Underground by Andrew McGahan

nonentity.
    It was the seventies, as I said earlier, that had fixed his attitudes—the social chaos of that decade, and the madness of the Whitlam Labor government, hog wild with ideas like free education, universal health care and generous unemployment benefits. The accountant in Bernard was outraged; who the hell was paying for all this? The taxpayer, that’s who. No, said my brother, if people had to struggle and save to get to university, well and good—then they wouldn’t waste their time marching and protesting and causing trouble once they got there. The same with the dole—if it wasn’t so easy to get, then there’d be no hippie communes or artist collectives cluttering up thecountry, and the unemployed would move heaven and earth to get jobs, just as they should. As for universal health care, well, quite frankly, the most advanced treatments cost a fortune, and if that meant the best care was only accessible to the rich, so be it, all the more motivation for the population to become wealthy themselves. Private sector, user-pays, that was the principle.
    The government’s true role, according to Bernard, was to formulate high policy, and to maintain the social order. The latter meant no undue toleration of drugs, or homosexuals, or refugees, or land rights for Aborigines, or militant feminism, or greenies, or rampant abortion, or power-hungry unions, or . . . Well, you get the picture. Put simply, he had settled upon those two most basic (and to outsiders, oddly contradictory) of conservative tenets. Namely that, in their private lives, people should conform strictly to the rules and be financially responsible for themselves, but that for the corporate world, there should be no limits or responsibilities at all. Nowadays, of course, this is standard conservative fare the western world over. But back in the 1980s, when Bernard was cutting his teeth as a young MP, it was cold and dreary stuff, even for the Liberal Party.
    It certainly wasn’t the philosophy of the eighties Labor government, so the decade was a grim period for Bernard. Casting about for better models, he ended up spending a lot of time overseas. Many of his Liberal colleagues were enamoured with Britain, and with Margaret Thatcher’s way of doing things, but not Bernard. His inspiration was the USA. If there was a fact-finding mission to the States, or a deputation sent over there for some diplomatic reason, then he made sure he was on it. And liking what he saw, he began, in his public pronouncements, to extol the virtues of the US system. He pointed to America’s military and economic authority, to its leadership in the overthrow of the USSR, and to its decisive history in defence of democracy. Australia, he insisted, had a responsibility to follow that sort ofexample. To bind ourselves to it. True, his faith was dented a little by the end of the Reagan era, and by the ascension of Clinton. But he maintained his friendship with the Republicans. Their day, he knew, would come again.
    In the meantime, he married Claire. Their only courting engagements, as far as I know, were Liberal Party fundraisers. There were no wild nights out drinking, no afternoons fucking in motel rooms. Bernard’s single requirement in a wife seemed to be the woman’s ability to fit in with his political career. Claire proved to be polite, sociable and correctly aligned to the right, so my brother declared himself in love and the date was set. After the wedding, the happy couple moved into a house only a few blocks from our family home in Camberwell. And for the little that his life changed, Bernard might as well have stayed at home. Claire cooked and cleaned for him just as well as our mum ever had. Not even for one day did he have to get out on the street and get dirty, fending for himself. How he later claimed to understand the plight of the working poor, or the social problems of the battlers in the outer suburbs, or the difficulties of running a small business,