Never a True Word

by Michael McGuire

  2

  This is what happened with our lovely new airport. The first we heard there was a problem was two weeks ago when Leo suddenly received a briefing paper from Treasury saying the project was running $100 million over budget. ‘Ah, fuck,’ I heard coming through the open door that separates our two offices.

  ‘Jack, get Harry and Bob and get in here.’ That’s a bad sign as well. There are probably about forty people working in this office, doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things. Every day I come across a person I would swear I have never seen before. But when Leo issues the order for the four of us to convene, it’s rarely for good news. Drinks on Friday afternoon excepted. Political offices are the oddest of environments. They give rise to delusions of grandeur you won’t find in your ordinary work setting. Even working in the ego pit that is the newsroom of your average daily metropolitan newspaper has nothing on politics. I have seen the most mild-mannered, self-effacing people enter the world of politics and quickly become entranced by the power and the influence. Politics is the only workplace where a half-smart twenty-something can issue instructions to a fifty-year-old career public servant and demand to be taken seriously. This being politics, every ministerial office in the government contains at least two or three nutters who reckon the joint would be a lot better off if someone would just listen to them. They rationalise that their genius is overlooked because of jealousy, or they are not in favour with the right power group in the party that particular week. Whatever their shortcomings you can be sure it’s not their fault. Politics: a place full of shiny people with ugly souls.

  I wouldn’t be as bold to claim our office was much different. We are a long way further up the totem pole than most so that gives us a lot more people to look down on. Harry is the youngest of the group. Mid-twenties, terrifyingly smart, neat suits, short hair, a touch of the angelic in his face, well-connected, predicted for greatness within the party. Future premier, according to some. He mixes it all with an easy sociability and an ability to communicate with just about everyone he meets.

  Bob is only about three years older than Harry, but makes it seem about twenty. He’s the fixer in the office. Plays all the hard political games out of public sight. He crunches the numbers, fights the internal enemies and smashes all the right heads. In another era, you can imagine him, a cigar in hand, issuing directions and pronouncements in complete anonymity. Today we just call him a faceless man.

  Then there is Leo. An anomaly in as much as he started in the public service, but was so good at his job he was forgiven for that early faux pas and was accepted as one of their own.

  Me? I’m just a journo who became a bit disillusioned with the world of newspapers. True, there was also the growing fear that the whole industry was about to die a painful, elongated death and I could be booted out of work at any moment. So I decided it was time to see how the other half lived.

  The four of us consider ourselves not only the smartest blokes in this office, but as also the only four blokes in existence who can save this government from itself.

  ‘Right,’ says Leo. ‘This little note just came in from Treasury. The airport thing is $100 million in the hole. It’s a fucking mess.’

  The deal was originally supposed to cost the government around $300 million when we announced it three months ago. So the perpetual headline maker in my brain is flashing the neon headline: ‘Thirty-three per cent cost blowout, thirty-three per cent cost blowout’. In isolation, while not ideal, it was manageable.

  Still, Leo knew when this came out Sloan would be subject to all sorts of ridicule from fuckwits like Caldicott. And our boss is not a man who takes ridicule well. He’s not the modern politician who takes the big hose to the obligatory inflammatory questions from the media, smiles and answers questions he hasn’t been asked and carries out the interview in serenity and peace. For example. A sensible politician would conduct the following sort of interview.

  Q: ‘Tell me, Minister, how drunk were you when you crashed the car?’

  A: ‘This is just another smear campaign by the Opposition. You know they hate cats don’t you? What the Opposition Leader won’t tell you about is his secret plan to dump all the state’s cats in the river.’

  By no measure, though, is my man a sensible politician. Not by current standards anyway. He fires back. He engages. Worse, he wants to win and believes he can. And he is good at it. He is good on his feet and quick of mind. But as any seasoned media observer will tell you, that’s a losing game when the other side always has the last word. When the bloke on the radio can keep talking after you have hung up, when the newspaper can decide how, when and where it wants to run your quotes, when the talking head on the TV news can stare down the barrel of the camera and deliver a verdict on your performance after you have left the stage—it’s a powerful disadvantage for the pollie. In some quarters Sloan is admired for his unwillingness to take a backward step on anything. At all. Ever. He is congratulated in some quarters for his apparent honesty when all around are strangled by political spin. But those people don’t have to work as his press sec.

  Leo looks around to gauge reaction to this little ant’s nest of bad news. Two ‘shits’ and a ‘fuck’ is his answer.

  ‘I take it you haven’t told old Ray?’ asks Harry.

  ‘Not yet, it just fell on my desk.’

  ‘He’ll fucking freak,’ chimes in Bob. There’s a moment’s silence as we all digest this. Really none of us are all that fussed by the budgetary and policy implications of what’s just landed. We can handle that, we’re professionals. The bit that scares the four grown men in this office is how to break the news to the bloke in the office next door.

  ‘Is he in?’ I ask.

  ‘Supposed to be, but not as yet,’ Leo replies.

  ‘So when’s he turning up?’

  ‘Don’t know. He’s already burned one meeting this morning and was his usual arsehole self when I rang to ask when he was coming in.’

  Sloan, as we all know, hates direct questions. Questions that for most normal adults would be handled with a fair degree of courtesy. Simple questions such as: ‘When will you be in the office? Can you make that meeting? Did you read the briefing? Have you made a decision on x, y or z?’

  These are the types of questions that for some reason seem to annoy him. Silence descends again in the office. Then we hear the voice and footsteps of the boss striding down the corridor. Some of the junior staff venture a nervous ‘hello’ to their boss but don’t merit a reply. This is usually a bad sign, although by no means unusual. The four of us look up as he charges past into his office. Leo tries to make eye contact and raises an arm in the hope of attracting attention but we don’t get so much as a glance. He barrels into the office and slams his door.

  ‘Oh, good,’ mutters Leo. ‘Looks like he’s in the right mood for bad news then,’ volunteers Harry. We are stumped. In an ordinary office, I would imagine, someone at this point would knock on his door and say something inane such as ‘You need to know about this’. That person may even be congratulated for bringing the boss’s attention to an issue of some importance in a prompt and forthright manner. One day I hope to work in one of those offices.

  But today, in this office, the locked door is taken as a code. It says: ‘I don’t want to talk to any of you fuckers and if any of you try I’ll rip your head off.’ Standing in front of that door is probably a little like how Frodo Baggins, after his many meanderings through Middle-earth, felt when he stood at the foot of Mount Doom and contemplated whether it was all really worth it. Did he really want to poke Sauron in that all-seeing eye?

  ‘How about a staff meeting?’ offers Bob, with one of his little grins that suggests he knows this is the coward’s way out but in the circumstances it’s the best we can do. The staff meeting is the usual fallback position. Every day has a morning staff meeting scheduled in the diary. Occasionally they actually happen. We talk about the politics of the day, what’s coming up, the diary, invitations,
speeches and appointments. On a good day, when the boss is in an expansive mood, it generally ends up in a multi-faceted discussion about all the dickheads he has to put up with in Cabinet. We then cheer him up with stories of the fuckwits we have to deal with in other ministerial offices. It’s as close as we all come to camaraderie.

  On bad days, it’s hard to get a word or a decision out of him. At some point in the meeting you know something or somebody will annoy him and he will tear into the unfortunate soul. There was the famous day he was so unhappy with a speech that had been prepared for him that he ripped it up in front of the bloke who wrote it while informing him he ‘wouldn’t be reading this shit’.

  To our surprise then, the boss then comes out of his office, cup of coffee in hand, looking surprisingly relaxed. Maybe him and the property developer had bonded.

  ‘What’s up fellas,’ he says in a tone of voice that could almost be described as cheerful. It seems we have misjudged the situation. Sloan plonks himself down in the chair across from Leo. This usually means he’s in a shoot-the-breeze kind of mood. Swap weekend stories, talk about the footy, sledge the local paper. I think it’s when he convinces himself we’re all friends here, all mates in a bigger war. And for the most part we are keen to buy into it.

  There’s a momentary silence. In these kinds of situations we take our cue from our fearless leader Leo. Today, he decides just to go for it. It’s the rip-the-bandaid-off approach, an approach considered ‘high-risk’ in this office.

  ‘You’d better have a look at this,’ says Leo, offering Sloan the briefing paper that Treasury has sent to him. Sloan looks at Leo like he’s just killed his dog then invited him over for a barbecue featuring dog sausages on the menu. He knows instinctively this will be bad news and he just doesn’t want to hear it.

  ‘Just tell me what it is, mate,’ he says, projecting the kind of barely restrained aggression you usually associate with the steroid munchers at the gym. ‘Treasury says we are looking at an $100-million blowout on the airport project.’ Silence.

  Then. ‘Fucking hell, mate. Why didn’t we know about this before? Where have Treasury been hiding this shit? Haven’t you been keeping an eye on those fuckers? That’s your fucking job, isn’t it?’

  There’s another silence. But I think I know what is coming next. Generally, it’s at times like these we employ a strategy known as ‘match the rage’. It was one of the first things I was taught after making the leap from the relatively civilised world of newspapers. The basic idea is that if there has been a fuck-up, and no one else in the office can be held responsible for whatever disaster has befallen us, then we match the rage about to be displayed by Sloan, uniting us against a common enemy. It helps build the illusion that we are all on the same team and, more importantly, Sloan can’t take it out on us.

  Bob fires up first. ‘It’s fucking Treasury, Ray. They must have been sitting on this for weeks. Probably protecting those fuckers down there who keep pissing our money away.’

  ‘Get John in here right now,’ says the boss. John being John Rogers, the long-suffering, highly patient Treasury Secretary who knows more about how the numbers work in this place than the rest of us combined. Rogers is one of those ultra-professional career public servants who does his job with minimum fuss. He has weathered any number of Sloan outbursts with more dignity and good humour than my boss deserves. His gray hair and slightly shuffling gait add to the impression he was here when the building was opened and will be here long after short-term political interlopers like us have been cleared away by the voting public.

  He appears in Leo’s doorway. ‘Treasurer?’

  ‘What’s going on at our airport?’ demands Ray.

  ‘Ah, well,’ Rogers begins in his usual soft tone that reminds me of an undertaker about to offer condolences for the loss of a loved one. ‘As it says in the briefing paper it’s going to cost about $100 million more than we originally expected.’

  ‘Why didn’t I know about this before?’ Sloan demands.

  ‘Treasurer, we just found out about it ourselves yesterday. Jim (another boffin) has been working with the Feds trying to tie down exactly what we need to complete this build for the last six months. Some of the specifications changed. Essentially, just a few cost over-runs. It was always expected there might be a few. The price of steel has gone through the roof, the price of labour has gone up, the Feds have insisted we add a few bells and whistles, more security, bigger fences. To be honest some of the earlier estimates we had to do to rush the project through were just guesswork really.’

  There is a brief moment of quiet as we all digest this and try and figure out what it means. I look at Harry. This is generally where the boy genius finds a way to save the day.

  He looks up at Rogers and asks in a quiet way. ‘So when you talk about some of the new stuff the Feds want, is that a change in the scope of the project. Has it just got bigger?’

  I smile to myself. Like the Yellow Brick Road revealing itself to Dorothy we have just been presented with a way out. It won’t be easy but it’s certainly doable. It gives us a case to argue at the very least.

  Rogers replies, knowing exactly what is going through all our minds. ‘Yes, but most of the hundred mill is just changes to original cost estimates.’

  ‘How much?’ I pipe up.

  ‘Sixty-five to seventy.’

  No problem.

  3

  Which brings me back to nervously pacing the kitchen hoping/fearing the mobile is about to ring. A week after Treasury delivered the bad news we quietly dropped the story to the local paper. These things always find a way out eventually, so it’s better to control the process from the start.

  The newspaper’s veteran political journo Phillip Jones was skeptical. He knew we were probably covering up something but he had no way of proving it. One of the rules about these kind of transactions is that in return for the exclusive the journo can’t ring other sources or more importantly the Opposition to point out the obvious holes in our carefully crafted story. Jones can ask all the questions he likes, but the reality is we haven’t given him enough information to know which questions to pose.

  It’s 7.45 am in the kitchen. No sign of Sloan being alive. Decision time again. I really have to jump in the car and get going but shall I risk another phone call before I go? Fuck it. Here goes. Two rings this time, then a grumpy voice says, ‘What?’

  ‘Ray, it’s Jack.’

  ‘Yes, mate, I know, what do you want?’ he asks in a far-from-welcoming tone.

  ‘Caldicott wants you on after eight about the airport stuff.’

  ‘Fine, text me the number and I’ll call.’

  This is something that always amuses me about the great man. Sloan has been on Caldicott’s program just about every week he has been in government, not to mention many years before in opposition, but still needs the number sent to him every time he is on the show.

  ‘The briefing is in your bag,’ I remind him. ‘Just talk up the project, remember this is a good thing, don’t get sucked into his bullshit …’ I suddenly realise I am talking to myself.

  As instructed I send him the number of the radio studio along with the time he is expected to phone. I then make the call to Caldicott to tell him my man will grace his program with his presence. He is suitably grateful.

  I am picking up my battered black backpack and heading for the door when Emily walks into the kitchen, wiping sleep from her eyes. ‘All ok?’ she asks. She knows I hate these morning dramas. That dealing with Sloan, or Caldicott, while still in my dressing gown and pajamas has a tendency to ruin my day. She hops up onto one of the stools that stand at the kitchen bar.

  ‘Fine, fine,’ I say. ‘Usual bullshit. One man rings. I jump. I call another man. Jump a little higher.’ She smiles her beautiful smile at me. It’s not the first time I have been here with her.

  ‘Ah, the responsibilities of high office. Well, you’d better get in there and save the world I guess.’

  I sm
ile back. Although mine is more rueful than joyful. ‘Is Lily still asleep?’

  ‘Yes, happily. Hopefully she stays that way for a while yet. Speaking of which I’m going back to bed.’

  ‘Good idea. Have a good day. I’ll talk to you later.’

  Emily comes over and gives me a hug and a kiss. Trying, I think, to impart the strength I will need to get me through the day. On the way down the hall I stop for a last glance at Lily as well. She’s only six months old, my beauty, perfect as she sleeps. I bend down to lightly kiss her forehead and whisper, ‘Daddy will be home as soon as he can.’

  It can’t be healthy every morning driving to work hoping for a car accident. Nothing too serious. I don’t want to die or anything. But maybe a broken leg or a fractured collarbone would keep me away from work for a couple of weeks. Most mornings the idea of a long rest is deeply appealing. Not that anyone should feel sorry for me. I made my choices and here we are. Before taking the job with Sloan I had worked as a journo for fifteen years. Like many others I had started small and aimed big, working for my local community paper, then a bigger daily and finally moving interstate for a national outfit. By then I believed I had really made it. Watergate here I come, a business journo with little interest in business or, like most finance reporters, much of an ability to read a balance sheet. And after seven years away from the home town it was time to come back to do all the sensible things in life, like buy a house and start a family.

  Life was good. I had even diversified out of business and was covering sport as well. A dream come true indeed for a bloke who couldn’t tell his depreciation from his amortisation but could recite the winners of the AFL premiership, the Brownlow medallist and possibly even the Coleman medal going back thirty years. But after a while the fun started to go out of even that job. Watching footy as a professional is not the same as watching it as a fan. As a reporter you have to write an even-handed, dispassionate assessment of the game. Where’s the fun in that? It was pointed out to me by one particularly grumpy old-school sport reporter that it’s considered bad form to barrack for your team while sitting in the press box, or to call the umpire a maggot.