Free The Brush-Off by Shane Maloney

and Spider eased it into St Kilda Road, joining the traffic stream headed away from the city centre.
    â€˜Not at all,’ I said. ‘It’s just that you’re the first Labor Party member I’ve ever met with his own chauffeur-driven Mercedes.’
    â€˜How do you know?’ said Eastlake agreeably. ‘You’d be surprised how well off some of the comrades are.’
    Doubtless he was right. If Labor really governed for everyone, not just for its traditional blue-collar base, then a millionaire should feel just as much at home in the party as any boiler maker ever did. If the Prime Minister had no problem with that concept, why should I? A decade in government at state and federal level had smoothed over a lot of the old class antagonisms, ideological and personal. Getting real, we liked to call it.
    We veered left and headed up Birdwood Avenue into the manicured woodland of the Domain. A late-afternoon haze had turned the sky to burnished steel, bleeding the shadows out from beneath the canopies of the massed oaks and plane trees. Geysers of water sprang from sunken sprinkler heads in the lawn and hissed across the roadway. Not that I could hear them. The cocoon of the Mercedes was a world apart.
    â€˜Old loyalties run deep,’ said Eastlake, catching my mood. ‘I’m a Labor man, born and bred. You don’t change your football team just because you change your address.’
    This Lloyd Eastlake was not at all what I had expected. A wheeler-dealer ex-carpenter with a penchant for modern art. A party player with a back-stairs fast-track to ministerial ears. I toyed with the idea of asking him how his meeting with Agnelli had gone. Shake the tree, see what fell out. I decided to sit, not give anything away until I had a clearer sense of the lie of the land.
    â€˜You’ll have to tell me all about the Cultural Affairs Policy Committee,’ I said, making myself comfortable, putting both of us at our ease. ‘I’m on something of a steep learning curve here, as Angelo no doubt told you. And what’s the story on this Centre for Modern Art?’
    Eastlake took a blank card out of his wallet and scrawled a couple of telephone numbers on it with a small gold pen. Private numbers. High-level access. ‘Call me next week and I’ll bring you up to speed on the policy committee.’ He tucked the card in my breast pocket. My backstage pass.
    â€˜As for the Centre for Modern Art, it’s a bit of a pet project of mine, to be frank.’ He reassumed his relaxed posture and proceeded to expound. ‘The National Gallery is all Old Masters and touring blockbusters. And the commercial galleries are little more than the unscrupulous peddling the unintelligible to the uncomprehending. The CMA’s mission is to fill the gap, to provide public access to the full range of modern Australian art, from its originators through to the creative work of contemporary young artists. Being relatively new, we don’t yet have our own collection, but we’re working on it.’
    Art really turned the guy on. I could sense the genuine enthusiasm. For art, and for the games that went with it. The pleasures of collecting. And of getting someone else to pay.
    â€˜Quite successfully too, judging by the government’s $300,000 contribution to your acquisition fund.’
    Eastlake looked at me sideways, crediting my homework, sensing criticism. ‘Good art costs money,’ he said. ‘Do you have any idea how much government money the trustees of the National Gallery have got over the years? The nobs are never slow to stick their hands out, believe me. The old masters are more than happy for the public to pay for their Old Masters. Isn’t it time that someone else got a fair suck of the sausage? Newer artists. Or the forgotten ones the art establishment has written out of history?’
    He wasn’t going to get any argument from me on that point. He saw that