Hockey: Not Your Average Joe (17 page)

But while he had escaped Labor’s fire, Joe knew it was fruitless selling the plan while penalty rates couldn’t be negotiated or traded without compensation. It was a glaring problem with the new laws. Joe had picked it up on the street. Whithear and Briggs knew it. Knight and Clancy, who had desks close to one another, would spend hours mulling over how it might be different. ‘We couldn’t answer that question,’ Clancy says. ‘You could try and explain it away, but the reality was that it was theoretically possible to offer a contract of employment without them.’

Worsening the impact of WorkChoices were the single parents it was going to hit badly, and there was no way around that. The union began targeting key seats, such as Longman in Queensland, which held a high degree of single mothers. Welfare to Work, which introduced a work obligation on single parents – largely mothers who had children aged over eight years – was now operating, and this only added salt to the wound. ‘They’re not complainers,’ Joe says. ‘But we were hitting them every which way.’

But it wasn’t just single mothers being targeted in the government’s plans. ‘We’d provided the lightning rod for every complaint you’ve ever had about your boss,’ Joe told Whithear on one trip. ‘And everyone has a complaint against their boss, so we can’t win that argument.’

Each day would start at about 6 a.m., with the union movement’s latest example – such as a teenager on a building site who had lost his penalty rates – taking pride of place in newspapers, and then on talkback radio. Emotions ran high. Security had to be called in Cairns when an event to support local candidate Charlie McKillop turned ugly. As former tourism minister, Joe knew hotel staff in Perth were making a point when he was assigned a room that looked more like a dungeon than hotel accommodation. State Labor governments were engaged, state-based unions were working together and the strength of a single message shone through, closing the door on Joe’s attempts to win voters over.

MPs were being abused in their electorates, too, and were queuing up to ask why their government was hell-bent on the reform. Senior ministers also saw the flaws. ‘Tony Abbott [health minister at the time] complained to Joe in the corridor once that his daughter was working but she only had a two-hour shift,’ Whithear says. It wasn’t worth firing up the family car to take her to work. Joe remembers the conversation. Across the board, the government’s industrial relations vision was failing and it could only blame itself. It had been the recipient of an unexpected majority in 2004, which had offered the chance for real industrial relations reform, but had failed to condition the electorate or properly explain its plans. For too long inside the party, the view had been that WorkChoices would mirror the GST. ‘We thought people would live it and then they’d find out there is no bogeyman,’ Joe says.

The NSW election, in March 2007, forced a turning point. The Liberals were expected to win in NSW and lost again to Labor, with internal polling showing that while it wasn’t the only issue, industrial relations had played a role in voters turning against the Party. The day after Labor’s Morris Iemma was reinstalled premier of NSW, Joe picked up the phone to Briggs. ‘We have to change this,’ he said.

‘Good luck,’ Briggs shot back. Briggs and the Party’s federal director Brian Loughnane both knew the problem was two-fold. First, industrial relations was Howard’s love child, and it was hard to imagine he would change, whatever the polls were saying. Second, the Cabinet didn’t really understand the reform, or how difficult it was, and it might be too late to educate them; Abbott was one of the few exceptions. But the unions had won, that was clear. It was very easy to scare people, and very hard to prove the scare might not always come true.

The following month, in April 2007, Cabinet ministers sat in Brisbane voicing their concerns about WorkChoices and the inability of the government to convince the public otherwise. Months after it was being aired on talkback and being discussed by advisors, those around the table acknowledged it was the policy around unfair dismissals and penalty rates that was the real bugbear. Excising the no-disadvantage test, in the government’s reforms, gave bosses the ability to employ with fewer conditions than they had previously been required to do. It was toxic. But what was particularly startling around this Cabinet table was the basic lack of knowledge about the laws, particularly the intricate workings of the no-disadvantage test. Senior ministers were asking questions that showed they didn’t understand the product they were selling to their electorates – the jewel reform they had pegged on their majority. One even questioned whether they had taken out the no-disadvantage test. ‘Our side was not across it and thought it would pass,’ one minister says. And as Joe points out, ‘We all underestimated the determination of the unions to run a real campaign.’

Earlier that month, on 6 April 2007, Briggs had holed himself away to work on an alternative fairness test. The word ‘fair’ had come up in internal focus groups, run out of Joe’s office. ‘The no-disadvantage test was the key,’ advisor Wendy Black says. But everyone knew Howard would never reintroduce what he had removed. That would amount to a loss, a backflip that would have the nation’s tabloid cartoonists doing spins. The word ‘fair’ curried points in the internal polling. Could a fairness test, a moniker for a reintroduced no-disadvantage test, do the trick?

Briggs put pen to paper, nutting out how it might work, and a few weeks later on Anzac Day, 25 April, a group visited the Lodge to put its case to Howard. Brian Loughnane was there. So was Briggs, advisor Peter Conran and Tony Nutt. Joe, who was in Sydney, had agreed to the fairness test, and crossed his fingers as it was delivered to Howard.

‘He hit the roof,’ Briggs says now. Two hours of discussion followed, as the men sat at the Lodge trying to talk Howard around. ‘He just didn’t want to do it,’ Briggs says. But pragmatism won out, and the prime minister tentatively agreed.

That weekend several advisors, lawyers and public servants locked themselves in the North Sydney Harbourview Hotel, just next to Joe’s office, to write up the changes; working their way through what to change, how to change it, who it would apply to, and how it would apply. A discussion on salary caps led to heated debates, particularly over whether agreements would be lodged and how they would be monitored. Briggs led the discussions when he was in the room. Clancy and Knight took over in his absence. Whithear, Joe’s chief-of-staff, as the only non-member of the ‘IR Club’ did what he could to extract something that might be communicated easily to the public. Joe visited regularly, rolling up his sleeves to help out, and two days later on 30 April 2007, Howard agreed to the changes. Joe knew they would never win the looming election with WorkChoices, but the fairness test gave the government a fighting chance.

James Chessell, who had been Joe’s media advisor before becoming a policy advisor, and his replacement Emma Needham, had their work cut out for them, trying to cut through the negative stories that dominated debate. Each morning, the media calls would start at 6 a.m., and go through until 9 p.m. With the odd exception, the story would garner coverage at the top of the news, whether it was the newspaper, breakfast television or current affairs radio. ‘Bastard bosses’ became the flavour of the month, and the Liberals’ eleventh-hour fairness test did nothing to abate the voter anger over it. It was relentless.

Seven days a week Briggs, acting on Howard’s authority, would be demanding Joe front the cameras and sell the plan. Joe’s media strength was also his weakness, a point his staff tried repeatedly to change during this period. They sat him down, explaining how he could beat Julia Gillard in a debate on most days, but then occasionally blow himself up on commercial radio. The problem was, Joe wasn’t a robot, and the down-to-earth persona he showed on
Sunrise
, sometimes didn’t work in a political environment. One advisor gives the example of Penny Wong and her ability to repeat the same message over and over again. ‘Joe said he wanted to be himself because that’s why people liked him,’ he says.

As with so many things in life, the release of the government’s new fairness test came down to timing. The shadow of the 8 May Budget grew long. John Howard had an announcement in his back pocket about the fairness test and a new Ombudsman, and had a final meeting with Joe in Melbourne two days before it would be made public. ‘But there was no feeling that we’d fixed this or we could now win the election,’ one advisor, who sat in on the meeting, says. ‘We’d just put lipstick on a pig, really.’

Labor had released its industrial relations policy, earlier that month, but were drip-feeding extra chunks of it through April. It was going down like a lead balloon. Howard wanted to see Labor bleed, and had delayed the announcement for a few days. Then eventually, he picked up the phone to the nation’s editors, one by one, briefing them on the changes before announcing them publicly in Melbourne on 4 May.

It didn’t make any difference. The battle was lost; the unions, more than the ALP, had outsmarted the Howard government by tying WorkChoices to everything – price rises, safety issues and the cost of living. The government looked and acted tired. Squabbles between Costello and Howard continued to get louder. Rudd looked fresh and energetic, popping up across the nation. The atmosphere in government offices, including Joe’s, was despondent. In human services, the mood had been serene and calm, staff joking that the biggest worry was an occasional story in
The Australian
about people rorting Centrelink. Now, with the battle almost definitely lost, the smile Joe wore on
Sunrise
disappeared. His demeanour was dark as the government marched towards an inevitable defeat.

Whithear joined Joe on the roof of his North Sydney office one night to have a sneaky cigar. He tried to cheer him up. If you deliver on this and get the government out of trouble, he told Joe, you’ll be seen as a hero. But the flip side could be spun, too. If you can’t win it for them, a leading moderate in NSW would be tarnished. And with lots of voters, that wasn’t a bad way to be seen either.

But Joe’s concern was not just the fate of his own government. He now started to worry about his own seat of North Sydney. His WorkChoices sell-job meant he was travelling the nation constantly, and voters in his own electorate looked like giving him a good backhander. He reached for a chocolate, his growing girth proof of both his mood, and his shot confidence.

FOURTEEN

It was Sunday
night in September 2007, and Joe was feeling edgy. He knew he had to call prime minister John Howard and have a conversation neither of them would fancy. ‘You can’t call the prime minister and tell him to go,’ Melissa said. But Joe was adamant. He’d told other Cabinet ministers a few days earlier that he believed Howard should vacate the prime ministership, but he hadn’t had the guts, yet, to tell him himself. He walked into the children’s toy room, a big colourful space that adjoins the kitchen, and called Howard at Kirribilli House. ‘Thanks for taking my call,’ Joe began.

‘No worries,’ Howard replied. ‘I suspect I know what this is about.’

A few days earlier, as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings were playing out in Sydney, an air of panic was hovering over the Liberal Party, with a growing realisation that pulling it out of the doldrums with less than three months until the election was nigh impossible. Those inside the room at the overseas passenger terminal, where a big APEC dinner was being staged, wouldn’t have known that, but it was there that Liberal MP Alexander Downer asked Joe to come around to his suite in the Quay Grand Hotel for a chat, and he joined others, including Philip Ruddock, Kevin Andrews, Julie Bishop and Brendan Nelson, to ponder the polling that voters wanted to hit the government for six. Neither Tony Abbott nor Mal Brough was there.

Joe stood on the verandah, enjoying a cigar, when Alexander Downer opened the batting. ‘He said the prime minister had asked to speak to us. He was asking for our view on whether he should go now, and pass over to [Peter] Costello.’ A thought dominated Joe’s thinking; earlier in the year, Joe believed that Howard had been behind the publication of a suggestion that he had asked Cabinet whether the poor polling could be sheeted home to him. It had really annoyed Joe. ‘It was spun by him that he’d asked the Cabinet whether it was [him], and they’d all said no. Everyone went, hang on, I don’t remember that conversation in Cabinet.’

Now he listened, as Downer went around the room, with each person giving their view on whether Howard should vacate the prime ministership. ‘You know Bennelong,’ Downer directed the next question to Joe. ‘Is he going to hold Bennelong?’

‘No, he’s gone,’ Joe said. Joe was sure of this, based on polling in his own seat, which neighboured Bennelong. North Sydney, over the years, had slowly bitten into chunks of the Liberal stronghold of Bennelong. Howard’s own home at Wollstonecraft had dropped out of Bennelong in a 1977 electoral redistribution. Lane Cove and Hunters Hill were excised later, and it was internal polling Joe had done in Lane Cove, which he now represented, that highlighted the unpopularity of Howard. Joe told the posse of politicians that Rudd, who had toppled Beazley and been installed as Labor leader ten months earlier, in December 2006, was preferred prime minister by a big margin in Lane Cove, an area the prime minister had once represented.

‘He has to go,’ Joe told Downer. ‘He has to pass to Peter Costello and our only chance of winning is if there is a baton change to Costello.’

Joe looked across at Nelson, who stood opposite him, remembering a conversation the pair had shared months earlier. Nelson was adamant the government would end the year in Opposition. At that stage, months earlier, Joe had not been so sure. ‘They don’t like doing it but they [the public] are going to put us down,’ Nelson said. ‘It’s just time. It’s like an old family dog.’

As the year wore on, Nelson’s assessment had proved right. Rudd’s ascension had made the Labor Opposition look fresh and fight-ready. That was helped by a complacent government, in which the leadership team, including Howard, underestimated Kevin from Queensland. In January that year, as the Howard government disappeared on annual breaks, Rudd ran free. Howard himself was not panicked, though. He was preparing his own reshuffle over the Christmas–New Year break and believed a Cabinet rejuvenation would see off the new threat. Yet it was during this period that Rudd was allowed to define himself – in many ways as an alternative, younger Labor version of Howard, a stable fiscal conservative – and the Liberal team spent 2007 trying to catch up.

‘We’d come back from the dead in 2004,’ Joe says now. ‘John Howard had seen off one young Turk [Latham] and he was waiting for this young Turk [Rudd] to fade and fall apart – and he didn’t. We were completely divorced from what the punters were thinking.’

Back in Downer’s suite the conversation remained focused on Howard. The inference that hovered over discussions was that Howard wanted his ministers to ‘knife him’, rather than voluntarily step aside for Costello. None of those present liked the idea, aware that a decision to bring down a prime minister would collapse their own vote. ‘Everyone agreed that we shouldn’t give him a leave pass because we would be blamed and we would lose,’ Joe says.

Downer says: ‘It was our view if we knifed him we would go down in a huge screaming heap in the electorate. Howard was not particularly unpopular with the punters, they were just tired of him. In Liberal heartland, he was a hero. And if you knife your heroes not only do you beatify them but you do the exact reverse to yourselves as the knife wielders. You demonise yourselves.’

A few days later, Joe had not heard back from Downer, who had gone to convey the group’s view to John and Janette Howard at Kirribilli house. That’s when, on the Sunday evening after discussing it across the kitchen table with Melissa, Joe decided to pick up the phone and tell the prime minister he should step down.

‘I think you should hand over to Peter,’ Joe said. ‘If you hand over to Peter now, we have a chance of winning the election. I don’t think you’ll win Bennelong and I don’t think we’ll win the election. Our best chance is to have an orderly transition.’ They talked about it. Joe said the public had turned; when the prime minister now talked about the future, they had stopped listening because they did not believe he would be there long term. Instead, they were listening to Rudd.

‘He said, “You don’t think I’m just going to hand over to Peter Costello, do you?” ’ Joe says.

‘I was surprised. I said you set the test. You said when it’s in the best interests of the nation and the best interests of the Liberal Party …’ Joe trailed off.

Howard was adamant. ‘I am not handing over to Peter Costello. I’m not going to do that,’ Joe recalls him saying.

Howard’s memory is of a conversation a lot less pointed. ‘He had a telephone conversation with me. He only just said [that I should go] … He just said it in the same way that Mal Brough said it,’ Howard says. ‘He had wanted to put it on the record as having said it.’ In any case, the conversation ended on a convivial basis, with Howard thanking his minister for having the courage to make the telephone call.

‘And that was it,’ Joe says.

But it wasn’t. With parliament resuming it soon leaked out that Cabinet had contemplated getting rid of the prime minister. ‘I was beside myself with anger because he had invited it,’ Joe says. Joe went around to Costello’s office telling him that spin was outrageous. Joe had always been a strong supporter of Costello, but not the agitator for change he has been described as. Howard says he was never conscious of Joe pushing for change earlier on. ‘I never doubted Joe’s professional behaviour,’ he says. ‘I never ever doubted Joe’s loyalty or partnership as part of the team. I could accept, quite benignly, that people might reach a point where they think it is time for a change.’

Joe was sure that now was the right time. Howard needed to step aside, and give Costello a wafer-thin chance of leading the government to victory again. He believed Howard should walk into the Party room and admit that he had sought opinion of his ministers on whether he should go, and he told Costello just that. It was a very different view from the one beginning to become public, that the Party might dispense with their leader. ‘If he won’t do that, I’ll move a spill motion on the floor of the Party room,’ Joe told Costello. Costello then left his office to meet Howard.

Later, Howard told the Party room that he had invited opinion on whether he should opt out of the prime minister’s office, and that he would only stay on for half the next term. Many believed that Howard had let everyone believe an act of disloyalty had occurred against him when he had invited it. ‘It was a joke that he could pretend that he was able to lead the Party and the Party was united behind him because everyone knew his Party wanted him to go,’ Costello says. ‘This was his sort-of concession. He came into the Party room and said, “Look I’ve decided to stay but I’ll go after the next election.” ’

Dismal polling – both public and private – for the government added to its woes, as the public embraced Rudd. Joe knew Rudd better than most on the Right, and in fact, his friendship with the Opposition leader had annoyed many of his colleagues. They believed Rudd was playing Joe – using Joe’s public profile to boost his own. Downer had grown to despise Rudd over the Australian Wheat Board saga, which had hurt the government, and didn’t like Joe joining Rudd for the ‘Big Guns of Politics’ session on Network Seven’s
Sunrise
each Friday morning.

At every turn, Joe was told he was helping advance Rudd’s interests
.
‘Their view was that the whole reason Rudd was popular was because he was on
Sunrise
– get him off
Sunrise
and you would really dent his popularity,’ Joe says. Thank goodness they hadn’t seen the pair of them at a Christmas party at David Koch’s home a couple of years earlier. ‘I was never a threat to him, so he was nice Kevin,’ Joe says. ‘He was always nice to me. We always got on well. I remember at Kochie’s house at the Christmas party the year before he became leader, giving him advice. We stood in the corner and he said, how do I become leader of the Opposition and I gave him all this advice.’ Joe was even invited to Kevin’s daughter Jess’s wedding, but reluctantly declined on the strong advice from his office. Joe genuinely liked the Kevin Rudd he shared the
Sunrise
breakfast stage with, and his parliamentary colleagues got his back up when pressure rose to get rid of any contracts Kevin’s wife, Thérèse Rein, had with the department (those common law contracts came out of Joe’s department). ‘I was livid about it,’ he says now. ‘You never play the spouse.’

The whole saga came to a head in April 2007, after five years on the program, following controversy over plans to stage a pre-dawn Anzac Day service in Vietnam, a plan blamed on Kevin Rudd that led to accusations it would cheapen commemorations. For someone so adept at handling the media, Joe underestimated this story, which blared across newspaper, radio and television: FAKE DAWN.

Usually, before the segment, there would be playful banter between the two politicians and their hosts. But this Friday, conversation was cool. Joe didn’t think too much of it, and played down the story when asked about it. That infuriated many of his colleagues, because it offered Rudd, who was being blamed for orchestrating the fake dawn, a get-out-of-jail-free card. They had expected Joe to launch a strong attack on his on-air opponent.

After the segment appeared, Joe’s mobile rang incessantly, with the first call from Howard’s office. ‘You can’t keep doing this,’ he was told. That was as close as anyone got to directing him to stop it, but the warnings that their laid-back friendship was helping Rudd came thick and fast and not just inside parliament.

‘I’ll never forgive him,’ John Singleton says. ‘He was such a good talent and he had this wuss with him and he dragged him into being popular. He [Rudd] would never have been prime minister without Joe’s help. Joe carried him.’

Still, today, some of his ministerial colleagues are furious the segment continued for the five years that it did. ‘He could have used it to deal a big blow to Rudd. He never did. He wanted to be popular and that would have made him at the time unpopular,’ one senior Liberal says. ‘He would not raise any negative story about Rudd on
Sunrise
and that’s because the
Sunrise
people would have told him that that kind of negativity wasn’t popular on television,’ another says. ‘Despite being told to do that by the government, he wouldn’t have wanted to because he might have been pushed off
Sunrise
.’

Following the airing of the ‘Fake Dawn’ episode Joe knew that he could be blamed if Rudd won. He agreed to end it, and on 19 April 2007, David Koch announced the news the two politicians had called it quits. ‘Politics can sometimes be a pretty nasty game and it was never the intention of the segment to get bogged down in that,’ Koch told viewers. It was politics, no doubt, that ended the television t
ê
te-
à
-t
ê
te and while the ‘Fake Dawn’ episode was portrayed as another example of Kevin Rudd’s media manipulation abilities, it was colleagues on Joe’s side who were behind the initial leak.

Joe couldn’t turn a trick at work, or at home. It was also in mid-2007 that Adelaide, who was just over six months old, contracted chicken pox. The couple now had two small children, and Melissa had returned to work. But at home she was taking calls during the night. Joe rarely saw her angry but each night she came to bed frustrated, after spending hours on international phone calls. Melissa, despite the enormous influence she holds over her husband, was fully aware of their professional separations. She rarely discussed the details of her work with Joe but based on what she saw happening in offshore markets she wanted them to offload all the family’s investments. This was before any suggestion was being publicly made that Australia was heading into recession. ‘She wanted to sell everything we owned,’ Joe says.

Joe called David Koch, respecting his opinion. Koch says, ‘Joe rings me and says, “Melissa is making me sell everything we own. She says a recession is coming, the biggest recession since the Great Depression. I’ve convinced her to keep our house but she’s selling everything else.” I said really? This is at the height of the share market boom.’ But she picked it. ‘If ever I have any worries about the economy or the markets, I’ll ring Joe and ask what Melissa thinks,’ Koch says.