Hockey: Not Your Average Joe (19 page)

All the while, tensions between Nelson and Turnbull festered. Turnbull wanted to be leader, and, to give him credit, he didn’t hide it. Whoever had nabbed it after Howard would have had the same chase from Turnbull. He considered himself most deserving of the gig, and was happy to fight for it. Nelson describes it as ‘a perfect storm’: Kevin Rudd, an astonishingly popular prime minister, Peter Costello, who could have had the job of Liberal leader but didn’t want to, and Malcolm Turnbull, who really wanted it.

Costello, the one person who could have walked into the leadership if he had chosen to, didn’t really know what he wanted, as evidenced by a meal he shared with Joe once Turnbull had become leader. Joe and Costello met for dinner, behind the big brass doors of La Rustica in Kingston, at Costello’s invitation. ‘I want you to be deputy,’ Joe heard him say. ‘It was at a table in the middle of Kingston where everyone could see,’ Joe says. ‘He said he was going to move, [that] it’s got to be dealt with – I’m ready to lead – will you be my deputy?’

Joe jumped at the chance, and left the dinner believing that he would be Costello’s deputy within weeks. Joe had an enormous fondness for Costello. He looked up to him, particularly politically. But the offer made over dinner never eventuated. Without talking to Joe about the plan again, Costello later announced his retirement plans. Nelson says he remembers Joe relaying the conversation to him. It is written in Joe’s diary: ‘Dinner, with Costello, at La Rustica – 10/3/2009.’

Costello says it never happened: ‘I was never coming back. I announced after the election I was standing down. I was waiting for the by-election and I was negotiating my post-political life. I was never coming back. I was never doing deals with Joe or anyone else. I’d gone. My mind had left the building.’ When pressed, Costello says this might have happened before the 2007 poll, or he could have been talking about Joe running as deputy to someone else. Joe still uses Costello as a sounding board on policy.

Turnbull won a ballot for leader on 16 September 2008, defeating Nelson by 45 votes to 41. Joe again voted against Nelson, who was still living in his garage. ‘My view was just that it was a matter of time. The Party had no money and Turnbull was promising that the Party would have money. It was just all unsustainable.’

Nelson says he was disappointed Joe showed an allegiance to Turnbull, but that it didn’t alter their friendship. Joe wasn’t interested in leading the Party then, but it was at around this time, in 2008, that he first started to think of when he might be in a position to nominate as leader. His
Sunrise
persona lived on in public, and he’d hear repeated requests for him to make a run. Turnbull’s leadership had meant Joe could also swap portfolios with Peter Dutton, moving from health to finance, and that was gift enough. Five months later, he succeeded Julie Bishop as shadow treasurer.

It was during this period – first as Opposition finance spokesman and then as Opposition Treasury spokesman – that Joe’s demeanour would change. The soft-hearted big bear of a man would disappear, in an orchestrated campaign to be seen as an alternative treasurer. Around the shadow Cabinet table, he was a lonely voice arguing against the Rudd government’s $42 billion stimulus package, announced in early 2009.

‘The Building the Education Revolution [which was part of the package] was a complete crock of shit. It was meant to be a stimulus measure but it had none of the elements of that,’ Joe’s then chief-of-staff Andrew Kirk says. ‘You can’t use infrastructure like that as a stimulus measure.’ Kirk deserves much of the credit for changing the perception of Joe as a big-hearted softie. He also authored the ‘debt and deficit’ line that would become the Opposition’s mantra in attacking the big-spending Labor government. Ironically, now in government, that’s changed. The ‘debt and deficit’ argument doesn’t work so well when you need to lift the debt ceiling. How does Kirk, who now works for the NSW government, see that? ‘When you are confronted with the rest of the world printing money to pay for their deficits and an endless increase in debt, then it is very difficult to stand against that. Austerity was destroyed.’

A few months after Rudd announced the stimulus package, the Godwin Grech story broke. Led by Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull, voters heard that Kevin Rudd and/or his treasurer, Wayne Swan, had helped a car dealer seek money from OzCar, a government agency. This would have meant they had misled parliament. The Opposition celebrated its king hit. Some on Labor’s side weren’t unhappy with Kevin Rudd being pulled down a peg or two either.

Former prime minister Bob Hawke and his wife Blanche d’Alpuget were at a dinner party at Joe’s house on the night after the claims were made public. ‘He was convinced that was the end of Rudd,’ Joe says. Both men, unlikely friends spanning different ages and political affiliations, talked about the political fall-out as they had a cigar on Joe’s balcony. Joe’s friendship with Bob Hawke hasn’t been well publicised but goes to Joe’s ability to network, and have friends in all camps. It can be traced back to 1996, when Joe was door-knocking his electorate in a bid to become the MP for North Sydney. He knocked on Bob Hawke’s door, but no one was home. A quick look at the electoral roll provided him with a bit of political ammunition. Two Mrs Hawkes were registered at the address in Joe’s electorate – Blanche and Hazel.

‘I thought I could make a point of this, or I could just ring him.’ Joe went for the latter. Bob appreciated it, and asked him over. They started talking, then playing golf, and socialising at each other’s home. ‘I just love him,’ Joe says. The feeling is mutual.

‘While he’s on the opposite side of the fence to me I often joke with him that I think he’s really right-wing Labor,’ Hawke says. ‘I’ve kidded him, saying I think I’ll run against him. His response is, “Bob, they love you but they wouldn’t vote for you.” ’ Both have common political traits, particularly the lack of stuffiness or remoteness.

‘We both get genuine enjoyment out of moving around and meeting people,’ Hawke says.

Their friendship isn’t hidden; it’s just not too public. But Joe and many on Labor’s side would prove to be wrong over the Godwin Grech affair. It wasn’t Rudd who would be knocked off his perch by Utegate, as it became known. The whole saga turned on Turnbull after it was revealed evidence central to his claim had been fake. That wasn’t the reason he lost the leadership, but it didn’t help. The real game-changer in sending Turnbull packing was the government’s emission’s trading scheme, the same scheme that would both give Joe a tilt at the Party’s leadership and teach him the biggest lesson politics has to offer.

SIXTEEN

Joe was on
his knees, scraping the scree from the top of the mountain. He couldn’t feel his hands, the five layers of clothing needed at this temperature providing a barrier between his fingers and the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest free-standing mountain in the world. The climb to 5895 metres had been harder than anything Joe had ever done, especially the last six hours, which had begun at 1 a.m. Now at the top, he knew what he wanted to do. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a photograph. Brian Freeman, who was watching his charge carefully, didn’t say anything. The other climbers were 60 metres away, in their own thoughts, and preparing for the descent. The air is thin up on the mountain, and breathing becomes difficult. Joe looked at the ultrasound in his hands, wiped away rogue tears, and then buried it atop Mount Kilimanjaro. ‘You are starting life at the top of the mountain, my boy,’ Joe said aloud. Brian couldn’t hear every word, but saw the emotion that had enveloped Joe. Whatever he had just done meant the world to him, Brian thought. Joe then stood up, and together they walked back to the group of climbers, without saying a word.

The ultrasound was of his soon-to-be-born son Ignatius Theodore, the third child he and Melissa would welcome into the world after the heartbreak of losing another. Melissa had experienced a miscarriage, and doctors had warned her that, at 43 and with two toddlers, she would not have another child. Anyone who knows Melissa knows that is a mistake. ‘No-one tells me I can’t do this,’ she told Joe as she left the doctor’s office.

From the time Ignatius, or Iggy, was conceived Joe knew he would be their little miracle, courtesy of a big painting that hung in their lounge room. The artwork, an oil on canvas by 19th-century English painter William Bromley, is titled
Rest By The Way
. It shows a woman, with a boy and a girl. In a certain light you could almost make out two other figures in the background, of another man and woman. Joe had taken it to be restored and once it was cleaned up, he believed it would perfectly mirror his family – Joe, Melissa and their toddlers, Xavier and Adelaide. They had the perfect pair, and the artwork in some symbolic way proved that. But when Joe went to pick up the restored painting he saw that the two figures were in fact carrying an infant baby. He stared at it, knowing the news that Melissa would deliver on his arrival home – she was expecting another child. The artwork, showing three children, still takes pride of place in the family home, an incredible and unnerving proof that Ignatius Theodore Babbage Hockey would make it into the world on 19 October 2009.

But it had been someone else’s child, one Joe would never meet, that was the impetus for the plan to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. The previous year, in May 2008, Joe had attended a fundraising dinner for the Humpty Dumpty organisation, a charity that raises money for medical equipment needed to treat children in hospital. Joe sat at a table beside Melissa, as a nurse from rural NSW told the room about a three-year-old boy who had died because the local hospital didn’t have a piece of equipment called the EZ-IO. In layman’s terms, it’s a drill-type instrument that is used to administer medicine when children are traumatised. Children’s veins can collapse, making it difficult to direct medicine into the blood. This instrument allows the medic to drill into the shin bone and administer the medication.

The nurse had asked Paul Francis, founder and executive chair of the Humpty Dumpty organisation, whether she could speak on the night. ‘She said to me it will never ever happen on her watch again. She said we need this piece of equipment.’ At the dinner, as the heartbreaking story of the unnecessary death of a three-year-old reverberated around the room, Sydney’s well-heeled fell silent before a show of real generosity. Funds for twenty machines, each costing about $1500 each, were raised in a couple of hours.

Joe sat at his seat as bewildered as everyone else. ‘I was angry and upset. I thought, I’ve distributed tens of millions of dollars, looked after Medicare and done all of this. How on God’s earth can this happen in the 21st century?’

He turned to David Koch, who was sitting on the other side of him. ‘We’ve got to do something,’ he said. Former star rugby union player Phil Kearns was there, too. Joe had another glass of red. ‘This can’t happen again in Australia,’ he said, thumping the table. David Koch suggested another Kokoda trek. What about Kilimanjaro? Joe asked. ‘Kearnsey said I don’t climb mountains and I said fuck it, I’m going to do it,’ Joe says. He asked Melissa what she thought, before walking up to Paul Francis and asking whether he could take the microphone off MC Ray Martin. ‘I thought, oh no, another politician needing a microphone,’ Francis says.

‘We’ve got to raise the money so every hospital has one,’ he appealed to the audience. ‘I’m going to climb Kilimanjaro. Who’s in?’ Paul Francis looked out into the audience as, one by one, more than 20 people raised their hands. Joe told them they had to raise $50,000 each to do it, an easy task for him after he pitted John Singleton and Gerry Harvey against each other as donors. (‘He rings and it costs me 50 grand,’ Singo jokes.) But by night’s end, a plan had been hatched to climb the world’s highest freestanding mountain the following year, a plan that would raise $1.6 million for the Humpty Dumpty organisation. It was a year after the climb, in 2010, when the same nurse sought Joe out, telling him he had saved a child’s life because of a machine that was purchased with that fundraising. ‘Outside the birth of my children, that was the best moment of my life,’ he says. All up, 200 machines have now been bought for hospitals across Australia.

Brian Freeman, who had led the Kokoda Track tour for the
Sunrise
team a few years earlier saw in the newspaper that Joe now had his sights set on Mount Kilimanjaro. He was more than a bit worried. Kilimanjaro is marketed as a non-technical climb, and that annoys Freeman no end. It is close to 6000 metres, an extreme mountaineering experience, and makes people susceptible to acute mountain sickness, especially pulmonary and cerebral oedema. Thirty Europeans die each year on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. What’s more, it rises high above Tanzania, a third-world country with no medical protocol or procedures. You had to fend for yourself if something happened. Freeman decided to tender for the job, and he won it, leading the cast of fundraisers the following year. David Koch joined in, along with Andrew Burnes, Paul Francis and more than a dozen others who had committed to Joe’s public appeal the previous year.

In July 2009, the group flew to Johannesburg, and then to Dar Es Salaam, eventually making their way to Arusha, near the mountain. The 20 climbers joined 120 local porters and guides, two doctors and several medics, for the six-night/seven-day trek up Mount Kilimanjaro. First stop was Machame Camp at 3000 metres where Joe and Andrew Burnes shared a tent. They both weighed in at 135–140 kilograms, but considered themselves reasonably fit. That didn’t stop the stomach bug that latched onto Joe for the first few days. With layers of clothing, it made the climb’s first couple of days uncomfortable, to say the least. A smaller climb filled day two, and they slept at Shira Camp at 3840 metres, before setting off on day three to reach Barranco Camp at 3950 metres. That was on Sunday 2 August, Joe’s 44th birthday, and porters were sent back to base to get a cake. By the time it arrived it was late, and the mountain climb the next day had meant people were itching to get back to their tents. The celebration was quick, and the climb resumed hours later.

The days were long, and they could feel the air thin out as they each moved along in their own thoughts. At Kokoda, it was fuel in, fuel out, one step after another. Here it was different; altitude is a strange beast. ‘Kokoda is an eight out of ten physical effort every day,’ Freeman says. ‘Kili is a five out of ten for the first six days and 11 out of ten on your summit day.’

Freeman believes climbers come back better people because of the quietude they experience on the mountain. Often, people atop the career ladder make the climb. At home, they rarely have time for themselves. The trek can force them to think about their priorities.

‘There are no silver medals,’ Joe told himself repeatedly during those long slow steps. ‘You get there or you don’t.’

A couple of days later, they all woke at Barafu camp at midnight, ready for the final full-moon climb to Uhuru peak. An elfin supply of air made sleep elusive. David Koch had made this journey previously, but it was no easier the second time. The night before, they had all been given a letter from someone in their family. Joe read one penned by Melissa, who told him how proud she was of him, and cried. Xavier had added a drawing for good measure. Everyone else on the climb had the same reaction and they had all retired, with emotions running high.

Now, just after midnight, Joe felt the ultrasound photograph in his pocket, and went outside to make the final climb to the peak. In a spontaneous pre-walk speech, Joe turned to the group. ‘We started climbing this mountain well before we even came to Tanzania,’ he said. He quoted the great words of Teddy Roosevelt: ‘Far better to dream mighty things, to seek glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than be amongst those poor souls who need suffer much or enjoy much because they live in the grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.’

There were a couple of rogue words in the quote, but it did wonders for the spirits of those standing around. ‘It was sensational,’ Freeman says. Paul Francis agrees. And with that, they started the seven-hour climb to the summit, the riskiest part of the climb.

‘I didn’t know that he was carrying a picture,’ Freeman says. ‘I was checking on some people and starting to send people down. Joe kind of tapped me and asked me to come with him. We went off beyond the peak and you could see the big crater of Mount Kili on the right.’ They were standing in some light volcanic ash, and Joe took the photograph out from a pocket inside his coat. He knelt down, without saying a word. Brian didn’t know what was happening, but he knew it was important to Joe. ‘I just knelt down beside him. That’s when he started scraping the scree away. We were both on our hands and knees.’

Joe buried the ultrasound. David Koch looked across and saw Joe on his knees. He knew climbers could suffer delirium. ‘I was a bit worried about him,’ he says. But Joe soon rejoined the group, and briefly explained his short tribute to his unborn son. ‘That for me, in all the time I’ve known Joe, is probably the most poignant reflection of him as a human being,’ Koch says.

Once back on home soil, with the achievement of having climbed the highest free-standing mountain in the world, it didn’t take long for Joe to settle back into political life. Only a few short months later he would, for the first time, make a play to climb another mountain – and lead his own Party.