Kate floated on her back in a tank at Hobart’s new Gravity Centre. The pitch-black, soundproof pod normally offered a rare sense of meditative calm, but today she couldn’t clear her mind. She couldn’t stop thinking about politics. Wedge politics.
That’s what she paid her hard-line backroom strategists for, and that’s what had always worked. It wasn’t about playing dirty, no matter what Robert Hellgrun said. It was simply about playing the game. Announce a big policy, back your enemies into a corner, leave them nowhere to run without being exposed as frauds and hypocrites. Then … checkmate. A tried and true recipe for success.
Kate had followed the winning formula, announcing a multi-million-dollar assistance package for timber companies and their workers. If Hellgrun and his dimwits didn’t back it, she’d accuse them of abandoning jobs and the Tasmanian economy. If they did back it, she’d accuse them of having no ideas of their own. Win-win. And as it panned out, it ‘appalled’ the Premier that Hellgrun refused to match her party’s commitment to industry. She branded the Opposition Leader as anti-development, anti-logging and anti-worker. But, for some reason, the strategy had backfired, at least that’s what the darn polls said.
For years Kate had ridden high on those polls. She’d lost a few deputies to scandal, but she herself had always remained unsullied. Critics unkindly called her Teflon Kate, but that wasn’t who she was. She was Tasmania’s golden girl, the queen of feel-good politics, off on a never-ending honeymoon with the electorate. No Iron Lady. She had grace. She had style, flare, all the editorials said so. Her first two terms oversaw a rise in employment and a real estate boom. A by-product of the buoyant national economy, the Opposition said, but her constituents knew better.
‘Our economic fortunes,’ she’d famously said, ‘reflect a new era of optimism and growth that makes Tasmania Australia’s own Camelot.’ She later regretted that remark, having been accused of hubris, of comparing herself to the charmed Kennedy administration. Her reference was to the vaguely remembered 1967 film version of the Lerner and Loewe musical. All that happy-ever-aftering in rousing chorus. The music had blared from loudspeakers at her rallies ever since.
But recently, for whatever reason, the polls kept tracking downwards. They still showed her winning, of course, but by a narrowing margin. She’d probably lose a few ministers this time around. Always difficult to find replacements from such a poor gene pool, and it didn’t help having Drake running around hugging trees. Silly boy. He could have inherited political power, been preselected for a safe seat. He could have gone far, but he was too pig-headed, too critical. And he wasn’t the only one. There were rumours that even her own environment minister privately disapproved of her forests policy. Though he hadn’t disapproved when she raised politicians’ salaries by 20 percent. He had no balls.
The most astonishing thing was that her personal approval rating was also down. It was so hard to please everybody. The party room had run their focus groups and blamed her presidential style. It smacked of elitism, they said, and was beginning to alienate voters. A humiliating series of political ads and photo opportunities followed. She frowned to think of them. Kate on a bus. Kate in an apple orchard, at a school, visiting tiresome children in hospital. Lots of sparkling white teeth, promises to listen, to share the pain, to admit mistakes. Mistakes? She hadn’t made any. All this phony contrition was embarrassing, and not at all what the electorate expected from their leader.
What she needed was a showcase for her policies, and that’s exactly what Inquest was. The question-and-answer style panel program suited her, as did the live studio audience. Tonight she’d appear alongside her old friend, Fraser Abbott, and the Opposition’s Robert Hellgrun. With only a week until election day, this was the perfect opportunity for a popularity boost. Kate almost pitied Hellgrun. She and Fraser would wipe the floor with him.