Hockey: Not Your Average Joe (13 page)

McGauran agrees. ‘It was a disaster.’

Both Hingerty and McGauran had their eyes on Yeates, who responded, ‘There’s a front page for tomorrow. The bloody minister for tourism doesn’t know where he is! What an insult.’

Hingerty knew he only had a few minutes to turn Yeates around. Yeates, now president of Country Press Australia, says: ‘I had the camera and I’m scribbling a few notes and I said that’s the headline: Minister for tourism says, “Where the hell am I in Bairnsdale.” ’ Luckily for Joe, Yeates was as fiercely parochial as he was a good newspaperman, and was open to ways out of the furore Joe had found himself in.

‘We want to meet John Travolta,’ Yeates told Hingerty. Yeates was on the local marketing committee for a planned air show and wanted to invite the movie star. He believed that could happen if the committee – made up of a plumber, the local undertaker, Bob and the pilot – flew down to Melbourne where Travolta was visiting Qantas.

Hingerty says: ‘I thought, this is going to be some of my best work, and I still contend today that it was.’ He called a friend at Qantas and Travolta not only granted them an audience, but threw his support behind their local air show. The front page of the
Bairnsdale Advertiser
had found a better story than the Australian tourism minister bagging their town – although Yeates made sure he made reference to the comments inside the publication.

After Melissa, the person Joe relies on most as a sounding board is Andrew Burnes, who he met before becoming tourism minister, but who was one of the industry’s biggest advocates. Former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer had convinced Joe to do the annual Tumbatrek up Mt Kosciuszko in 1999, two years before he took on the tourism role. Burnes was on the same walk, and weighing in at more than Joe, the two found themselves huffing and puffing at the back of the pack. Burnes had his own company, the AOT Group, but he was the national chair of the Australian Tourism Export Council.

Joe, who was acting tourism minister, had spent most of his time on the phone, talking to journalists about the GST. But in between telephone calls, Andrew and Joe started talking, liking each other instantly and sparking a friendship that Joe would draw on time and time again as he climbed the ministerial ranks. From the outset of his appointment, Burnes did everything he could to sell the tourism portfolio to him. It employed 650,000 Australians, he said in one phone call to Joe, and represented 6 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Joe’s view on tourism had been formed through his own experience. He saw it as soft, ballooning with the help of poor university students looking for work, and rich families wanting to treat themselves to holidays. His travel experience, inside Australia, was fairly limited. Burnes changed that, taking Joe and Hingerty to Uluru, followed by the Kimberley and ending up in Broome.

In addition to Andrew Burnes, Joe relied heavily on others and set up a pseudo cabinet of business advisors. Peter Hurley, who was the national president of the Australian Hotels Association when Joe took on the role, remembers each catch-up being more like a ‘meeting with a finance man, not a marketing man’. Terry Jackman, then chair of Tourism Queensland, remembers both Joe’s drive and his ability to play the political game. That’s an astute point, and indeed Joe picked business-savvy entrepreneurs who also had the ear of Howard. These people not only knew the prime minister; they sometimes served as his counsel for advice, and Joe saw ingratiating himself with them as a step towards rebuilding the fractured relationship he believed he had with Howard. Inadvertently, in talking to Howard, Joe hoped this group of businessmen would also be selling the government’s tourism minister.

Joe’s parliamentary secretary for tourism at the time was Warren Entsch, federal MP for Leichhardt in Queensland’s top end. Apart from moving to Canberra in the class of 1996, Entsch and Hockey were worlds apart. Joe, the Sydney University graduate, was a lawyer and political operative. Entsch left school at the age of 15, did a stint as a toilet cleaner in a railway, and despite having no interest in politics ended up in parliament. It was during a visit to the Mareeba wetlands that Joe asked Entsch where his property was, and told him he wanted to buy a farm. ‘I thought, what’s a friggen Sydney bloody lawyer thinking, wanting to buy a place in Far North Queensland?’ Entsch says now. He suggested the Hunter Valley would sit more neatly with Joe. It didn’t.

Despite their seeming differences, Joe and Entsch became firm friends and a few years later Joe and Melissa ended up buying the property neighbouring Entsch’s in northern Queensland. In 2003, Joe and Melissa would become the proud owners of 222 acres of farmland just outside Malanda on the Atherton tablelands, snuggled between the Ker and Great Dividing ranges. The Babbage-Hockey clan would travel up a couple of times a year to stay in the 1934 farmer’s cottage and go on to develop strong ties with the previous owners and their new neighbour, Entsch.

Mick Konig had owned the dairy farm for 20 years before selling it to Joe and Melissa – the Babbage Hockey’s calling it Platypus Creek. Konig says Joe drove a hard bargain, telling him he didn’t want the dairy cows as part of the deal, but Konig could see that Melissa wasn’t a silent party to the transaction either. When she talked, everyone listened. He gives, as an example, a chat she had with him while Joe and Entsch were discussing the purchase of some cattle. Konig saw they were wild, having come from the Gulf, earning the nickname in his vocabulary of ‘cape geese’. ‘I was standing on the side looking and Melissa said, “What do you think of these cattle?” I said I’d take them out and shoot them straightaway. She said, “Alright we’ll get rid of them.” ’ Melissa then walked down to Joe and Entsch, and told them to get rid of them, before walking back up to Konig and asking him to stay on as manager.

Within a short time of Joe and Melissa taking over, it shifted from a dairy to beef farm, the meat destined for a butcher in Townsville. In good times, it boasted 400 head. With its undulating hills and big dams, the farm looked as though it had popped out of a picture book. Joe would spend his time on the farm speeding around on the motorbike, driving the tractor too fast, helping to brand cattle and doing a spot of fencing. Often, when he returned to the big smoke of Sydney, Konig would spend a couple of days fixing Joe’s mistakes. ‘He’s not a farmer,’ Entsch says. ‘He used to drive Mick crazy when he’d get onto the quad bike or tractor and Mick would have to fix it up.’ Konig just smiles; his loyalty to Joe stops him saying anything.

At the centre of Joe’s time as tourism minister, however, was the development of a white paper. All new ministers, after an election, get a written brief that includes a statement of expectations. John Howard had asked Joe for a strategy for tourism. This could have been interpreted in many ways – but Joe seized on it. Tourism should have its own white paper just like the defence portfolio, he decided, before quickly calling a meeting and unveiling the idea. Hingerty caught the eye of David Mazitelli, who was the deputy secretary of the department of industry, tourism and resources, as Joe explained his grand plan. ‘You could see it in David’s eyes – at first he’s thinking who is this bloke?’ Hingerty says. But Joe was adamant.

Howard had wanted a plan for tourism, and he was going to get one, on steroids: a ten-year-plan, outlined in a white paper, which would lift tourism from its rut and propel the nation forward.

‘Every minister wanted their own tourism strategy and as soon as you got a new minister you got a new tourism strategy,’ Mazitelli says. He was, understandably, a bit sceptical. ‘My initial view was, here we go again, another one.’ But it didn’t take long before Mazitelli was won over by Joe’s insistence that this would be a genuine whole-of-government document. The plan would go through from a discussion paper, to a green paper and then a white paper, resulting in a plan that, with Cabinet’s endorsement, would become policy. Mazitelli was onside. Entsch believes it was a risk that paid off. Joe promised it publicly, with bells and whistles, and if he couldn’t deliver it, it would smash his political career.

Yet, it was inside the Cabinet room that Joe felt he confronted most resistance. His senior minister was Ian Macfarlane, who had the prized industry portfolio, and Joe felt he was constantly trying to rein him in. Entsch, from the sidelines, saw it as professional jealousy. ‘When there was an opportunity, Macfarlane as the senior minister would stand up and address the crowd and say he was the senior tourism minister and remind people. People didn’t listen; Joe was their champion,’ Entsch, an unashamed admirer of the new treasurer, says.

When the green paper – the precursor to the white paper – was leaked to the media after a Cabinet meeting, Joe, without any real proof, suspected his colleagues. The upshot however, was that Joe had been rolled in Cabinet, reflecting serious reservations around the decision-making table. ‘They opposed it; everyone thought it was a trivial industry,’ Joe says now, despite the irony of him holding a similar view when offered the portfolio.

Nick Minchin, finance minister at the time, says, ‘He basically came to Cabinet with what I regarded, as finance minister, as something of a rather large and overly generous and ambit claim upon the government for funding for tourism. Where there were bids for taxpayers’ funds that I thought lacked merit, I’d do my best to make sure they didn’t succeed.’

So Cabinet sent Joe back to have a fresh look at tourism, and particularly the taxpayer dollars thrown at it. Still, Joe stood his ground. Sure, he reduced the size and ambit of his plans, but was adamant he needed a huge financial boost if it was to be seen as a legitimate business industry. The green paper relied heavily on having a tangible commercial response to rebuilding the nation’s tourism sector.

Ken Boundy, who ran the Australian Tourist Commission, which later became Tourism Australia under Joe’s portfolio, believes the final white paper gave credibility, for the first time, to the industry. But it did more than that. It showered the industry with love, and changed how it was perceived.

Tourism had always been measured by a headcount of people coming through our airports. If it went up, it was viewed as a good year; if it went down it was a bad year. But the terror attacks in September 2001, as well as the Ansett collapse, showed it was more about the money being spent than numbers. Tourism was a business not a pastime, and that was the crux of the white paper – a shift from numbers to profitability. A second focus looked at what we had to offer to attract greater patronage. Overall, it was a new way of looking at tourism, in the same way you might look at the banking or construction or building industries. Having industry onside helped mould the paper, and sell it.

Chris Brown, who headed the Tourism and Transport Forum and whose father, John Brown, had been the Hawke government’s tourism champion, says industry pulled out all stops to get it across the line. For example, every single electorate in the nation was mapped, showing the number of tourism jobs in each MP’s seat. ‘We worked with him to take that through to government to help him sell it,’ he says. So with industry backing, and despite some Cabinet colleagues scoffing at the amount of money Joe was seeking, kudos for the plan built, including inside the prime minister’s office.

Exceptions exist to most rules, and so does it to the claim that all of industry was onside. Joe had regular barneys, too; one of the most notable was with Qantas after it announced it wanted to raise the airline’s foreign shareholding. ‘I wrote to Cabinet and said, basically, over my dead body,’ Joe says. Joe’s view was that they couldn’t have it both ways – trade off the spirit of Australia with their own marketing and then be owned by a foreigner. ‘It was not on,’ Joe says.

Chris Brown remembers the stalemate. ‘Geoff [Dixon, the head of Qantas] and Joe weren’t really chummy at that point in time and I remember thinking, how do I not get in the middle of these two,’ he says.

That exchange provides an interesting backdrop to the decision Joe had to make, post-election, when Qantas sought a government-backed debt guarantee. The same can be said for the debate about the second Sydney airport, because one of the people Joe has clashed with most is undoubtedly Max Moore-Wilton, the former secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, hand-picked by Howard. He is now Sydney Airport Holdings Ltd chairman. Back in 2003, Moore-Wilton (who had moved to Sydney Airport) labelled the young tourism minister a ‘galoot’ for suggesting the airport pay for anti-terrorism security changes demanded by the government.

‘I take a view about politics and politicians that they are doing a public service,’ Moore-Wilton says. ‘It’s the job of those of us who interact with them to assist and help them but [also] to speak frankly to them.’ So, does he believe Joe has matured through the ranks? ‘All of us learn as we grow older,’ Moore-Wilton says. ‘Joe has both ambition and determination – both attributes of a good minister.’ But then comes the rider. ‘It’s not always enough to be right or determined or ambitious. You really need judgment – what I call commonsense. I think John Howard had that in spades, which made him a great prime minister. We will see whether Joe Hockey is a great treasurer.’

Inside the boardrooms, the view of Joe is more favourable, a point made by former staffer and now
Australian Financial Review
‘Rear Window’ columnist Joe Aston. ‘Around the big banks and financial services industry, they love him,’ Aston says. ‘He’s really well liked around the top end of town – almost without exception.’

As tourism minister, Joe found that despite opposition from some of his Cabinet peers to a big-spending tourism manifesto, a couple of senior colleagues stood up to support him. Trade minister Mark Vaile and John Howard headed the list, the latter in part because of the feedback he was receiving from the senior business community, the same people Joe was using both as advocates for the industry and for his own advancement. But on the day Joe’s plan was due back in Cabinet, Howard was away. ‘I knew if it was left to the room I was in trouble because no-one would back me,’ Joe says. That included treasurer Peter Costello, Nick Minchin and Ian Macfarlane, who had offered Joe a small amount of money to build his plan. ‘I told them to shove it,’ he says now.