Hockey: Not Your Average Joe (21 page)

Costello says it wouldn’t have mattered if he had changed his mind; Abbott had already done that. Kirk also thought the conscience vote lacked a disciplined view. ‘I said, if you do that, everything we’ve talked about – consistency, discipline – will be chucked out,’ Kirk says. ‘You’ll just be another wishy-washy Kim Beazley.’

Joe’s decision to promise a conscience vote also took Briggs by surprise. Instinctively, he thought people were not going to give their precious vote to someone who was not going to have two feet in either camp. And he was of the belief that Joe should have taken a position other than Turnbull’s – to deliver a clear verdict. ‘I always thought – I still do – he [Joe] had the certain cover to run for leader that he’ll never get again, which is the right-wing patriarch Nick Minchin running his numbers for him,’ he says. ‘Nick basically said to him, Joe if you support the abolition of us proposing this I’ll throw all of our support behind you. It would have been game over.’

In what was another significant set-back to Joe’s bid to become leader, he didn’t call all of those MPs who he thought had his back. Short on time, he had relied on Briggs to lobby other MPs. Briggs made a few calls, but the approach was flawed. Senior MPs didn’t want a new MP calling them on Joe’s behalf. If Joe wanted their vote, he could pick up the phone himself, they thought. In the hurly-burly of politics, you mightn’t attach much weight to that, but at least two senior MPs remain miffed that Joe was not making the calls himself. ‘Any politician worth his salt would have turned over every stone to make sure they were going to win,’ one said. ‘After all, Abbott was working his guts out ringing everyone.’

Another senior Liberal agrees. ‘On that occasion, Joe didn’t do the work. Abbott said he was going to run; he should have got on the phone and called everyone. That feeds the view that he has this destiny thing where he should get things easily.’

One of Joe’s supporters took a call from a third MP late on the night before the ballot. ‘One of them was at dinner with four of his colleagues, so there were five of them at dinner,’ he explains. ‘Some people were saying you either call yourself or you get an older statesman of the Party to call. That was a tactical mistake.’

But Briggs was picking up another problem, too. Those who put themselves on the line to get rid of the ETS were telling him that they couldn’t then support Joe’s conscience vote. They wanted him to take a strong stand. ‘What the fuck is his position on carbon tax?’ one senior person bellowed down the phone to one of Joe’s colleagues. ‘When you’re in politics and you’re asked what your favourite colour is, you can’t say tartan.’

Despite all of this, Joe would still have won if not for Turnbull beating him on the first vote. No-one even contemplated that scenario because Joe was convinced Turnbull had told him, and he had told everyone else, that he was not running. Turnbull is just as adamant that that did not happen. ‘Malcolm had pledged to me that if there was a spill motion that was carried he wouldn’t run,’ Joe says. ‘I believed him. I trusted him. I thought I would win.’

The only time Joe lost his cool, in the lead-up to the vote, was when he saw Family First Senator Steve Fielding playing kingpin on television. Fielding held a crucial vote on whether the legislation would go to committee. Joe asked to see him on Monday, the day before the leadership vote. This was the first real leadership battle where social media carried every nuance, and cameras, including Sky News, were everywhere by the time Fielding knocked on Joe’s door.

Not wanting to talk in front of Minchin and Brandis, Fielding and Joe went to another room. ‘I’d be happy to consider sending it to committee but this has to be between you and me,’ Joe remembers him saying. Meeting over. Until ten minutes later, when Joe was diverted to Sky News revealing, courtesy of Fielding, that Joe had requested it go to committee, a proposal Steve Fielding believed he couldn’t countenance.

‘We just looked at the TV and thought what? Did we speak to the same person?’

The following morning, just ahead of the leadership vote, Fielding swung back past Joe’s office. Just as had happened the previous evening television cameras captured the moment. Joe spoke first. ‘I said, can you shut the door for a sec?’ The door shut, Joe says he gave Steve Fielding a character assessment he hopes he will never forget. ‘I said listen, mate, I’m going to count to five and if you’re still here when I get to five, I’m going to rip your head off. I said I never want to see you again you deceitful prick. One. Two. Three. Four. And he ran out. And that was the last time I ever spoke to him. I was so angry. You don’t treat me like that.’ (Steve Fielding did not respond to several requests for an interview on this matter.)

But Joe’s Party didn’t treat him much better, soon tossing out his leadership plans in the first vote, and writing him into history as slipping up. Two days later, under Abbott’s shiny new leadership, the Party voted against the ETS in the Senate, with two senators crossing the floor.

The loss jolted Joe, and it took four weeks for him to mull over what had happened. Tony Abbott immediately asked Joe to stay in the Treasury portfolio. Melissa didn’t want him to take it. ‘My view was that he should go to the backbench. That’s what I said he should do. I said let them do what they’re going to do. You’ve got a five-week-old and a three- and four-year-old – go to the backbench and have another crack at it later. But he was adamant that he wanted to be part of trying to get rid of the Labor government,’ Melissa says.

Joe accepted the job of remaining Opposition treasurer. He also tried to smooth things over with Turnbull. They had a make-up dinner at a Canberra restaurant to restore their working relationship. Later, Joe says Malcolm told him how hard it had been during that period and how he’d struggled with it. ‘I think that was his way of saying I’m really sorry I dudded you.’

Has he learnt to trust Turnbull again? ‘I’m still going through that process, but I won’t write anyone off forever.’

Melissa is more black and white than her husband. ‘There will always be distrust there,’ she says, carefully. Joe’s father has passed down to Joe a string of advice, and Joe passes others on to his staff. One of his favourites is ‘Hold your nerve.’ Of all the lessons in his failed leadership bid, that might be the hardest to navigate if the leadership question arises again. He won’t be as trusting. And next time, he’ll do the numbers. But can he hold his nerve?

EIGHTEEN

Joe approached the
end of 2009 having spent the better part of three decades immersed in the daily whirl of politics – first as a student politician, then as a state political advisor, a federal MP, junior minister, Cabinet minister and then a senior Opposition frontbencher. He’d come to politics interested by the notion of how it could deliver results by helping people, such as replacing local cricket nets, and how he could be in the middle of that. Call it the inherited sense of obligation from an immigrant dad made good in a new country or the obligation to serve that came out of a Jesuit education, but Joe’s fascination with politics revolved around what it could deliver for those who had chosen him to be their representative. He was very much to the middle rather than the Right of his Party at a time when the Labor Party had been elected with a leader who had also seemed determined to take his Party more to the middle ground. While Joe was Liberal through and through, his philosophical positions were developed rather than innate. This is a peril of modern politics, where focus group responses can go further than guiding the political message and easily stray towards creating the policy position. What was becoming evident in Australian political life was a desire for leaders to stand for a values position – not just to trot out the best lines and espouse what voters had told them through political research.

Considered one of the nation’s best political communicators, Joe had been brought forward by his former leader John Howard to sell the unsalvageable WorkChoices, not because of his policy skills but because of his salesmanship. He consistently stood out in research as one of the most admired politicians in the nation. He had the appeal of being a ‘good bloke’, someone you’d want to have at your home for a barbecue – regardless of your political stance. The
Sunrise
phenomenon was an important part of building the Joe Hockey political persona. But, as important as
Sunrise
was in shaping the political message, it did not allow the scope to colour the picture, to permit a politician to go further than glib responses to the issues chosen by morning TV hosts. Joe was a great political salesman but history is not kind to political leaders whose prime skill is just to shape a message. It was clear that was the limit of Kevin Rudd’s political skill; his attempts to wrap his message in a philosophical position through his critiques of the capitalist system moved him from being the pleasant middle Australian Kevin ’07 to someone beholden to left-wing thinking the nation thought Labor had long left behind.

The Liberals had the same problem. Nelson, as first leader against prime minister Rudd, had a background as a moderate and he had to continually bury the fact that he was once a member of the Labor Party. Turnbull was the Labor voter’s preferred leader but he had to carry the baggage of the republican campaign, a cause more closely aligned to Labor priorities than traditional conservative values. By the end of the year, it was becoming apparent to Joe that the leadership baton could one day come his way, and that he could perhaps achieve his schoolboy ambition of being prime minister. But what sort of prime minister? Aside from being a good bloke, what did Joe Hockey stand for? For the first time, Joe started to seriously consider colouring in the picture of who he was. For, by then, the one other person who could claim the leadership had well and truly defined who he was and what he stood for.

That person was Tony Abbott, Joe’s fellow alumni from The University of Sydney, fellow Jesuit, fellow Howard government frontbencher and someone well defined in the public mind. Abbott had always been a values politician. He wore his Catholicism on his sleeve, was an arch-conservative and presented an almost frightening persona, so much so that he was universally known as the ‘Mad Monk’. Joe was every bit as much a Liberal as Abbott, every bit as committed to Liberal causes as Abbott, but there was no doubt that Abbott behaved as Captain Conservative while Joe behaved as the reasonable man in the middle.

As much as
Sunrise
had boosted Joe’s profile, it also ran the risk of putting a cap on his ambitions unless he could do better to define himself to voters and Party members who wanted a leader to stand for something; to not just be a master of the soundbite. In a process that he began on the eve of the 2009 leadership battle, and escalated the following year, Joe emerged with a new determination – approaching his portfolio with renewed vigour and inspired to address some of the perceptions that he saw unfold during the leadership debate about the breadth of his philosophical foundation in politics. His headland speeches – on liberty and youth, enterprise and the age of entitlement – were aimed at illuminating those political motivations that drove Joe in politics. The speeches were aimed at ensuring that people knew where Joe came from, and where he was headed. Voters had a gut instinct of where Abbott and Howard sat in the body politic. Not so with Joe.

The political environment heading into 2010 was the most volatile it had been since 1975. It seemed that almost each day a new headline would herald a new drama, as the government fought for space. In April, Rudd, as prime minister, deferred the commencement of the proposed CPRS, the following month he announced the government would tax the super profits of the mining industry, and in June he was deposed in a leadership spill by Julia Gillard. The following month, she announced changes to the Resource Super Profits Tax (later known as the Mineral Resource Rent Tax), and a month later a federal election ended in a hung parliament. A changed media landscape meant politicians were acting in a 24-hour news cycle, a giddy delivery of news that added to the bedlam. It was a trend that would continue over the next couple of years, as the parties waged a battle over asylum seeker policy, as well as the carbon price scheme that was introduced in July 2012 – a few months after another attempt to white-ant Gillard left her national leadership fragile. It was into that mix, that Joe determined he would answer the question: ‘What does Joe Hockey stand for?’

Tony Pearson acts and looks a bit like you would expect a banker to act and look. Serious. Fairly monosyllabic. Thinks before he speaks. Puts everything in some sort of context. And, first as the Opposition treasury’s director of policy and then, after the 2010 election, as chief-of-staff to the Opposition treasurer – that’s what he wanted his boss to mirror: a good solid banker. Pearson was from the banking and finance world, having had big gigs at both the ANZ and the Reserve Bank, before being lured to work for Joe. But as a senior staffer in his office, even before the important chief-of-staff role, he anguished over the public image Joe had. ‘The way I think about MPs in general and Joe in particular is that he is the rock star and we are the management, particularly the chief-of-staff. You’ve got to manage him like a talent,’ he says. Pearson knew that voters wanted their treasurer to be reliable and credible, just like their own banker. Even a bit boring perhaps. He tested his view each time he interviewed someone for a job in the office. ‘I’d say to them, you want to work for Joe – what’s his image? Sometimes they’d say negative things – early on they would say he’s a nice guy, he’s well-liked, a man of the people, possibly laid-back, a bit lackadaisical, a bit happy-go-lucky. I’d say, if you were advising him, what would you do? It wasn’t Joe’s stance on an issue that was the subject of conjecture; it was how he came across.’

Three issues rose on the presentation front, with his weight being the chief one. Although Joe had climbed Kokoda and Mount Kilimanjaro, the 12-hour days required of his political work would exhaust him with his big bulky frame letting him down. So was his propensity to sweat. While make-up was used under the heavy hot television spotlights or in a packed media scrum, the sweat would still build on his face before beginning the trickle down his neck. That annoyed him, but it also made him look as though he was nervous, or not being wholly candid. Staff wondered whether his size contributed to that, but no-one was going to say that to his face. The third issue was less obvious during media scrums, but very noticeable in set speeches. He seemed to huff and puff, breathing erratically. Joe put it down to a childhood of asthma. Others thought he would benefit from speech lessons, not unlike those he was dragged along to by his sister as a youngster. On Andrew Burnes’s recommendation, an expert in delivery was brought in to assess his speech patterns, and help him control his breathing. To Joe, it was all a bit airy-fairy and while he entertained it at the request of those around him, it was a fleeting relationship.

Joe knew that the public perception of him as the big, jovial Armenian Santa Claus had to change, particularly if he was to be treasurer, and possibly prime minister one day. He needed to look different, feel better, and lose the media appearances that were all fun and no substance. He had to get serious, and he began the journey just before his leadership bid and worked on it right through Opposition until government was wrested off Labor in 2013.

Joe changed in many ways. He’d been happy to cruise along in 2009, allowing Party members to try and rope him into the leadership, but after the loss, which he found humiliating, his confidence took a pounding. In parlance once used in Melissa’s athletic world, he had been picked for the team, only to be benched before he got the chance to show his talent on-field. His Party had sought him out, and then stopped him getting across the line. As well as chipping at his confidence, that made him stop and reflect. ‘That’s when he really thought, I want to, be prime minister,’ one senior staffer says.

That seminal moment led to a change of attitude for Joe, too. He had always considered himself as being across his work, despite the ‘Sloppy Joe’ moniker, and John Howard says he never saw otherwise. Peta Credlin, Abbott’s chief-of-staff, agrees, saying the ‘Sloppy Joe’ tag would never have been directed at a woman ‘They [Labor] were trying to fit Joe up for being big and lazy and not across his brief. I think people might have underestimated his actual intellect.’

Joe now needed to be
seen
as being across his brief. He stopped delegating as much and did more himself, sitting with a red pen and going through speech drafts and writing over them for hours at a time. He became more careful with his words; instead of attacking the banks, he’d attack the treasurer over the banks. Semantics perhaps, but it was also clinically strategic, and gradual. There were to be no more appearances in a tutu, but he still accepted invitations to appear on
The Project
on Channel Ten.

He brawled with himself over any mistakes he made, such as a poor performance attacking the 2010–11 Budget, when previously he would have moved on quickly. He even called former prime minister Paul Keating, made an appointment at his Potts Point office, and asked him about competition policy and getting states onside. Joe mended a few fences along the way, including with his now good friend and member for Moncrieff Steven Ciobo, with whom he had fallen out over conflicting views on the access card.

‘Avuncular Joe was never going to cut the mustard if he was going to be leader of the Liberal Party,’ Christopher Pyne says. ‘I think it dawned on him in Opposition that there just wasn’t any support anymore. There’s no department and there’s hardly any staff. If you’re going to make it you have to make it on your own. But after we had been in Opposition for a few years and then lost again in 2010, he shook off the “woe is me” routine. He decided in the last term that if one day I’m going to be the leader I’m going to have to toughen up.’ That transformation – from jocular Joe who always said ‘yes’ to the unsmiling face demanding an end to entitlement – was helped by his opposite number Wayne Swan. Joe likes most people, but he couldn’t cop Wayne Swan; he was desperate to knock him off, and that fed a killer instinct.

Joe had come to the Liberal Party after impressing its NSW elders with his performance as an Independent at Sydney University. He had decided to pursue a political career within the Party after giving himself a crash course in political philosophy. His maiden speech to parliament in 1996 drew on some of that reading, in particular what he described as three principles of modern liberalism – recognition of the rights of the individual, belief in parliamentary democracy and a commitment to improve society through reform. His definition drew on the work of 18th-century philosophers John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. Joe told parliament:

Liberalism has traditionally steered a course between the extremism of the far Left and the reactionary conservatism of the far Right. Liberalism is most comfortable when it is developing new ideas and setting new goals. It encourages us to nurture expression in areas like the theatre, music, dance and cinema. It encourages us to excel in sport through better training techniques and improved fitness. It encourages us to succeed in business with better work practices and innovative products. Liberalism has a reformist zeal: to reach higher, to move faster and to grow stronger. This will deliver a society that the greatest Australian Liberal, Sir Robert Menzies, described as a nation of lifters and not leaners.

On a more practical level, Joe’s first speech to parliament also cited his father’s immigrant past and the importance of that influence on him, and issued a challenge to the community to improve on its treatment of women.
‘We should abandon the politically correct platitudes about equality and honestly acknowledge that there remain entrenched societal and institutional impediments to women’s equal and active participation in either or both the home and work communities,’
he said. Like almost all those who went before him, Joe’s maiden speech went largely unnoticed – particularly given the queue of those who were lined up to deliver their first address to parliament in the class of 1996. But even so, Joe had written into history the reasons he sought election. He had pinned his philosophical colours to a mast then and it was those values that he looked to now to define his future.