Shane Maloney: The Brush-Off

While I was waiting for a name to come to mind, I finished my cigarette. Our smoke-free environment, naturally enough, provided no ashtrays so I took the butt into the executive washroom and stuffed it down the basin plughole. The executive washroom was what we jokingly called the small private bathroom off the minister’s inner office. Supposedly for Angelo’s exclusive use, it was also accessible from my office. Since it had an exhaust fan, I’d sometimes slip in for a quick concentration-enhancing puff when no-one was looking.

The door leading into Angelo’s office was open a crack and I could hear his voice. He sounded keyed up. ‘A new broom,’ he was saying. ‘Energetically wielded.’

I was history.

‘Money is the key.’ Just the sort of thing you’d expect to hear Agnelli barking down the phone. ‘All the policies in the world won’t save us if we don’t go into the election with a decent campaign fund.’

Party matters were the subject, so he wasn’t speaking to a bureaucrat from one of his new ministries. Whoever it was, my employer was warming to his topic. ‘It’s time to start getting serious.’

‘The finance committee’s doing everything it can, Angelo.’

Ange wasn’t on the phone. He had a visitor. I knew the voice. Duncan Keogh, one of a number of assistant state secretaries from party headquarters. Keogh was a smarmy popinjay, a twenty-seven-year-old smarty pants who could barely remember when Labor wasn’t in power. He approached politics as though its exclusive purpose was to provide a career structure for otherwise unemployable graduates of Monash University.

Why, I couldn’t help but ask myself, was Agnelli closeted with a mid-level machine man like Duncan when he should have been more concerned with the pressing business of the day, the outcome of the Cabinet reshuffle?

‘Duncan,’ I heard my boss say wearily. ‘You’re our third finance committee chair in eighteen months. I’m not saying you aren’t competent, otherwise I’d never have supported you for the appointment. But you just don’t have the sort of clout you need to be effective.’

Keogh needed more than clout. He needed a brain transplant and a personality upgrade. He was a non-performer who had inveigled himself into the finance committee chair by singing some bullshit song about new blood and fresh ideas. Agnelli had bought it, against my recommendation, and seconded Keogh’s nomination. Duncan’s subsequent performance had been conspicuously ordinary. With any luck, Agnelli had summoned the twerp to tell him he’d better start delivering, that he should either shit or get off the pot.

‘Cabinet-level influence is what you need, Duncan. And that’s what I’m proposing to give you,’ he said. ‘With you in the chair and me setting the agenda, we can move our fundraising efforts to a whole new level.’

I didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking.

Raising the cash needed to run election campaigns was a chronic headache. Last time we’d gone to the polls, we had to mortgage party headquarters to cover the cost of the how-to-vote cards. And, lacking the conservatives’ traditional allies in big business, we were forced to scratch for cash wherever we could find it. But rattling the tin for money was a task best undertaken at a very long arm’s length from the positions occupied by people like Angelo Agnelli. It was a job best done by more anonymous members of the party apparatus. Collectors of membership dues. Organisers of mail-outs. Conductors of wine-bottlings and quiz-nights. Men like Duncan Keogh. Not Cabinet ministers.

‘I’ll still be the chairperson,’ said Keogh. ‘Right?’

I could hear his tiny mind ticking over. Letting Agnelli pull the strings, he was thinking, would be a good idea. He would win a big friend and move a little closer to the centre of the action. Agnelli could do all the work and Duncan would still get to put ‘Chairperson, Finance Committee’ on his CV.

‘Absolutely,’ said Angelo. ‘So, how much have we got in the kitty right now?’

‘Just over four hundred thousand,’ said Keogh. ‘Union affiliations and membership levies, mostly. Half in Commonwealth bonds, half on deposit at the State Bank.’ A safe player, our Duncan. If this was his idea of a fresh approach, no wonder our finances were in such a parlous condition.

‘We’re going to need a shitload more than that,’ said Agnelli. ‘A million five, minimum. What about corporate donors?’

Keogh cleared his throat nervously. ‘Barely a pat on the head, so far. About ten grand all up. But we’re setting up a sub-committee to look at a strategy to improve that figure.’

‘A committee!’ Agnelli snorted derisively. ‘The skyline’s full of cranes. Fucking sunrise industries left, right and centre. People making money out of our polices hand over fist. And ten grand is the most they can cough up. What’s wrong with these pricks?’

Keogh was really on the ropes now. ‘It’s a sensitive area. Either they give or they don’t. Mostly they don’t.’

Another voice weighed into the discussion, soothing, placatory. ‘Duncan’s right, Angelo,’ it said. ‘This is a sensitive area. Go blundering around putting the hard word on the business community, you’ll end up being accused of peddling influence.’

For the life of me, I couldn’t put a face to the voice. But whoever he was, he was talking sense.

‘See,’ said Keogh, vindicated. ‘It’s not as easy as you seem to think.’

But the other speaker hadn’t finished. ‘That’s not to say that there aren’t ways of approaching these matters. Take your new portfolio, for example, Angelo.’ The voice was of a man used to being listened to, someone at ease in a minister’s office. ‘Your accounts department alone employs, what, four or five hundred people.’ He was speaking, he wanted it understood, hypothetically. ‘That’s a lot of office space. Property developers pay sweeteners to private corporations to secure long-term leases on their new buildings. If some of them were to get the idea that the Water Supply Commission was thinking about moving house…’

‘Jesus,’ groaned Keogh. ‘We’re treading perilously close to the line here.’

‘You don’t think the Liberals wouldn’t be even more cosy with their business cronies if they had the chance?’ said Agnelli.

The more I heard of this, the faster my disquiet turned into outright anxiety. Knowing Angelo as well as I did, it didn’t take too much mental exertion to figure out what he was up to. He’d decided to do a bit of lateral thinking.

Like the weather, campaign finances were something that everybody complained about, but nobody did anything to fix. Angelo, evidently, had decided he’d be the one to grasp the nettle. Even the most outstanding performance in Water Supply and the Arts could only earn him a limited number of brownie points with the Premier. But if he succeeded in filling the party war chest, some big favours would be due next time the hats went into the ring. Obversely, the consequences of failure did not bear thinking about.

‘We’re all agreed, it’s a sensitive area,’ said the voice, conciliatory again. ‘And there’s no rush. The election is two years away.’

‘Quite right,’ said Agnelli, getting the hint. ‘First things first. What sort of interest is the State Bank paying us, Duncan?’

Keogh rustled some paper and named a percentage. It was about ten points lower than what I was paying them on my home loan.

‘Shit,’ said Agnelli. ‘My cheque account pays more.’

‘The money could definitely be working harder,’ agreed the other man, businesslike now. ‘Managed properly, 20 per cent or higher isn’t out of the question. That’s another $50,000 a year, straight up. And no favours required.’