by Paul Daley
Next night he goes on TV again and claims I abused him, threatened to punch him out. The prick uses vision of me on field in 1977, decades ago, you know: I’m twenty or something, a kid, in my second or third season, slow-mo, lifting the elbow—accidentally, absolutely—whacking a Blues player in the head.
All the papers followed, indignant, demanding to know if I’d threatened to belt the Eel. Half of them probably wished I had because he’s such a friggin’ prick and that’s what they’d all liked to have done, too. But I knew that that was actually beside the point, so I couldn’t deny it. I had nowhere to run from the adjectives—erratic, volatile, unpredictable, angry, potentially violent. And they’ve stuck with me like shit to a blanket ever since.
But now, thanks to a few more stories from the colleagues—some true, most not—they’ve constructed a question on the back of them, the C Question, the Big One: do I have the character to be prime minister?
I know it’s a bad look to go round threatening to thump journalists. And I’ve never threatened a journalist since. But I’m sorely tempted to this morning. Then again, that would be pointless. Because I know that, for once, they’re mostly not making it up. They’re reporting what my treacherous comrades are actually whispering to them down the line.
I read the first ten stories from the clips, marking up bits of them in green highlighter.
‘I am now sadly resigned to the fact that Slattery has no chance of taking the party forward unless he neutralises the government’s initiatives on terrorism. He needs to take the politics out of the issue—to do otherwise is fruitless’.
Fruitless? Fruitless! Fucking Moulden. Shadow environment. Who else speaks like an Oxford Don with a pineapple stuck sideways up his arse?
‘The party has been incredibly patient with Dan. But it’s getting to the point where his idiosyncratic maladministration when it comes to simple party processes are plummeting morale and …’
Doh! That would be Demitri Vagnoli—shiny-suited right-wing caucus chairman, Serbian torturer of Queen’s syntax from way back, to whom I refer variously but usually as either Vadge or just VD because, well, because I can, anyway VD … he told Eddie recently, stupidly, that I was an idiosyncratic maladministrator. She passed it on, of course. I’d recognise that little wog branch-stacker’s speech patterns even if I was listening from underwater.
‘… some of us are, naturally, evaluating leadership options. The time for equivocation is drawing to a close …’
Come on down, Dave Sweetman, shadow attorney-general. Favourite word: equivocation. Evaluating leadership options? Mainly his own. Oh come on, Danny. Let’s bury the hatchet—no more equivocation. I’m backing you in once I’m on the frontbench. Treacherous little bastard.
‘He’s losing the plot, disappearing into a vortex of self-deceit, existing in a parallel universe that is so far disconnected …’
Little Timmy Proudfoot. You nasty step-on-tiptoes-around-bigger-blokes twerp—leader of Opposition business in the House, shadow IR. Dr Who fan. Only Jon Pertwee is fonder of a vortex or a parallel universe. I was certain he was with me after all I’d promised him.
‘Daniel Slattery is about to reach the point of no return.’
Justin Deveson—Devo—my chief whip. Fuck you too, comrade. The only other person who calls me Daniel is Mum, and only when she’s really cross.
I spend another little while highlighting and annotating, with the names of others whose clumsy quotes prove they’ve been briefing against me: Skinner, Darling, Crowe, Grossman. I write Usher’s name down with a question mark beside ‘… and his leadership approach has a nihilistic undercurrent that …’. Usher loved that word nihilistic. I’d never heard her conjoin it with undercurrent before. But that is just a short step, right? It has to be her. Nihilistic undercurrent. Disappointing after all I did for her during her marriage bust-up. Maybe it’s because I knocked her back when she put on the hard word that time. Ah well, she’s only human.
No, today the journos are definitely not making it up—even though there’s no end to the shit some of them do create to enhance their byline counts. It’s perfectly obvious who they’ve been speaking to. And when I dissect their direct quotes a little more, you know—triangulate—I reckon I can even tell what they’re saying to each other.
The pattern always starts the same way when a leader’s up against it: a deliberate, seemingly innocuous, throwaway line from one of your genius colleagues about something to do with your leadership makes it to print. Then the pack attacks with endless versions of the same banal, obsessive questions that cut straight through party—and then public—confidence, and erode your bottom line with the pollsters and the focus groups. Soon that’s the only prism anyone—the press, your colleagues, your staff, Christ, even your family—can see you through. Nothing else gets heard. It’s a total mind-fuck.
The questions are always the same.
Are you confident you have the support of your colleagues?
Do you expect to lead the party to the next election?
Are you expecting a leadership challenge?
Yes. Yes. No.
Correct answers: No. No. Yes.
Then before you know it some dumb cunt backbencher (how many times have you told them to just shut the fuck up on the doors?) shoots her mouth off because she can’t stand the idea of not being on the six-o’clock news, too, and you’re getting as many Google hits as Peng and Snake Boy.
Oh Danny is a wonderful leader. Of course we’ve heard all the scuttlebutt and rumour—but he has our absolute, one hundred per cent support as the leader.
Jesus! Then comes the lemming parade: backbenchers all legitimise the rumour further by saying publicly just how much they support you. It’s part of another coded language—call it reverse speak—where the opposite of everything said is actually the truth.
I once had a girlfriend, Janelle. Nearly smothered me to death. Mum hated her. Said she was cheap, right down to her silly name. Every time I went off piste and said sorry, she’d repeat a line from that schmaltzy movie Love Story—you know, Love means never having to say you’re sorry. Now, I’ve always liked a chick flick. They have their use, mostly as a bit of a Sunday-night aphrodisiac to go with the bottle of red and the pizza. But I had to ditch Janelle when I couldn’t stand it anymore, even though there was plenty of stuff I actually liked about her.
Well, party support for the leader means never having to state it.
I know that too well.
It’s precisely the same stuff they used to say about Julian Dawes when he was on the ropes a few years ago and I was circling, getting ready to rip the shiv into the silly old windsock.
After the vote, which I won 48–46, Dawes shook my hand, took me aside and said, Danny, you know what really got to me in the end?
Tell me, Jules.
It was the voices, he said.
Bloke’s gone fucking bonkers under the pressure of it all, I thought. That’ll never happen to me and if it does, well, that’s when it’s time to chuck it in. Life’s too short, and all that.
Jules, what’re you talking about? I asked him.
He wouldn’t answer, but shocked me with this instead: Danny—I voted for you. Got you over the line.
Fuck me—you voted against yourself? Thanks, Julian. But why? Didn’t you want to be leader anymore?
No. I couldn’t stand the voices. You’ll see, he said.
And now I do see.
I look up from my highlighting work and yell across the room to Eddie, I’ve figured it out, and quick as a flash she’s there at my desk looking contemptuously at the highlighted clips and the notes and arrows and thought bubbles I’ve scrawled all over in green.
Get me the whiteboard, I demand.
What for?
Because I’m going to draw a diagram of triangulation—of who said what to which journo. Then I’ll get each of those pricks in and demand they go back out and doorstop and retract each and every thing they’ve said anonymously abou
t me.
Oh yes, Danny, that should work an absolute treat. Then what? A firing squad at dawn?
Geez, I don’t know, Eddie. Call a press conference. Suicide in front of the cameras like Robert Budd Dwyer maybe. Get noticed more than the cooking shows for a bit.
Robert Budd who?
Dwyer. Pennsylvanian politician. Google him, I tell her.
She shakes her head. Danny, she says, it’s time to get serious.
Eddie’s right, of course. She nearly always is.
And it’s a pretty shitty place I find myself in this mid-Monday morning on a parliamentary sitting week. When they read my story, people will be shaking their heads and asking how the hell did he get himself here in such a hurry.
The first thing I’d say in my defence is that none of it is really my fault. And the other thing I’d say is that I started moving from party hero to zero about six months after I won the leadership.
8
Like all the good things that have happened on my watch, I’ve always been happy to claim Edwina Katzen. But Eddie would tell it differently—she’d say that she found me, threw me a lifeline about eighteen months after the 2008 election, about a year or so ago.
Really, we found each other, I suppose.
It went like this.
A month after the election I rolled Dawes. He had to go. He’d only just managed to win us a net gain of two seats. Yep—just two, even though Drysdale’s lot was rancid, swinging dead in the breeze, stumped for ideas and ambitions beyond holding power, and the punters were dying for a reason to slot them.
And so the Drysdale Government was returned for a record fifth consecutive term with a majority of three seats.
Julian Dawes could have been an all-time party hero. He’d been around forever, like a pair of old bedsocks, so the punters knew him as a steady pair of hands. All he really had to do was go positive and original and he’d have won in a landslide. But instead he listened to the party boys, the back-roomers who’d told him not to scare the horses, make the transition easy for the voters, stay small target.
Dawes had blown with the wind as a leader for two terms—promising the voters more of Drysdale with a less avuncular, slightly more urbane edge. But really, he just represented more of the same cynical horseshit. Soft on the outside and empty within. And despite what the party boys always think, the punters are smart—they can tell when a leader stands for fuck-all and they hate the pretence.
And here’s another given: they’ll usually go with the fuck-all that they know rather than the fuck-all they don’t. They get angry as hell when you condescend to them. And they had correctly spotted the big teddy bear Jules for the weathervane that he was—even though the party and its true believers kind of loved him because his dad was a minister back in the glory days of Reggie Holden’s government and Jules had taken over his old man’s seat under our next PM—Tom’s dad, Paddy McQuoid.
But dynasty’s no substitute for substance. It’s also something the party—which can be oddly sentimental towards those it considers its sons even when they’re stuffing up big time—refuses to learn. If they’d been smart they’d have dumped Dawes before that election and put me in as leader. I’d be PM today. Idiots.
Drysdale was sixty-eight at the last election and now he’s just recently gone seventy. Despite his so-called historic win, there’s a lingering undercurrent of party-room talk about ditching him for a younger Tory model, maybe his deputy, Paul Anderson. Anderson’s got the mussy handsomeness of a Kennedy and a mouth on him like Luna Park. He bleats on privately about his entitlement to the job and how Drysdale’s promised him this and that and how damned unfair it all is that the old boy won’t stand aside for him in the name of government renewal. But Ando was born a political cripple with all the intestinal fortitude of an amoeba. And you can neither summons nor learn the stuff to overcome that particular disability. Drysdale, wily, ballsy old fucker that he is, knows Anderson will never have the gonads to challenge. That’s always been in the bank for him.
With a bit of early help from Tom, I long ago found my inner gladiator. And I don’t give a stuff what the Tories do leadership wise. I say bring it on! Next! I’ll take on all comers. I’m ready to fight their cynicism and ideas vacuum and whichever prick they throw up as prime minister.
But there’s no underestimating Drysdale—he’s cunning as a ’roo shooter’s heeler. Soon as I shafted Dawes, Drysdale sniffed the wind, didn’t like the aroma of decay all around him and promptly soiled himself because his trick bag was empty. Well, maybe not quite empty.
Not for me the sleight of hand and the spin and the white-bread bullshit.
Anyway, the point is Drysdale knew there was something different about me that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Then he really shat himself because suddenly I, the new leader, wasn’t just banging on with the usual party platitudes and small-target stuff the comrades always carry on mindlessly about.
You know? We’re conservative economic managers—those past crazy high-taxing and reckless spending governments of ours, tsk, tsk, tsk, they were on another planet; Christians’R’Us; we’re a party of the centre; no socialists or revolutionaries here—girls should marry boys, boys girls; we are for you if you set the alarm clock early and work hard all day; keep the illegal towel-head reffos out or on some stinking, sweltering boring Pacific atoll—that’ll teach ’em to threaten our unique way of life, whatever the fuck that is. You know—trust us, we’re pretty much the same as them but just a little bit different around the edges.
So straight away I started saying stuff that scared the bejesus out of both parties. Get rid of the inequitable child care rebate and introduce tax incentives for both parents to work part-time to care for kids and ease the pressure on government-subsidised child care; ban junk food at home and cook healthy food for your kids; introduce publicly funded doctors to schools so poor kids get decent healthcare; spend money on teacher education and on inducements for the best of them to work in the most downtrodden suburbs; introduce means-tested free school lunches so no kid goes hungry; try mentoring instead of jail, or youth training centres for wayward teenagers, by people like me who’d moved up and out. Little things? Yes. But together they became part of a bigger, more optimistic story that conjoined the prosaically practical with the idealism at my party’s historic heart. And then I got onto the bigger stuff like bringing the troops home right now, no more messing around with stalling transition arrangements, and letting the refugees—the Normalians and the others—stay if they pass the security checks and, you know, if they are willing to die to get here they’ll be good citizens, sort of thing.
Drysdale was terrified that he was actually witnessing in me the real deal—a politician who spoke common sense rather than focus-group-consultancy speak. A politician who believed in himself. I, Danny Slattery—yes, insecure, punchy, flawed, fatherless and mother-smothered—was flying high above Drysdale and all my other enemies, Tory and from my own side. I could see them all down there where Shark Face lurks, looking up at me and wondering how the hell to clip my wings.
The bottom line was that I wanted to appeal to the human optimism that I reckon is inside all but the most hard-hearted—to those who feel a little more ready to peek over the fortified walls of their McMansions, who want to re-engage with the country beyond their mortgages and Family Payments A and B.
I knew those people were out there because I’d read their emails and their letters—this was the one thing of value for me that did shine through in the qualitative polling. After fifteen years of Drysdale—fifteen!—the punters were deeply wary of division and conquest. They were financially comfortable. While they didn’t like to think too much about it, they were also grudgingly appreciative that Les was keeping out the hordes who he’d scared them into thinking could bring it all undone for them.
The smoke pall from 9/11 had dissipated. And they were now eager for some light, for life outside the shadow of imminent, perpetual threat.
&nbs
p; I’d been talking for years before I became leader about the erosion of community. About how people had stopped talking to their neighbours, about how the vast middle class has become a gated members-only club secured with razor wire and Dobermans and with its own ubiquitous postcode, about how it has built a moat between itself and places like the Olympic Village. As a backbencher I even wrote a book about it—Cracking the Secret Postcodes: Why Everything National Is Local Again.
Postcodes was all about filling in the moat, about tearing down the gates and smashing down the walls so that people could look one another in the eye, survey their surroundings and see that the world, their country, was not so fucking scary after all.
I argued the only way to do this was by ripping into poverty at its roots by empowering communities like the village to get involved in decisions about government service provision, to embrace community policing, to take pride in schools and healthcare centres and sporting clubs, to cut their lawns and clean the graffiti tags off the local shops, to do their homework and to look out for their neighbours—but mostly to talk to each other. I stressed the importance of attacking welfare across the scale with more reciprocity from both the comfortably well off and from the dirt poor who rely on taxpayer coin.
This was all part of what I called my Window of Optimism—a term I coined in Postcodes and that I’ve made my political catchcry, my trademark if you like, ever since. Sure, I saw all the comrades rolling their eyes. But now that I was leader, the punters and the press—and especially Drysdale’s Tories—would have no choice but to take the window seriously.
On becoming leader I was determined to stay positive and to roll out policies progressively in plenty of time before the election to demonstrate I wasn’t like the rest—and that I wasn’t trying to hide anything.
I’ll never forget the open-mouthed faces of my colleagues who’d just made me leader when I said at my first press conference how I wanted the Australian people—the forgotten people in lost suburbs without access to the postcode, and the people who are paying their mortgages and living comfortably but who feel afraid about the future even though they’re in the right postcode, everyone—to look at Australia through the Window of Optimism.