How do they sleep at night?

We were driving down the Princes Highway to Possum Point and I was reading the Saturday Herald when I got to thinking about the spread and depth of corruption in our society.

There was a story on page seven of the Herald’s dead tree edition about “corporate marquees” at the Melbourne Cup. I’ve never been one for the cup.

Over the years I’ve bought a few tickets in sweeps down at the pub so as not to be a party pooper. Once, about 1986, I won two whole dollars when the nag I’d drawn came in second but to this possum, the whole horse racing industry stinks of human and animal exploitation.

But I had no idea there were corporate marquees at the Cup. According to the Herald’s ‘private Sydney’ writer, Andrew Hornery – who probably has to take a shower four times a day – some “stars” can rake in as much as $100,000 just to turn up at one of these things to be snapped by the papparazi.

Right above the Melbourne Cup piece there was a crime story. It seemed a Central Coast truck driver called Glenn Punch had died, and his girlfriend, Rachael Hickel, had just survived, after injecting a new, fully street legal synthetic party drug, which mimics the effects of cocaine.

These two dumb losers bought it from the Nauti & Nice “adult shop” in Rutherford. They call this shit “bath salts” or “Smokin’ Slurry” and it sent Punch psychotic, whereupon he stripped off his clothes, jumped a barbed wire fence naked and attacked a security guard, after which he went into cardiac arrest and crossed the finish line. Rachael was found wandering topless and bloody hundreds of metres away having fallen out of Glenn’s truck.
“There’s a lot of money to be made and my clients make no secret about what they do,” Mr Patrick Quinn, a Brisbane lawyer representing several sellers of the drug told the Herald. There’s the whole power relationship, straight from the horse’s mouth.

Geez, Mr Quinn must be proud of his work. I guess he tells himself the law is, in its own ideological terms, a mercenary system, and he’s just doing his job representing his client and it must be alright because they’re brazen about it and they’re getting rich, eh.

How does he sleep at night? Well probably, very easily, between silk sheets with a partner whose beauty would make you weep with desire.

That’s pretty much how James Packer sleeps, I guess. Only he bunks down between those sheets in a vast luxury motor yacht with liveried footmen and when he wakes up at two in the morning he can call Barry O’Farrell or John Robertson or Paul Keating or Luke Foley and he knows they’ll stand to attention beside their bed and listen attentively to his yarns about Asian high rollers and answer his questions respectfully.

And they won’t mention the homes broken by gambling, or the minibuses traversing the suburbs picking up hapless little Chinese business persons and conveying them to Star Casino to blow the rent money on their little mobile phone stall in one of Frank Lowy’s shopping malls, or the cash the state is going to fork out through FACS to pick up the remains of his or her family.

And when James says his Brancusi sculpture 30 storey world-class hotel slash casino will only cater for “high rollers”, they’ll laugh uproariously at his little joke and murmur respectfully about the jobs created and agree that the issue of poker machines for the small fry can certainly be revisited after the operation is up and running, and thanks for the donation to the party coffers all in the interests of democracy of course.

I flipped over to page 13 and there was James Packer himself telling us in an opinion piece that, “Under investment in top-class tourism puts the city at a serious disadvantage”. Ho, ho.

In several hundred weasel words like “quality tourism infrastructure”, “six-star hotel resort”, “iconic building”, “We’ll be listening to the best architects the world has to offer”, “partnered with community organisations”, “ indigenous workers”, the only reference to gambling was “VIP-only gaming and – as I have made clear – there will be no poker machines”.

You have to savour this stuff … “Gaming”. How innocent. Who could be against games?

I’ll bet James didn’t write this fantasy all by himself. I’ll bet he had a whole committee of high priced spin doctors on the job. ‘Because that’s how it is at the top. You have what Barry O’Farrell calls a thought bubble and then you have your people action it.

It was a big beautiful sky as we passed Gerringong on the coast road and I reflected that, with this mob running the state, I was never going to be out of work.

• More Nick Possum at brushtail.com.au.