10
Budget day it is. For months we have been working on this bloody thing. As much as anything it’s been exhausting dealing with the media. Sure, we have made our calculated drops and tried to keep them all reasonably happy. A crumb here, a morsel there. But it’s never enough. The broad plan of trying to keep some of them reasonably satisfied gradually degenerates until all you are doing is making most of them deeply unhappy. Something you don’t quite appreciate until you get out of the day-to-day media world is how driven it is by individual ego.
You see it in the newsroom every day. You know there are a more than a few who fancy themselves, but it’s not until you step back and take the helicopter view of the industry you see how widespread it is. The aim in this gig is to try to figure out how they all work.
For example. A fuckwit like Caldicott needs to be managed carefully. But once you make the discovery that his show is all about him and nothing much else he is easier to handle. Then there is Caldicott’s rival Terry Dowell, a man who is so up himself that his slogan is ‘Making this city a better place’ and there’s a fair chance he believes it. He’s the kind of shock jock who professes to stand up for the battlers while living in a mansion, driving a Maserati and dining in the city’s most expensive restaurants.
And he has the cheek to call the government a ‘band of elites’ on a regular basis. The radio blokes are just sideshows though. In terms of hard numbers they have a small audience compared to the number of people who watch TV news or read newspapers and websites. The television journalists are the most amusing. Barely a brain cell between them. They preen for their audience and each other and intone carefully about whatever the latest disaster is to befall the government. Twitter has made them even worse. They spend most of the day showing off to one another.
The press gallery is the clubbiest club in town. They follow one another around like a pack of small dogs, happily sniffing each other’s bums. It’s not too surprising I suppose, it’s not like they have to break any real news. As long as they provide a ‘comprehensive’ ninety-second round-up of the day’s events everyone is happy. I worked with a newspaper bloke who once referred to them as press release cinematographers and a better description is yet to be coined.
The newspaper types tend to be the most cynical. You can be a lot more descriptive, detailed and vicious in 600 words in a newspaper than you can ever be on television. The paper still tends to get the news first as well.
A typical day will see the radio lot pick up the paper as the template for their show, then run with whatever takes their fancy for a while, before the TV stars pile on board.
But just when you think you have them all figured, something funny and surprising comes out of nowhere. The week before the budget a fellow called Alan called. He is the alleged funny man/roving reporter on Caldicott’s show, the bloke Caldy likes to think of as a bit of light relief from his highly intellectual, hard-hitting radio show. The poor fucker covers everything from fatal road crashes to the birth of a new animal at the zoo. He had never rung me before.
Alan: ‘Hi, Jack, it’s Alan from Caldy’s show. You got a sec?’
Me: ‘Oh hello, Alan. Sure.’
Alan: ‘You know the budget next week?’
Me: ‘Yep.’
Alan: ‘I had an idea.’
Me: ‘OK.’
Alan: ‘I was thinking it would be great for our listeners to get an insight to how Ray Sloan handles his big day.’
Me: ‘What did you have in mind?’
Alan: ‘Well, I was thinking I could go round to Sloan’s house first thing in the morning, you know, on budget day, and have breakfast with him, jump in the car with him on the way to work and broadcast it all at the same time.
Me: Laughter.
Alan: ‘What? I was thinking, you know, we could relate it to the listeners like they have a budget they work to and this is Ray’s budget. It’s just much bigger.’
Me: ‘You are kidding me, right?’
Alan: ‘No, dead serious. What’s the problem/’
Me: ‘You really think I am going to let you knock on Sloan’s door at six in the morning. Have him cook you breakfast? Interview him, follow him around. All on his biggest day of the year? The day when his stress levels are already through the roof. Are you nuts?’
Alan: ‘No, I thought he would love the idea …’
Me: ‘Sorry, mate. Never going to happen.’
Alan: ‘Oh.’
Me: ‘Ok, Alan, see you, mate.’
Alan: ‘Bye.’
I can tell you we laughed about that in the office for quite a while. Even Sloan thought it was hilarious.
The best thing about budget day is that in another twenty-four hours it will all be over. Still, I managed to get to the office at eight riding on a cloud of optimism. Perhaps, it was the lack of sleep and the excess of coffee. More likely it was that odd feeling of looking forward to seeing Sloan. Surely he would have to bow down and acknowledge a master at work after the paper’s front page that day. I accepted the congratulations from the other lads and settled in at my desk for a final read through of all the twenty-nine press releases I had written for the budget. Praying I wouldn’t find any mistakes that were too late to fix.
Half an hour later Sloan strolls into my office. He is sharply dressed in a new dark suit and his lucky aqua tie and looking as pumped as I have seen him. It is almost heartwarming. Despite everything else right at that moment I want him to have a cracker day, to really drive home all the good work we have all spent months slaving over.
‘Mate,’ he says with a giant grin. ‘You are a fucking genius, I couldn’t believe that front page.’
‘I told you so,’ I say, trying to match this infectious enthusiasm. Not sure how to carry out the inverse of the normal ‘match the rage’ philosophy. ‘You just gotta trust me sometimes.’
‘I still can’t believe we got away with that one, I can’t believe he bought it. And the radios have been running it straight all morning, just reading the paper story.’
‘Well, let’s not get too carried away. You know Caldicott and those TV show ponies will be all over you this afternoon trying to pick holes in the thing.’
‘You leave them to me. I can control them.’
11
At 11 am we walk into the city hotel where the budget lock-up is already underway. I kind of love the idea of the lock-up. You let all the journos into a room and you take away their mobile phones, their access to the internet, to Twitter and Facebook, their ability to talk to anyone except carefully vetted people about what the budget means.
Then you load them up with a bundle of press releases and 500 pages of highly detailed, dense and hopefully impenetrable numbers. And watch them pretend to understand what they are talking about.
The ones to fear on these kind of days are the refugees they pull in from the business pages of the newspapers. Some of these buggers are scary because they can actually read numbers and understand them. Worse, they can flick their way through a balance sheet, take in debt numbers, revenue numbers, growth predictions, find the hollow logs stuffed with cash, the rubbery numbers and the risk factors. In short all the things we are trying to hide. The good news is these serious types are no match in the ego muscle stakes with the prancing ninnies that pass for a press gallery in this town. You would have to dig a long way back in the archives to find a question that any of them asked that was not foreseen and safely batted away by the Treasurer of the day.
But still their manic desire to be first and loudest works to our advantage. The rest of the journos barely have a chance to get a question in. So the day works like this. Sloan stands in front of the room, red laser pointer in hand. (These days we always make sure there is a back-up. At a lunch recently Sloan’s pointer failed. It wasn’t a pleasant moment. Think of what happens when you take a dummy away from a miserable toddler and you’ll have some idea of the reaction.) The little pointer gets pointed at all the numbers and the graphs and he ta
lks about the triumphs and skirts around the disasters.
This is the calmest bit of the day. Here the hacks don’t question him, interrogate or generally rile him. Sloan plays emperor to the minions. And that includes the Premier who always pops his head in at this point, presumably because it looks like he is supporting his Treasurer, and leaves before the hard questions get asked.
After this prelude comes the walk around. Sloan wanders among the hacks, spending most of his time with the TV types who can then have themselves filmed apparently deep in conversation with the Treasurer. It is really just vanity television. I think, they think, it makes them look important to their viewers, although I would be stunned if anyone apart from their partners and mums and dads noticed. The juicy bit, the theatre of the day, is the press conference.
At about an hour it is easily the longest press conference of the year. It starts with the usual cacophony of bullshit from the TV and radio types, all clamouring for attention. The newspaper journos usually just sit back and let them go for it. As soon as Sloan takes his spot behind the lectern on the little stage the hubbub erupts as ten reporters all try to ask a question at the same time. Amid the outcry one voice is more persistent than the rest. It’s Josh Chalmers, the Channel Six political veteran whose longevity is more a tribute to his enormous ego and rat cunning than any real understanding of the political process. He likes to see himself as the ‘father of the gallery’ and there is no question he is something of an institution in this town. Apart from his work on TV he has a weekend column in the paper and is a radio regular as well.
I love his newspaper column best, but there are others who believe the shallowness of his TV reports are funnier. Yet others swear by the vacuousness of his radio work. What Chalmo most likes to talk about is himself and how important he is to the political health of the state. As such, his column is filled every week with sentences such as ‘When I spoke to Minister X this week …’, ‘What I told Minister X this week …’ or ‘As I warned the government last year …’. If you look at it as parody rather than political commentary it is wonderful stuff. It’s ‘The Not So Secret Diary of Josh Chalmers Aged 53 3⁄4’. Sloan lets the pack shout a bit longer before settling on Chalmers.
‘Josh,’ he intones as if bestowing some great favour on the man from Six.
‘Treasurer, in budget paper three, it says overall tax revenue this year will be $31.6 billion. This makes you the highest taxing state government in history. Are you ripping off taxpayers?’
I hear a little whoop behind me. It’s Harry. He’s just won the office sweep for predicting what the first question would be. Bugger. I had gone the other side of the coin thinking we might get the ‘You are the highest spending government in history’ question. Either way, we workshopped the answer to this one last night with Sloan and he is entirely comfortable with his answer. Chalmo probably sees it as a ‘gotcha’ question that will embarrass Sloan but for us it’s the perfect introduction to the press conference.
‘Josh,’ he begins with a well-practised air of weary resignation. ‘As you know the economy has been going gangbusters in recent years under the careful stewardship of this government. As the economy grows, which is something that helps every family in this state, it is inevitable taxation revenue will rise with it. Our responsibility to taxpayers is then two-fold. One we have to reduce the tax burden wherever we can and two, we have to build the services and infrastructure of the state as well as we can.
‘We have done both. There are $1.5 billion in tax cuts in this budget, there is increased spending on health, on schools, on law and order, on roads, on rail, on buses. This is the budget that sets this state up for a prosperous future. A future where we cast off the past and embrace everything this state should be.’
And there, with any luck, is the line we hope gets run on five television channels, multiple websites, radio and the newspaper as the defining moment of the government’s budget.
The press conference drags on for another hour. But the longer it goes the more Sloan is enjoying his work. This is not one of those times when he is defending the indefensible, trying to wrap a bow on a turd and looking to flee as quickly as possible. After the pack has blown out its early bluster, he goes looking for questions. Calling on journos who have spent most of the press conference chewing on their pen and wondering what’s happening on Twitter. It’s a command performance.
For once he has, more or less, kept the ego in check. He has been funny, appeared right across his brief and, more importantly, sold the government’s message well. Better, even than salesman supreme Boyle could have managed. Why, we all wonder later, can’t it always be like this?
12
The rest of the day passes without great incident. The assembled hacks are a bit unhappy they failed to put a dent in Sloan. No big mistakes, no tempter tantrums. No doubt they will try to even the score on the news later that night. Say what you like about the media world, but they always get the last word. After the lock-up is over we slide off to parliament to watch the official part of the day. I suppose in an ideal world, the media hoopla would just have been the necessary entrée to the main event of presenting the budget to its parliament and its elected representatives. But no. After the presser it feels the circus has packed its tent and gone home. The rest is just contractual obligation.
The good news is Sloan remains in a happy, almost bubbly, mood. He knows it’s gone well. The morning front page, the presser, the fact he took on everything the press pack could throw at him and walk away unscathed is a wonderful ego boost. And as he’s never worried about the budget speech to parliament (it’s just another chance to remind the Opposition who is in charge) everyone is feeling fine and dandy.
So, it’s just parliament to dispense with, watch the TV news and then it’s across the road to the pub to tell each other how good we are. And that’s roughly how it pans out.
By 7.30 pm I am well into my first beer with Leo, Harry and Bob and thinking, Thank god that’s over. We replay the day to each other and all agree, if we are not geniuses then we are awfully close. This government, we all decide, is remarkably lucky to have us.
‘Only 12 months till the next one,’ Leo pipes up. Having a crack at imposing reality back on our happy gathering, but really just letting loose that miserable side of his personality that makes him such an effective handbrake on anyone getting ahead of themselves.
‘Well, hopefully,’ says Harry. ‘We do have that little annoyance called an election first don’t we?’
‘That won’t be a problem,’ says Bob deep in the comfort of some old bouncy chair this pub has employed in an attempt to convey the atmosphere of an old English gentleman’s club rather than the dive it most obviously is.
‘The election is in the bag. The other side is hopeless. Jeremy Montague is a gift for us. We should prop him up as long as we can. Half-bright, half-interested, the epitome of the whole born-to-rule laziness that defines that whole outfit. He’s the ultimate compromise candidate. Their left and right wings hate each other so intensely they refuse to vote for the other’s candidate, no matter that both are far better options than our man Montague.’
‘Yep,’ pipes in I. ‘And on our side we have as leader one of the great egotists of all time. A bloke, who I reckon, takes it as a personal affront that he has to run a little shitty joint like ours and not the United States of America. Then we have our man the great Ray. A bully, a nutcase, and obsessed with getting invited to the opening of every envelope in town. Yep. We are miles in front.’
‘The difference is,’ says the boy wonder, ‘that while we know you are right on Boyle and Sloan, nobody outside the party does. We are smart enough to keep all our dirty washing on the inside. That’s called discipline. The other lot has really no fucking idea and prefer to do their fighting in public. The punters only suspect Boyle and Sloan are a couple of cockheads, but they know for an absolute, rolled-gold fact that the other lot are definitely, without question, morons. That’s an a
dvantage.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘These things are never that easy are they? Who knows what could happen and you know Sloan is going to be absolutely horrible in the run-up to it. His glass jaw will be fracturing all over the place.’ I have a thought. ‘The election is nine months away. How about we pledge to all hang in here together until it’s over?’
I put my hand into the middle of the circle we have created. First Leo, then Harry, then finally, and I suspect reluctantly, Bob, put their hands on top. The deal is sealed. I get up to get in another round of beers just to reinforce the moment when Sloan, all happy bravado and good humour, comes over.
‘What’s going on here?’ he asks. ‘Just promising each other that no one disappears until after the election,’ I say.
‘I should fucking hope not,’ Sloan says. ‘If any of you try and leave before then I will chop your fucking nuts off.’
I take that as a compliment and head to the bar.
13
After the intensity of the budget I feel the need to communicate with the outside world again. To spend time with my family, see if I have any friends left who are not firmly rooted in the world of politics. To spend a day with people, who while having an interest in the world I have immersed myself in, are not defined by it.
You become a slave to the mobile phone. It can ring first thing in the morning, it can ring last thing at night. It can ring in the middle of your child’s birthday party on a Sunday afternoon, it can ring while celebrating a wedding anniversary with your wife. (Sorry if that sounds like a VB ad from the eighties.) I’m not too familiar with the whole Pavlov’s dog’s theory but I can report with confidence that every time that damned implement rings my heart jumps and my stomach sinks.
A day at the footy is called for. I call my oldest friends. Pete and Gav are both refugees from schooldays and express mild surprise in hearing from me (‘Jack, Jack, yes I remember a Jack,’ says Gav, with what I would consider an unnecessary degree of sarcasm) but decide they can spare the time to join me in this noble pursuit. As it turns out it’s a hard winter’s day. Low gray clouds racing across the sky, wind with a touch of the Antarctic, the occasional icy shower. It’s not going to be a pretty day of precision footy. But it’s a day that’s good for the soul of a supporter. You are going to suffer for your team. Albeit, with beer and snag in hand. We take our once normal place on the concrete steps in the forward pocket. Despite the weather there is feeling of comfort about this place, a place I have been coming to for the better part of my life. First with my dad, then with these blokes and hopefully one day with Lily and any other offspring.
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