The Big Ask Read Online Free Page A

was Agnelli’s press secretary. He was a tall, sad-faced ex-journalist with a permanent stoop, a reedy voice and about as much hair as it would take to stuff a pincushion. He was perched like a heron on the arm of the office chesterfield, his shoulders slumped forward in the melancholic posture appropriate to his vocation. ‘It’s the Herald , Ange,’ he pleaded. ‘You know what they’re like.’
    Lowry did not need to elaborate. Melbourne’s afternoon broadsheet had never been sympathetic to the Australian Labor Party, in or out of office. And its current editor, a Murdoch hack with the physique of Jabba the Hut and the morals of a conger eel, had made it his mission in life to torment us at every opportunity.
    â€˜But the Herald wouldn’t have it, thwap , if somebody hadn’t, thwap, leaked it.’ Agnelli turned his ire on me. ‘And that’s your thwap department, Murray.’
    Neville Lowry was a comparatively recent addition to Angelo’s staff and he still tended to pay the boss some degree of deference. Not a mistake I was likely to make. I leaned forward in my chair and displayed the palms of my hands. ‘What am I now?’ I said. ‘The resident plumber?’
    For almost seven years I’d worked for Angelo. Stoking the boilers of policy analysis. Tending the vineyards of administrative superintendence. Fixing his fuck-ups and burying his boo-boos. Almost seven years. It was beginning to feel like eternity. First I was Angelo’s electorate officer, inherited with the fittings and fixtures when a factional deal handed him a safe seat in the northern suburbs. Back then I managed his constituent affairs, fending off cranky voters and stroking the local party apparatus. And when, in our second term, he was appointed Minister for Ethnic Affairs, he took me along for the ride. This was designed to fend off any suspicion of wog favouritism. As he pointed out at the time, with his characteristic mastery of the bleeding obvious, Murray Whelan is not an Italian name.
    Other portfolios followed, rungs in Angelo’s ascent up the ladder of political preferment. We’d climbed them together. Local Government. The Arts. Water Supply. Agriculture and Fisheries. And now the big one, the jackpot. In a Cabinet reshuffle the previous month, Angelo had been catapulted into the job of head honcho of the state’s rail, tram and road networks.
    In better times such a promotion would’ve been cause for celebration. Unfortunately, Transport had become a poisoned chalice, claiming the careers of two of Angelo’s predecessors in less than a year. The problem was money. The government had run out of it. The boom days of the eighties were over and the chickens of fiscal profligacy had come home to roost. With the state deficit running at Brazilian levels, the minister’s task was reduced to screwing as much revenue out of the system as possible while presiding over a one hundred million dollar budget cut.
    A man of conviction and inner resource might have been able to cope. But those terms had never been applicable to Angelo. In the previous three weeks he’d veered from steely resolve to catatonic retreat to blustering bravado. Now he was tearing strips off his advisers. ‘A leak,’ he repeated, thwap . ‘Somebody’s got it in for me.’
    â€˜That’s a pretty wide field, Ange,’ I said.
    â€˜You know what the Herald ’s like,’ moaned Nev Lowry again. ‘And the Buzz doesn’t even pretend to be factual.’
    The Buzz was the Herald ’s gossip column, a vehicle for all manner of kite-flying and bait-laying. It was a gadfly in that day’s Buzz which had flown up Angelo’s trouser leg, a snippet headed TRUCK CASH GRAB .
    â€˜The Buzz has it that incoming transportation supremo Angelo Agnelli has been cooking up plans to slap a hefty new tax on trucks. Makes you wonder how the government’s