ben schultz
Animal Justice Party campaign director Ben Schultz (Image: Animal Justice Party)

It was about 30 minutes before noon three Sundays ago on an otherwise tedious, overcast day when it happened.

“Was I nervous? Yes and no. I just reached down into my pants and pulled out the envelope of [group voting tickets], and handed them over to the [Victorian Electoral Commission] ladies,” says Ben Schultz, adding that he saw their eyes widen in unison.

“Down your pants? As distinct from, say, the pocket of your pants?”, I ask.

Yes, there was nothing for it, the Animal Justice Party campaign director went on to explain. Despite months of careful negotiations and rigorous preparation, as well as the stress associated with the promise and peril of empty assurances, Schultz had found himself at the eleventh hour on the 11th floor of 530 Collins Street almost irrevocably unprepared for his moment.

Adding to the toll, his phone was abuzz with messages from “preference whisperer” Glenn Druery, demanding to know his whereabouts.

“Hiding [the envelope] down my pants wasn’t ideal, but I thought, ‘Shit, what if I get bailed up or hit over the head or something?’” he said, referencing the possibility other parties might spy his ruse. “So there wasn’t really a choice in the end.”

Midday that fateful day marked the deadline for every party to register its group voting tickets (GVTs) with the VEC, with the full candidates’ list and ballot draws for each electorate only released two days before — on the Friday.

Hours earlier, Schultz — ever the actor — had, as arranged, met Druery at Druery’s hotel in Melbourne, along with a friend of Druery’s, who Schultz described as nothing short of a “leprechaun”.

“He, the leprechaun, was really intense,” he says. “He was telling me, ‘You’ve got to preference the Shooters, you must preference the Shooters, and I was like, ‘Jesus, man, we’re the Animal Justice Party’.”

Druery, meanwhile, remained under the decidedly false impression that he “had the Animals”, and that the party would, as instructed, preference Druery’s “cabal of riff-raff parties” before Fiona Patten’s Reason Party. The quid pro quo was a seat for Animal Justice candidate Georgie Purcell, Andy Meddick’s former chief of staff.

But after decades of micro-parties largely depending on Druery for his near-reverential insights and advice for upper house election, Schultz went the other way.

“The whole old white dudes club really got under my skin, and clearly the idea of preferencing the Lib Dems over Fiona for our own gain was unconscionable,” he said.

And so, Schultz set out to destroy Druery’s alliance of micro-parties and reduce Druery to a figure of self-parody.

To Schultz’s mind, the entire ruse that day was more or less going to plan until Druery asked him for a lift into the VEC: “The problem was I had my envelope of GVTs on the back seat — it was such a stupid schoolboy error. So I got my partner to phone me and demand I come home, which she did,” he said, adding that he’d “played the whipped partner to perfection”. 

The icing on the cake, says Schultz, would have been to come face to face with Druery afterwards, when the VEC had published the GVTs and the full weight of his deception was unveiled for the world to see. But it wasn’t to be. Instead, he says, he had to make do with the leprechaun.

“On my way out [of the VEC], I smiled at the leprechaun and he said, “Is that all you’ve got to say for yourself?’, and I said, ‘No, tell Druery I wanted to see the whites of his eyes’.”

When pressed to explain his choice of words, Schultz says: “You see, the thing you might not know about Druery is that he has all these war analogies — like, when you’re in hand-to-hand combat, don’t shoot until you can see the whites of their eyes.

“So it was just a really poetic moment for me to say that, and his mate, the leprechaun, passed the message on. And of course, I got to say it later over the phone, so that was really nice.”

A few days on from the election, the prevailing view is that Druery’s grip on the upper house has been broken, with his alliance of parties all going backwards. Derryn Hinch’s party could lose all three seats while disgraced former ALP powerbroker Adem Somyurek, running for the DLP, will probably be pipped at the post by Patten.

Druery, for his part, downplayed the significance of Schultz’s move, focusing instead on Schultz’s dishonesty.

“It wasn’t a sting operation; it was just a rat. They absolutely lied to me and ratted on all the other minor parties that helped them,” he said. “They think they can come in and act like they’re in Dodge City and just shoot up the place and run out without paying the bill. Well, no. Trust is trust and truth is truth. And to be dishonest means you’re dishonest.”

Druery added that he felt “really betrayed and taken advantage of”.

Schultz, however, assures Crikey he’s aware of Druery’s hurt feelings. To prove the point, he texted a screenshot of a Twitter exchange between the two, where Schultz — responding to Druery’s question “Why were you dishonest, Ben?” — says: “I’ve been saving this for you.”.

Underneath was a Simpsons meme which read: “Have a sook, c**t”.

Tomorrow: Druery’s side of the story, and what he calls the “political anarchy” Schultz’s action has, in his view, potentially unleashed.