Never a True Word

by Michael McGuire

  Wakefield Press

  Award-winning journalist Michael McGuire has worked for more than twenty years at the Australian in Sydney, and the Adelaide Advertiser where he is now senior writer. He has also dabbled in state and federal politics. Michael is married to Rachel and they have two children, Tom and Ruby. Never a True Word is his first novel.

  Wakefield Press

  16 Rose Street

  Mile End

  South Australia 5031

  www.wakefieldpress.com.au

  First published 2017

  This edition published 2017

  Copyright © Michael McGuire, 2017

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  Cover designed by Liz Nicholson, designBITE

  Edited by Julia Beaven, Wakefield Press

  Ebook conversion by Clinton Ellicott, Wakefield Press

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: McGuire, Michael, 1971– , author.

  Title: Never a true word / Michael McGuire.

  ISBN: 978 1 74305 484 0 (ebook: epub).

  Subjects:

  Political consultants—Fiction.

  Journalists in government—Fiction.

  Political corruption—Fiction.

  For Rachel

  1

  As soon as I step into the shower the phone rings. It’s one of life’s inevitabilities. This is a job where the phone is never far from my grasp. It’s my eleventh digit or second brain. With a sigh I turn off the water, reach over to the handbasin and grab the damned implement resting between a tube of toothpaste and a razor. I wonder if there is a proven association between stepping into the shower and mobiles bleating.

  As expected it’s the city’s number-one radio prick who has used his pudgy little fingers to press the numbers that will bring his voice to my ear. A man who inflicts his loud and often nonsensical opinions on the public each day and who considers each and every utterance to be a veritable nugget of truth. A man who has confected outrage down to such an art it could be hung in the Louvre. In other words, your bog-standard radio shock jock. Every city has one these days and this bloke is ours. It pains me more than I can say that I have to be civil to this enormous fuckwit.

  ‘Jack, it’s Andrew Caldicott,’ he says in that familiar deep and velvet baritone that often makes me think he missed his true calling as the bloke who does voiceovers for Hollywood films. ‘Sorry to disturb you so early.’ This is a lie. You can tell by his tone that it’s the highlight of his week, he takes pleasure in torturing innocent press secs. It comes from his innate sense that as a journo and, worse, a media star, he is somehow morally and intellectually superior to a low-rent government spinner such as myself.

  Anyway, it’s 7.15, not that early. I am up and conscious, so that’s a start. My personal best in the rudely awakened-from-sleep-stakes was 5.40 am by an idiot radio reporter who thought I would be rousting my famously grumpy, occasionally hung-over, Minister of the Crown, the Honourable Ray Sloan, from his slumber in time for a quote for the 6 am news. Oh, how I laughed.

  But this is the life. The glamorous world of the hired spin doctor. Standing naked under a leaking tap speaking to a bloke whose ego is so big I’m surprised there’s still room for me in the shower. A bloke who, if he was half as good as he thinks he is, would have won three Pulitzers, eight Walkleys, an Oscar, a Grammy and the Stawell Gift by now.

  And it’s all fuelled by the biggest case of small-man syndrome I have ever come across. Here’s another idea for a scientific study. Someone should examine the average height of the nation’s more bombastic radio presenters. I reckon to a man (and there’s not many women) they are all midgets. And not just physically. Still, I’m paid to try and keep these blokes on side to whatever small degree is possible. I have to think though, at this point in my life, acting school would have been a more useful preparation for this job than a journalism degree.

  ‘Hey, no problem, Caldy—(beautiful use of the familiar there, we’re old mates and I want him to know I am the friendly face of government)—I was expecting to hear from you this morning.’ (Because you are so predictable.) Of course, I say all this with a forced cheerfulness that the cast of Friends would have stopped to admire.

  ‘Well, mate, I need to speak to your boss this morning after eight,’ he says. Between eight and nine is the golden hour on his radio show. It’s when the ratings are highest, it’s when the big issues are rolled out, it’s when he delights in bringing on politicians with the express intention of fucking them over.

  ‘About what?’ I enquire, although I know exactly what he is about to say.

  ‘This blow out, mate. The one on the front page of today’s paper.’ (The daily rag is where he nicks most of his ideas from.) ‘What’s going on? What are you hiding?’

  ‘Mate,’ I say. (There’s that word again.) ‘It’s bullshit. It’s not a blowout, the size of the project just changed. It got bigger so of course it’s going to cost more money. Just basic economics really. It’s a good news story, the project got bigger and better. This is a good news story.’ There’s a brief silence. We both know I’m bullshitting him. The only question really is how deep the pile of bullshit is on this fine morning. Today, it’s only about shin height I reckon. Nothing a good pair of gumboots won’t keep out. I’m not lying to him exactly, but neither am I telling the whole truth. But this is the job. Blame the adversarial nature of media-political relations in the digital age. No one trusts anyone. Although this may just be because truth is a rare commodity these days and it’s not just governments and spin doctors who have a propensity to bullshit. This morning’s conversation is fairly typical. In this case Side A (Caldicott) claims something is a disaster and the nasty government is engaged in the biggest cover-up this side of Watergate. While Side B (that’s me) says, ‘No, no, no, you’ve got it all wrong. Black is white, up is down.’ Let me give you an example. The catastrophe I am dealing with this Monday morning is how much money the government is going to spend building a new airport that will be home to the Air Force’s new whiz-bang planes that go very, very fast. See how exciting this world is? As is often the case with these things, our lot had to beat off competition from many other places to win this supposedly grand prize. There was no science, or even particular brilliance, to winning this bid. We just bribed the Federal government with more money and promised to build it a long way from any of their marginal electorates. Especially those ones who could become upset at the thought of screamingly loud airplanes flying overhead for much of the day. Anyway, it turns out the money the government now says it’s spending to build this home for these expensive new toys, doesn’t exactly match the amount mentioned when we announced we had won the contract—with the requisite hoopla, self-congratulation and hyperbole—six months ago. From a media spinner’s point of view this is not necessarily terrible. Projects blow out all the time for any number of reasons. The important issue is to find a path through the usual shock/ horror and emerge essentially undamaged on the other side.

  Today’s attempt at a salvage operation is a bit more complicated though. First I have to deal with the ego mountain of breakfast radio who has missed the story. Like everybody else he had to read it in the paper, but he is particularly pissed today because he had my man on his show Friday morning and there was not a whisper of this yarn. Caldicott even asked him how the project was going and the boss gave him a wholly noncommittal ‘fine’ before launching into his usual spiel about how wonderful it was. It hardly seems necessary to point
out that my man was in full possession of the facts of the matter when he was giving his answer. It just wasn’t, from our point of view, the right time to share. So the newspaper was handed the story first. In the wonderful world of the modern media it doesn’t matter if the story turns out to be right or wrong, up or down, backwards or forwards, what matters is who got it first.

  ‘Sure, fine, let him come on and explain it himself,’ he says. ‘Sounds like crap to me. Sounds like you are dodgying up the numbers to cover your tracks. Sounds like just another case where this government can’t control its spending.’

  ‘Come on, Caldy. There’s nothing to hide here. The project just changed. It was a bit of fine-tuning, it wasn’t even anything to do with us really, the Feds wanted a few more bells and whistles. We had to beef up security a bit. It happens. You know those boys as well as I do. Stop looking for a conspiracy where there isn’t one.’

  ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘But will he come on? I don’t want him ducking my questions. Don’t suddenly find him a last-minute meeting he has to go to.’

  ‘I’ll ring him, but I don’t know what his diary looks like this morning.’

  Again, this is partially accurate. It’s true that I don’t know exactly what my boss’s diary looks like right at this moment, although I could check easily enough as it’s in my phone. However, what I do know is he spent yesterday being wined and dined on the super-yacht of some dodgy property developer who no doubt tried to put the hard word on him about building his latest ugly development out there in the far suburbs. For whatever reason, Sloan loves these guys. And you can tell because he went by himself. No advisers. No witnesses. Just him and a billionaire who has decided there is money to be made somewhere in our fair city and who sees the government as a handbrake on his ambition to make another billion as quickly as possible. Thus, calling the boss at quarter past seven on a Monday morning is not my idea of fun.

  Back in the real world, Caldicott demands an answer from me before eight and hangs up. By this time I have at least wrapped a dressing gown around my nakedness and checked to see if the ringing of the phone and subsequent conversation has wakened Emily and Lily. The first good news of the day is wife and baby still seem fast asleep. I shuffle slowly to the kitchen to make the call to the boss. We are still in the dog days of winter and the tiles on the kitchen floor carry the chill of the night. I’m wishing I put socks on to protect my exposed toes. But the chance of frostbite is the least of my worries. There’s a fear in my stomach and a heaviness in my legs as I look for small ways to delay the inevitable phone call to Sloan, but I also know the later I call him the worse it will ultimately turn out. It’s a delicate balancing act. If I call too early he will be grumpy with me for waking him up, if I leave it too long he will complain that I haven’t given him enough warning before he has to go on radio.

  If I leave it even longer no doubt I will cop an earful from Caldicott and the usual accusations that the government, and my boss, are scared of his hard-hitting questions. At least that’s what he will tell his listeners. Not that I care greatly about the possibility that Caldicott will give me a going-over. When it comes to their relative capacities to instil fear in my gut and hatred in my heart, Ray Sloan is the clear winner.

  Stalling, I flick through the already read newspaper. The footy stats from yesterday’s game suddenly seem terrifically important and deserving of my complete attention. I contemplate having more toast and jam, decide to iron my shirt first, and promise myself I will definitely call at 7.30.

  At 7.35 I flick through my contact list and find the name Ray Sloan. It goes to message bank. I leave a message asking for a call back. The fear builds a little more. Not getting Sloan is worse than getting him. It sets off a whole new round of questions. Will he call back? How long can I wait before I can call him back again? How long can I hold off that dickhead Caldicott? The best thing to do in this situation is share the pain. To bring someone else into the circle of suffering.

  Time to call Leo Roberts—chief of staff. I know there is nothing he can do to help. I know what advice he’ll offer but sometimes you just need a little reassurance. A little hand-holding if you will. Roberts is a good bloke. In his early thirties, so younger than me by a few years, he is affable, smart and hard to unsettle. He also has a withering sense of disgust and disappointment in Sloan. ‘Fuck me, I’m more babysitter than chief of staff to this knobhead’, is one of his more frequent laments. Leo answers the phone. He knows it’s me from the screen of his mobile and his tone is appropriately weary and wary for this hour of the day. He knows I don’t call before eight unless there is a major disaster looming or the boss has gone walkabout. Today there is neither really, but I am a little edgier than normal. Roberts answers: ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Hi, yep, Caldicott wants to talk to Ray about the defence stuff in the paper today.’

  ‘Nothing else?’ Roberts is paranoid, as is everyone who works in politics, that at any given moment you are about to be blindsided by something big. Something unforeseeable.

  ‘No,’ I reply. ‘Not as far as I know anyway.’

  ‘Well, that’s fine then. He’s on solid ground. Briefing went in his bag last night. Shouldn’t be too hard. We more or less wrote the story in the paper.’ By which Leo means that is was us who planted the story. Or ‘dropped’ it to them, in the modern parlance. We handed it to the paper’s chief political reporter, a bloke who is solid and reliable and won’t fuck us over unless we really deserve it. The story ended up on the front page but it’s more or less how I expected it to turn out. In fact, let’s be honest, it could have been a whole lot worse. The government is throwing a bundle more money at a project already thought to be overly expensive and of limited benefit by the many experts and critics who populate our media and universities.

  The headline reads: ‘Sloan Slings Another $100 million at Air Force Project.’ First par: ‘Treasurer Ray Sloan has committed a further $100 million to the state’s largest defence project, claiming the new funding will bring more jobs and investment.’

  Like I said, as with many things in politics, this is a partial truth. The whole truth in politics is reserved for those who are pure of heart and have nothing to hide—and there’s not many in any government who can make that claim. Certainly not us. Having said that, the truth is we don’t lie. Well, not absolutely. The media likes to see truth in binary terms. You are lying or you’re not. You’re telling the truth or you’re not. This is understandable, it makes their job a lot easier and it makes it simpler to write a story. But truth is rarely unqualified. That’s where I step in. My job is to mix the black with the white to find the grey. To soften the hard edges of the perceived (by the media) truth. I take any horrible, terrible message the government knows it ultimately can’t control, dig for whatever element of truth I can find and hold it up as the glittering absolute. What I have become is a miner for the truth. People think calling me a spin doctor is some kind of insult. And in some ways it is. But it undersells what I do. In my own mind am I am less spin doctor and more spin professorial fellow. For example. There was the occasion we managed to push out the story that a multinational oil company was starting the clean-up process of a refinery that it had not used for more than a decade. All that time it just sat there rusting quietly in the ocean breezes. It was an eyesore. It was a public relations disaster for the government in a marginal seat. Everyone could see said oil company was playing the government for fools by pretending there was a chance that one day it would start the bloody thing working again. There was much toing and froing. My man would make regular public pronouncements about how he was taking it up to this nasty company. That he was fighting for the best interests of the state and wouldn’t be backing down no matter how big the oil company was or how deep its pockets were. It was, after all, a matter of principle. And he was right. It was a fight worth having. But, the truth was for the oil company we were, at best, a minor nuisance. Us against a company that ranked as the nineteenth biggest
economy in the world. If we cracked the top 1000 I would be stunned. So we were a gnat gnawing at the elephant’s back leg. Even so, Sloan was out there as often as he could manage telling everyone they ‘wouldn’t get away with it’. And why not? It was easy politics. It was one of those rare occasions when the government was having a battle with an entity even less popular than itself.

  Until one day the oil company surprised us by saying they had contracted a local university to start some preliminary work looking at the best way to clean up the site. That was all we needed. The press release was headlined ‘Refinery Clean-up Starts’. We called a press conference to say we had won the day and how the evil multinational had backed down in the face of our relentless campaigning. To make sure we controlled the story we held the press conference in the government’s offices. We didn’t invite the oil company or any of the boffins from the university who may have been able to cast doubt on how genuine this clean-up was going to be. If the whole truth was to be told I didn’t know myself. The secrecy of the oil company worked in our favour as they weren’t too forthcoming with obvious details such as how long it would take or how much it would cost. The main issue, from my point of view, was that they said it was happening. The media duly reported the story, albeit with a level of skepticism, but I didn’t care about that. The story died that day and no more was ever heard about it. It was only later I discovered that on the 180-hectare site, the work being done on the clean-up was limited to a square ten metres by ten metres, and even that was only experimental work to see if it was even possible to repair the area at all. Still, what did I care? If the political problem was gone then the actual problem was gone as well.

  That’s my job then. To shove that little nugget of truth out there as a distraction, at the very least, or the entire story if you’re extraordinarily lucky. Or if the journalist is extraordinarily stupid. Which happens more often than you think it would. Or should. And given the short attention span of the media and its desire to cover everything in apocalyptic ‘scandal’ terms, once you are seen to solve one problem the hungry beast immediately goes looking for the next disaster. In the process it forgets just how ‘important’ and ‘serious’ and ‘damaging’ the previous story had been.