Australia’s federal parliament isn’t normally associated with sex, drugs and dance parties and nor should it, because they’re rare occurrences. But rare does not mean unknown.

In the mid-nineties I was hired by the prime minister’s personal department to courier cabinet documents. The job niched well with my neglected university studies but required a cabinet-in-confidence clearance, one of the highest-level security checks conducted by the Australian government.

There’s no way I’ll pass this, my younger self believed.

With good reason. My studies at the time were not going downhill because I was failing, for that you had to attend. Most days I slept in a foetal position thanks to partying long and hard the previous night.

The dance scene was flourishing in Australia back then, not in the mainstream clubs, but in pockets of underground bars and seedy makeshift dives. The gay scene was all over it. Any given night I could usually be found dancing to vinyl remixes in a club called Heaven, eyeing off the glamorous babes who came to gay clubs to escape lecherous country boys like myself.

I crossed paths with a lot of drug dealers and petty criminals. Canberra was awash with acid, pot, speed, ecstasy and heroin and it was impossible to avoid the peddlers, who sprouted like mushrooms at every rave, dance and warehouse party.

Many friends and acquaintances from university, extremely intelligent more often than not, danced too close to the flame and were badly burnt; masters in art history, biochemists, self-important law students. More than a few ended up on heroin. Some of them overdosed and died.

I sat opposite an ASIO officer as he thumbed through a wad of documents, most of which I’d filled out myself. My living arrangements. My family history. My family’s family history. All dating back and back. Where I’d worked, studied, lived. Where I’d stuffed up.

“You over-claimed your Austudy allowance,” the spook accused me suddenly, correctly.

“Yeah, I did. I paid it back.” Swallow.

“But only because you were found out, you meant to keep that money.”

“No, I was just stupid. I didn’t know how to fill out a form properly. I paid it back.”

He grunted. “Get out then.”

I hadn’t expected Austudy to come up. I expected criminals and junkies and accusations of links to organised crime. Spurious links, chance encounters and friends of friends of friends, but enough to give me cause for concern.

The student allowance was overpaid by a few hundred dollars when I’d taken a job at the CSIRO’s privatised computer wing Paxus Comnet while I was meant to be attending Narrabundah College, a senior Canberra high school. I failed to notify the education department of my drastic change in income immediately and they came gunning for me over the over-payments.

The clearance was granted and I commenced work in the Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet. PM&C contained a bunch of offices, most of which were a whimsy of the leader of the day. It’s a powerful place at the apex of the bureaucracy, but had surprisingly few staff – only a few hundred when I worked there. Today it numbers in the thousands.

My initial position involved paying bills for the Lodge. There was nothing interesting about that first job, mundane accounts payable work, checking off invoices and making sure they were paid on time.

How I ended up in PM&C’s pinnacle, the Cabinet Office, escapes me. The interview was like a scene out of Trainspotting. All that separated me and a thumping dance floor was a shower, suit and a couple frantic cab rides. By some dark magic, I landed an extremely unimportant position in one of the most important offices in the government of Australia.

At this point, I’ll have to bore you with how the Australian executive functioned back then, and in many ways, still does. Once a week, usually on Tuesdays, usually at Parliament House itself, the cabinet would meet.

Cabinet meetings are supposed to be when all the important decision making gets done and occur entirely in secret. The argument goes that if ministers are free to speak their minds inside cabinet, they’ll argue their respective points of view with honesty. Once everything is decided, whatever personal views held, the ministry goes forth and spruik a united public front. Minutes of these covert gatherings are held under lock and key for decades and their eventual publication is typically a source of much excitement in the mainstream media.

Submissions to cabinet have the capacity to make or break policy, legislation, even whole departments. These submissions flow in from all over the Australian bureaucracy, from every department, sub-department, statutory authority and related organisation.

Prior to the digital age, it was a mountain of paper and each submission had to be provided in scores of copies to be shipped out to every other area that might want to stick their noses in, from Treasury and Finance through to the secretive Office of National Assessments and the Defence, ASIO and ASIS spooks. And every minister needed to receive a copy, on time, in perfect condition.

My job was to get all the copies to where they needed to be. Everyone but the ministry was easy. I had dozens of acronym-labelled pigeonholes to pop the papers into. But the ministers’ copies needed to be hand-delivered. That’s how I found myself with a duffle-bag full of secret ministerial documents, hooning the short distance from PM&C’s office-block to the Parliament in a hotted up government car with big red stickers on its windscreen. I’d screech into the ministerial entrance, wave at the security guards and head on up into the heart of government.

The executive corridors of Parliament House yawned wide and luxurious. Classic art adorned the walls and all that was missing was a string quartet to sooth passers-by. The destruction of the Twin Towers in New York, half-a-dozen years later, would change the atmosphere irrevocably and turn parliament into a fortress, but back then it was more like a friendly museum. Austere but accessible.

By design, Canberra itself is invisible from the many tall windows. When inside the ‘House on the Hill’, as it is sometimes dubbed, it was easy to forget the rest of the world existed, and for many of the inhabitants, it didn’t.

Over many years of infrequent and improbable association with The House, I came to view it as some kind of mythical kingdom court, adrift on a sea of eucalyptus leaves. Like any regal court, The House contained courtiers, sycophants, nobles and various hangers-on. And it contained a king.

The king at the time of our tale was Paul Keating. He was brash, intelligent, witty and rude. Fighting his last successful election, Keating was posed a question by the opposition leader on the floor of the House of Representatives. The prime minister responded by putting a finger to his lips and made a bubbling, farting noise – the type used to tease a baby. It caused immense confusion for those responsible for recording everything the politicians said for Hansard. How do you transcribe a mouth-fart?

Walking into the Prime Minister’s office for the first time was a surreal experience. The security guard, a somewhat more serious fellow than the unarmed, rotund gents on the outer doors, gave me a good hard stare.

I stood in front of the armed and uniformed protective services officer wearing jeans, a flannelette shirt and Doc Marten boots. This was entirely acceptable back then somehow. Despite the rigorous security clearance and new position, I barely sat above a cleaner in bureaucratic pay scale and ranking. Over one shoulder hung my bulging duffle bag that could have contained, well, anything really.

The guard looked me up and down and narrowed his eyes. “You the new courier?” he asked.

“Yeap.”

“Head on in and see Jane (not her real name).”

“Thanks.” I turned to enter, heartbeat slowing.

“Oi. Wait.”

I froze, turned. “Yeah?”

“Welcome aboard.”

Looking back, he may have just been fucking with me. “Thanks,” I breathed and headed into the most powerful office in Australia.

The prime minister’s secretary was one of the nicest people I met. Jane exuded none of the false self-importance that bedevilled many of the denizens who lurked parliament’s corridors and offices.

“First day?”

“Yeap. I have the prime minister’s cabinet papers.”

“Excellent, just pop them down there. Would you like to see his office?” she asked good-naturedly.

“For sure.”

Jane took me through the lavish office complex, introducing me to various harried looking individuals who glanced up, often with a phone cradled against their head. Some waved, most didn’t.

“The boss is out of the country at the moment, but it never stops around here.”

We entered the sacred abode of the leader of Australia.

The office was not as large as I expected. There were no command screens or red hotlines to the White House, just plush leather furniture, a few museum type artefacts and lines of books on the walls. The Prime Minister’s desk was large and clean. Behind it rested a voluminous chair.

I felt a tingle, the kind you feel when walking into a really old church or similarly ancient building.

“Do you want to try out the chair?” Jane asked mischievously.

Oh, yes. You don’t off-handedly choose to study law and politics at Australia’s national university for kicks and giggles, at least I don’t think you’re meant to. I may have strayed from my chosen academic path, off into the fairy lights of the dance scene, but I still harboured fantasies of taking on politics, bedazzling the party and the people, sweeping my way into Parliament on a tide of narcissistic self-belief. My dominant inner-child fantasised about claiming the federal seat of Batman.

Would the Member for Batman please remove his cape and cowl? The speaker would thunder.

Don’t think I will, fantasy me replied.

That chair, polished by the most powerful arse in the country, felt good. I reclined back and surveyed the room, imagining media moguls begging (or threatening) my favour, faction leaders hinting at spills, department heads nodding gravely, journalists droning repetitive, inane questions and all of them intimidated by my stony countenance.

Would the Prime Minister please remove his cape and cowl?

Don’t think I will.

“OK, that’s enough,” Jane said, breaking the moment. Perhaps I wasn’t showing the proper etiquette for the occasion. No ooos and ahhs or “Isn’t it a comfy chair?” – just a calculating look of self-righteousness.

“Sorry. It’s a nice chair.”

Delivering important documents to the various men and woman who ran the government became routine. I got to know the guards, the ministers’ office staff and the friendly gatekeepers at their front desks, all protecting their small realms from intruders. But not from me.

Some even became friends. A mate I grew-up with scored a job in TV media, carrying about those big fluffy microphones, and he introduced me around. I joined a network of young underlings spread across The House; junior producers, sound assistants, media advisers and even the odd journalist. Some of them ended up rising quite high, taking command of their respective fields.

The people I never came close to befriending or even supplying my name to were the ministers themselves. To them I was less than a bug, rarely noticed. If I was late with the documents, I might earn a scowl or a curse. That was as close I came to the big league.

The foreign minister occasionally threw things at me, a stapler, a notepad, if I interrupted his thoughts with an urgent document. The prime minister once chastised me for helping myself to leftovers from cabinet’s healthy serving of club sandwiches. It was the only time we spoke. Actually, he spoke, I just nodded with a mouthful of bread and salmon.

The kind of dirt I have to report on these characters is banal. Some offices stunk of tobacco, despite a smoking ban. The rumours of who slept with who may have been the rich gossip of us underlings, but cannot be substantiated and is kind of irrelevant, then and now. I became involved with a staffer who worked for the trade minister, an unremarkable occurrence that would lead to a mildly significant event later on.

I probably can mention the notorious ‘meditation room’ without the Australian Federal Police storming my house for breaching any secrecy protocols. Someone thought it wise to plan into Parliament’s design a sealed chamber, beautifully cushioned and sound proofed. I never heard of anyone using it as intended, but it quickly became the unofficial version of Parliament’s mile-high club.

And while the heroin epidemic raged in Canberra’s unseen suburbs outside, a cleaner confessed to me The House’s needle-bins filled faster than any she’d ever seen. The halls of power were rife with type one diabetics apparently.

I eventually grew bored, quit the job and returned to a life of neglected studies and clubbing.

I still went up to The House often. Friends in the media would sign me in on unescorted day passes and I would roam the halls, visit old haunts and catch up with acquaintances. I indulged in many games of corridor cricket, a popular past time of the often-bored mainstream media sidekicks. (Years late, prime minister John Howard would ban the practice.)

On one of these visits, the ex from the trade minister’s office asked for help.

At the end of every summer and winter session of parliament, the executive of frontbench ministers threw a party. These days, it comes in the form of a lavish ball, but back then they were informal affairs. Parliament can often build to a tense crescendo before breaking for each bi-annual recess and by the final Thursday, everyone; politicians, staff, media – were ready to blow off steam. The infamous corridor parties were in their heyday.

“You’re into the dance scene, can you get a DJ for the corridor party? I’ve been dumped with organising it,” the ex asked.

‘Get a DJ’ ended up being code for organising the whole damn gig. The budget wasn’t large, most of it going on booze, so I secured the services of a cheap seventeen-year-old who had access to some equipment; amps, turntables, even a few FX machines, along with a mate to lug it all about. Turned out the young DJ was the grandson of some conservative minister from ages passed, not that he seemed to care. Most of the time he was too stoned.

Set-up for the party was a nightmare. The amps blew and most of the equipment DJ Stoner organised turned out sub-par, but with the loan of a van from protective services and a lot of racing around town we eventually converted one of the executive corridors into a fair resemblance of a nightclub, complete with a smoke machine, spinning lights and sweeping staircase to the second level.

Somehow I convinced the ex that I needed half-a-dozen people to arrange it all, which I didn’t, but that’s how I got a bunch of nightclub freaks through security.

The opposition conservatives were set to hold their own party somewhere else in the building – a drab, grey affair that nobody was keen to attend.

The government of the day knew a sure-fire tactic for keeping these shenanigans out of the media. They invited them. It made it difficult to report on a wild fracas in parliament’s hallowed halls causing fifty thousand dollars worth damage when you were there with a bra on your head, pissing against one of the columns in the PM’s private courtyard.

Guests arrived from all corners of The House, from the lowliest SBS sound technicians to a few of the ministers themselves. Most of the bigwigs didn’t attend, including the prime minister, much to my disappointment. But we still had a large crowd, and many had started early on the booze.

DJ Stoner launched into a trancy set to get the mood moving. But something was evidently wrong. People in suits and business dress were looking at us and muttering, some shaking their heads and then my ex was at my side whispering, “They don’t like this.”

“Fuck.”

I severely misjudged my audience. These people didn’t know Digweed from a Public Enemy remix and didn’t care. They just hated the music.

Thinking quicker than usual I raced to the DJ and said, “ABBA. Now.”

“What?”

“Anything seventies. Donna Summer, fucking Queen, just do it.”

He found some Diana Ross at the bottom of his collection, god knows how it got there, and suddenly we were back in business. The dance floor began to fill. The Aboriginal Affairs Minister took to the floor. A noted journo started showing off how badly she could dance. And the party took off.

Later DJ Stoner subtly changed the tempo, slipping in some beats modern to the mid-nineties. The audience were too drunk or having too much of a good time to notice. It was nice to see the egos dropped, masks removed – a bunch of people, however powerful or hot-headed or well, just silly, having a good time.

I went off to take a piss, studiously ignoring the suited man at the urinal next to me, and heard a moan coming from one of the cubicles. I recognised the voice of DJ Stoner, presumably his friend was covering on the decks. “You OK in there?”

“Yeah, man. I’m just tripping off my balls,” came the reply.

The suited fellow sprayed his shoes with piss in an effort to escape.

“Come on,” a friend from the media said, grabbing me by the shoulder as I exited the toilets.

“Where?”

“The Opposition’s party. They’re running out of beer here. We’re going to raid it.”

And raid we did. It was quickly evident that party was going nowhere. Everyone was standing around, politely chatting, all suited in grey and black with sombre expressions to match their dress. At the rear of the room a vast tub full of ice and expensive imported beers shone like the holy grail.

Half-a-dozen young media lads and I worked our way through the stiffs until we surrounded the tub to block the view of our nefarious intent. I stuffed a dozen cans into every available pocket and made to go. One ambitious young lad loaded a nearby cake trolley and proceeded to calmly wheel it from the room. Until he was stopped by a concerned looking opposition leader.

“Where are you going with that?” John Howard asked. I ran.

Some of us made it back to the corridor party, conquering heroes. The trade minister sidled up and spoke to me for the first time ever. “I see you have a few spare beers there, young man.”

“Here you go, minister. Courtesy of the Libs.”

The half-dozen clubbers I smuggled in were all enjoying themselves, showing the parliamentary crowd how to dance. I got chatting with one of them, a green-eyed, blonde-haired beauty I was much enamoured with. She mentioned she played the piano.

“This way,” I said.

Grabbing her by the hand, we ran down through the corridors to the occasional startled glance and shake of the head from the much-harnessed guards. By now the party was out of control and drunks and couples and drunken couples were being herded away from places they shouldn’t be.

Green Eyes and I entered a huge hall lined with portraits of scowling men. In the middle sat a baby grand piano. I was vaguely aware Green Eyes was some kind of vocalist when not fighting a vicious heroin addiction. I didn’t know she was training to be a professional opera singer at the Australian National University’s school of music or could rattle off Beethoven and Mozart on the ivory keys more effortlessly than the rest of us breathe.

I stood back and watched as she made the baby grand come alive, filling the hall with classical music I half-knew, but could not name. She lost herself in the performance, and so did I. Suddenly I noticed two security guards standing to my left and right.

To their credit, they let her play for half an hour before the senior guard put a stop to our break-in and gently returned us to the party.

Myles Peterson is a journalist, writer and online security consultant based out of Canberra and Melbourne.

Illustration: Channel Four Films.

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