“Ben Schultz basically spread my legs and just kicked and kicked and kicked until I fell down,” Glenn Druery told Crikey.
“I mean, I felt like I’d just watched someone deliberately run over my dog — it’s the worst election I’ve ever been involved in.”
Most people by now have a nodding familiarity with the ruse visited on Druery by one Ben Schultz of the Animal Justice Party — the self-professed anti-hero, fighting for Victorian democracy, who reneged on his backroom preferencing deal with Druery in the final moment.
But some insiders, none more so than Druery, dispute Schultz’s version of events, likening his clever game of deceit to nothing less than a dog act for the ages.
For one thing, Druery says it’s “absolute bullshit” he pressured the Animal Justice Party to dislodge Reason Party’s Fiona Patten from the upper house and, in the result, throw Andy Meddick to the wolves.
The idea, he says, was conversely conceived by Schultz, who he accused of shamelessly wallowing in a post-election “vegan lard of glorified lies and deception”.
“He wanted to win more seats and trick both sides,” Druery said with hindsight, noting, of course, he was blind to Schultz’s ploy to Judas him in the final hour. “What he ultimately did is play both sides against the middle — he played the progressive side for preferences over Patten and he played me.”
“And the bottom line is preferences don’t lie: I didn’t send preferences to Andy on Ben’s instructions. Andy was done in by his own people.”
It’s a sentiment shared by veteran deal maker Graham Askey, who outed himself as the “leprechaun” of Schultz’s story and accused Schultz of, at minimum, twisting his words.
“Schultz really is lying when he accused me of urging him to preference the Shooters. We knew the Animal Justice Party would never [do that] and vice versa,” he said.
As an aside, Askey said he found the whole leprechaun tag “pretty insulting”.
Meanwhile, Shooters MP Jeff Bourman told Crikey he’d received a surprise phone call from Schultz at the tail-end of preference negotiations, asking for a deal. Schultz, for his part, denied Bourman’s claims, saying the truth was more or less the reverse.
Whatever the case, Druery says it all, in his view, lends weight to the sheer effrontery of Schultz’s “self portrait of lies”.
“I feel really bad for my people that this toxic Trojan horse came into our camp and I opened the door for him,” Druery said. “I just wish I’d paid attention to all the red flags.”
Among those red flags were, he says, Schultz’s flinty calm with respect to Meddick’s looming political demise and his alleged preparedness to trick the progressive bloc for political gain — claims which Crikey put to Schultz and he denied.
Beyond these intrigues, Druery said he’d also heard whispers from the Labor Party that Schultz was in the midst of betraying one of them, while Schultz’s behaviour that fateful Sunday before VEC registration was, in retrospect, altogether bizarre.
In this regard, Druery confirmed Schultz had met Askey and him at his hotel that morning, but rather than one or two trips to the male restrooms, it was several.
“He was gone for ages. I thought, ‘Gee, I think I’ll avoid going if possible,’ ” he said. “But then when I did go, I noticed the toilet paper was still folded in that classic hotel way.”
It’s, of course, a matter of public record that Schultz had spent at least some of his time in the toilets making private phone calls, including to his partner, to avoid sharing a ride with Druery and Askey en route to the VEC offices.
But far from playing the “whipped partner to perfection”, Druery says Schultz’s acting approached something closer to a “B-grade Russian spy movie”.
However, Askey, for his part, did confirm one crucial part of Schultz’s story: namely that he told him he had reneged on the deal with Druery’s alliance of minor parties to “see the whites of Glenn’s eyes” — an altogether triumphant moment Druery likened to a “gladiatorial champagne piss”.
“It’s just not how this game is played,” Druery told Crikey. He added he was considering his legal options and, short of that, would ultimately deal with Schultz as ruthlessly as he has others who have broken his trust.
“Look, I’ve been in this game for over 27 years and have a reputation,” he said. “If you’re in the family, then I will give you my shirt, I will feed you before I feed myself, I will give you my bed and I will sleep on the floor.”
“But if you betray me or my people, if you lie to me, there’s not a rock you can hide under — politically speaking. If we all behaved like Schultz and broke our word, there’d be anarchy.”
When pressed as to whether any future reform of the upper house voting system would blunt his political influence, Druery chuckled: “Just because they move the goalposts doesn’t mean you stop kicking. You just kick in a different way.”
“Politics is always about the long game.”
