whitlam. This was the party that said the same thing every time it was defeated, Fitzwilliams thought.

  With Stanfield done, it would be Fitzwilliams’ turn next. He’d make the short trip to the hall where the Liberal faithful were waiting. The ten-minute journey would give the commentators back in their studios time to dissect Stanfield’s speech. Stanfield hadn’t resigned, so she still must be hoping to cling to the leadership. That option wasn’t open to Fitzwilliams; too many Liberal and National seats had been lost tonight.

  Fitzwilliams rose to his feet. ‘Time to do it,’ he announced. He didn’t want his speech to be trite like Stanfield’s. He thought of his improv coach Paul’s advice. ‘Don’t overthink it. Go with what feels right in the moment.’ He’d do that, only this time he’d make sure not to drop the f-bomb.

  ‘Prime Minister.’ Quentin caught his attention. ‘If one of those robot things comes within five metres of you, I’ll take a cricket bat to it,’ he vowed.

  ‘You don’t carry a cricket bat, Quentin.’

  ‘You’re right.’ He drew a small prod from his jacket. ‘I wonder what a taser would do to their internal electronics.’

  Though Fitzwilliams planned to go improv, he nevertheless performed the Arrival of the Leader as per the traditional script. He did the walk through the crowd, stopping for a word here and there, smiling, acknowledging the applause. The Roving Roboters, clearly in the doghouse, were conspicuously inert. He accepted the obligatory hugs from those on the podium.

  The audience quietened. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘talk about a kick in the teeth.’ He hoped Paul his improv coach was watching. Beatrice, to his left, was just warming up her adoring look. ‘My thanks to the people of Dobell for re-electing me, but as to the question posed to me on the campaign trail—by The Clash, no less—the answer would have to be: I should go.’

  Normally, when a defeated leader resigned, a few of the faithful were obliged to call out, ‘No! No!’ but Fitzwilliams’ jocular tone had puzzled them. ‘I’m stepping down as your leader.’ Fitzwilliams scanned the crowd. ‘But I’ll stay on as Member for Dobell because … well, I think the next parliament m
ight be a very interesting place after the result tonight.’

  There was a smattering of applause, but it seemed uncertain.

  ‘The Luddites certainly put the boots to us tonight,’ he summed up. ‘I feel like I’ve been in a ruck and maul with the All Blacks.’

  A small part of the audience laughed, hoping this was what was expected of them.

  ‘They’re going to think you’ve been drinking,’ Beatrice managed through the clench of her smile. There was a tremor at the corners of her lips. She was suppressing laughter.

  ‘We lost a few excellent MPs tonight,’ he told the audience, ‘people who made a significant contribution to this nation. And we lost a lot of deadwood too,’ he observed more lightly. ‘I mean, we had enough deadwood to constitute a fire risk. I reckon tonight was a hazard-reduction burn of our cabinet.’

  There was a single guffaw from the crowd. Beatrice, her smile twitching, poked him in the side.

  He rallied some gravitas to his voice. ‘So now, in all probability, we’re the Opposition, the official Opposition. I’m hoping,’ he told them, ‘that that’s a term we won’t use very much from now on. Let’s make ourselves into something else. Let’s be the official Improvers, the official Come-Up-with-a-Better-Idea brigade, the official Are-You-Sure-This-Is-a-Good-Thing-to-Do filter for the government. And if the new government listens and adopts one of those ideas, let’s not go frothing to the media calling it a backflip. Reconsidering something because a different point of view is more convincing is a sensible thing to do. Backflips? I wish I could do an actual backflip. I can’t touch my toes most days.’

  He surveyed the room. The crowd was almost palpably disconcerted. That last bit had been rather tangential. What he’d just said, he realised, was a jumble of what Olga O’Rourke told him yesterday about why she brought the Luddites into being. He hadn’t set out to endorse her ideas. It just seemed to slot into the flow of his speech. ‘My hope, as I leave you tonight, is that we’ll be a party that, instead of scheming to find the quickest route back to power, concentrates its efforts on the sound and just governing of this country. That’s the kind of party I hope we’ll be in the next parliament. Congratulations to Prime Minister Ned Ludd … whoever that may be.’

  It took a moment for the crowd to understand that he had finished. The applause rose to the expected level of heartiness. The Speech of the Losing Leader was still a performance piece and this was what was required of them. The applause had a mixed sound to it—some of it angry clapping, some reluctant, some numb, a tiny bit perhaps genuinely enthusiastic.

  ‘They hated that,’ Beatrice appraised, giving him a wink, ‘but I loved it! It was the right thing to say, Adrian.’

  She was looking at him in admiration. She wasn’t bunging it on. It was sincere and it was, he realised, hopeful. It made Fitzwilliams think that this campaign, including this particular result, had all been worthwhile, might even be good for the nation. ‘I’ve been PM so long,’ he observed at last, ‘virtually everyone calls me Prime Minister. Only you and one other call me Adrian.’

  ‘One other?’ Beatrice asked suspiciously, as if calling him by his first name should be a level of intimacy reserved only for herself.

  ‘Yes, you and the Transport ACT bus ticket machine when it’s shaming fare evaders.’ He gave the Defeated Leader’s overhead wave to the audience and smiled.

  ...

  Although it was a Network Nine Roving Roboter that fell onto the Labor leader, video footage would reveal that Seven had rammed it. Allison Trang and her crew were going to be crucified. ‘They could slate us for this,’ Allison told her team grimly.

  To call ‘slating’ the latest managerial fad was equivalent to describing a Viking’s battle-axe as a fashion accessory. Slating was the disposing of an underperforming or problematic department en masse. If there was a problem in a section, you got rid of the lot of them. No one, regardless of merit or innocence, was spared. The only restraining factor was the so-called Gough Threshold, where the savings brought about by replacing sacked senior staff with junior workers was offset by heavier losses through unfair dismissal claims.

  On the control room screen, Prime Minister Fitzwilliams was speaking.

  ‘We could claim the Roving Roboter malfunctioned,’ someone suggested.

  Allison pressed her lips together and shook her head. ‘Maybe if it was made in Australia, but it’s German manufacture; no one would believe us.’

  ‘What if we took a coffee and spilled it on the controls?’ another proposed. ‘Say it shorted out and the Roboter went wild.’

  It was a preposterous idea but the only one on the table. ‘Anyone got a coffee?’ Allison asked.

  ‘Boss! You’re not going to believe this!’ a technician across the room cried excitedly. ‘I’ve got Jesse Pelletier on the line and he has Ned Ludd! Nude Ned, Bicycle Ned! Ned Ludd! Exclusive!’

  Allison’s arm froze, the coffee cup poised over the Roboter controls. ‘Get the feed direct to our hosts,’ she ordered. ‘Cut to it the instant Fitzwilliams finishes!’ She paused. ‘How much money does Pelletier want?’ Allison asked perceptively. She’d dealt with Jesse Pelletier before.

  ‘Not money. He wants a permanent job for himself and his camera operator. He’s also refusing to throw to the host. He interviews Ned Ludd. No one else.’

  Allison grinned. ‘Agreed. Tell him we agree to everything. Do it,’ she ordered urgently. ‘Get ready to cut to wherever the hell Jesse Pelletier is.’

  The feed from the Melbourne pub came up on the screen. ‘No one’s going to slate us if we deliver a Ned Ludd exclusive,’ Allison vowed to her team. ‘Tomorrow we do a special feature on how our man Jesse Pelletier tracked Ned Ludd down and found the nation’s new prime minister!’

  ‘Pelletier was drinking in a bar,’ the technician explained, ‘and Ned Ludd happened to walk in.’

  ‘We’ll tell it slightly differently. Anyway, that’s tomorrow’s assignment,’ Allison said with a dismissive wave of her hand. The PM had finished. ‘Tell Pelletier he’s on in forty-five seconds. Let the hosts just start blathering their analysis of Fitzwilliams’ speech and then we interrupt them.’ She raised her fist triumphantly. ‘We’ll make Jesse Pelletier a hero of journalism. Let them try and slate us after that!’

  ...

  Jesse Pelletier drew in a breath. National media with quite possibly the Prime Minister elect. Ned Ludd, wearing a t-shirt with a penny-farthing bicycle on it, was leaning with her back to the bar, facing the camera. On either side of her were the now-famous-in-their-own-right Veronicae. Prime Minister Ned had an arm slung over the shoulders of each. Ned Ludd told him they’d deliberately escaped the drones trailing them, running through shops and laneways until they had tumbled into this pub. Was this his kind of prime minister or what?

  Gunnar was working the camera, the bodyguard obligingly holding aloft a pool cue with a microphone taped to it to serve as the sound boom. It was a picture of how journalism ought to look. Jesse didn’t even mind that the bartender behind them was photo-bombing the shot.

  Gunnar counted him in with his fingers and he was on.

  ‘This is Jesse Pelletier, Network Seven reporter coming to you live from Melbourne, and with me is the person who may well be the next prime minister of Australia, Ned Ludd …’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Considering he had just stepped down as leader, it struck Fitzwilliams that there was an inordinate amount of politics that needed doing the morning after the election. His first visitor was Russ Langdon, who’d come to tell Fitzwilliams he planned to nominate for the Liberal Party leadership. A few months earlier, Fitzwilliams would have been incredulous at the idea, but Langdon had displayed qualities during the election that Fitzwilliams never suspected were there. Langdon was certainly a better man than Damian bloody Boswell to rebuild the party. As for any others, Alan Chandos wouldn’t want the leadership and Donna Hargreaves didn’t have the numbers. Langdon was clearly the best choice. Fitzwilliams felt he cou
ld offer his support unreservedly to his Minister for Security and Freedom.

  ‘Thank you, Adrian,’ Langdon said. ‘That means a lot to me.’

  Fitzwilliams blinked at Langdon’s premature dropping of ‘Prime Minister’—he was still technically PM until a new one was sworn in—but, he reflected, he might as well get used to it. ‘You shouldn’t thank me,’ he joked. ‘I’m the one who has left you a party holding only forty-seven seats.’ Fitzwilliams detected a slight flick of Langdon’s eyebrows at the comment. Was forty-seven yet another one of Langdon’s blasted prime numbers?

  Next in the office were his Treasurer and Minister for Health and Ageing. If he’d been surprised by Langdon’s decision, he was astounded by what they had to tell him. The Luddites were offering Chandos and Hargreaves the chance to keep their cabinet posts. ‘You have no authorisation to enter into a coalition with the Luddites,’ Fitzwilliams informed them both bluntly.

  ‘They aren’t asking for a coalition, Adrian,’ Hargreaves said. ‘They’re just asking us—and we intend to accept.’

  ‘They’ve offered Labor four cabinet posts,’ Chandos added. ‘All the really capable ones from Labor. At the risk of being immodest, Adrian, they appear to be picking the best brains in parliament. The Luddites are calling it the Conglomerate Cabinet.’

  Everyone, it appeared to Fitzwilliams, must have been chomping at the bit to call him by his first name. It irked him that Labor, with four fewer seats, was being offered more cabinet positions than the Liberals, but the Luddites already had Olga onside. Hargreaves and Chandos were really the only other two worth having, he admitted. The Luddites knew what they were doing.

  ‘You’re not going to start wearing a celery stick I hope,’ Fitzwilliams said, and even Donna laughed.

  Around eleven, he received the totally improbable phone call he knew was coming. It was Roslyn Stanfield.

  ‘How’s the knee?’ Fitzwilliams asked straight away. ‘Leon thinks it’s your ACL.’