Hockey: Not Your Average Joe (5 page)

A couple of days later, Joe buried himself in documents at Sydney University’s Fisher library. He wanted to match his views with those of John Stuart Mill and see whether it was in the Liberal Party, not the Labor Party, where he would fit naturally. He then went to the Blue Mountains, to the holiday home his parents owned, and shut himself off from family and friends for two days, returning with a decision that would chart the next step in his career. ‘I saw no option but to join the Liberal Party,’ he says. It embodied the value of personal responsibility, of caring for people by using a trampoline so that they could jump out of the safety net. Don Harwin, a fellow student and a bigwig in Sydney University’s Liberal Club, liked that. He had seen Joe operate at close quarters, and the tectonic shift in student politics Joe had navigated. It was unfathomable how he could have taken the SRC president’s job without being part of a Party machine. He was gutsy, happy to take on anyone and gave as good as he got. He also had the knack of building followers. Don Harwin had plans for Joe Hockey, and they didn’t stop with him signing up to join the Liberal Party.

FIVE

Cigarettes and beer
were on offer in an upstairs room in NSW’s Parliament House. It was late, nearing midnight, the end of winter in 1990, and this meeting had been going since early afternoon. It had started in the dining room, and eventually moved upstairs. Three Young Liberals, all with dibs on the job of NSW president, sat around a table. John Brogden thought he deserved it. So did Trent Zimmerman. And Joe Hockey. But they all knew only one of them would be acceptable to the Party power brokers sitting several metres away. Don Harwin was the outgoing president and held enormous sway in the decision. In fact, he was immovable. He sat with Liberals John Booth, Michael Photios, Ted Pickering, John Hannaford and Ron Phillips, willing the young men to make the right decision so they could all go home. ‘The process was actually known as white smoke,’ Zimmerman says. ‘If the Young Liberals couldn’t decide who would be president, then a few of the Party elders got together in a room with alcohol and let us battle it out. It was the last man standing. They weren’t there to arbitrate – but to guide the decision.’

Brogden and Zimmerman were annoyed at being asked to put aside their ambitions for Joe, who had been declared ‘hot property’ by the Party’s hierarchy, but particularly by Harwin. ‘We had done the hard yards. We’d done all the branch work and then Joe sauntered in and got a rails run,’ Brogden says. Zimmerman, too, had been gathering support from his peers in the hope of nabbing the post. ‘John and I thought we had more support than Joe. It wasn’t ugly because we were all friends; there was no knock-it-down fight but John and I played on the fact that we had been doing the work for a long time, understood the organisation, and had better roots in the organisation.’

But that argument didn’t wash. The elders didn’t tell them how to vote – just what to think – and that was that Joe would be better at representing the Young Liberals in the broader community, the wider Party and the media, because of his experience as SRC president. Joe also boasted a corporate background, as a young lawyer with Corrs Australian Solicitors (later Corrs Chambers Westgarth), a job he’d started in 1990. John and Trent were NSW political staffers. Eventually, with an eye on sleep, the three candidates walked out to tell Booth, Photios and Harwin they’d made the right choice. Joe Hockey would become the 1991–92 NSW Young Liberals president, but they’d done a deal involving a two-year succession plan. Zimmerman and Brogden would be Joe’s vice-presidents, and then Zimmerman would follow Joe as president, taking over in 1992–93, and then John Brogden would get his turn in 1993–94. Dennis Koutoulogenis would be Joe’s third vice-president, responsible for administration.

Don Harwin believed they’d been guided to the correct decision. He shook their hands. It was an excellent choice, he told them. Don had already annoyed some in the Party by leap-frogging Joe into the senior vice-president’s position the year earlier. The Young Liberals boasted strong presidents who went on to elected office, and he was determined Joe would follow in the footsteps of other presidents, such as John Howard (1962–64), Philip Ruddock (1971–72), Chris Puplick (1974–76) and Michael Photios (1984–85). ‘I was a total unashamed backer and I wanted him,’ Harwin says. ‘Being president I believed would be a huge boost, so I made that condition very clear.’

Don was following his political instinct, based on Joe’s on-campus performance. Not long after Joe had taken office as SRC president, Harwin made his way down to level one of the Wentworth Building to introduce himself. Harwin had been about to run for the Sydney University Union Board and wanted to harness the college vote Joe had shown was possible as part of a broad coalition ticket. Joe listened, made a token effort, but Harwin was unsuccessful. At that stage Joe had fended off his offers of joining the Liberal Party, but Don Harwin didn’t give up, and soon after Joe’s term as SRC president was up, he set about finding a suitable role in the Young Liberal Movement for Joe to sink his teeth into – and, more importantly, get noticed.

Matt Hingerty found himself working as an electorate assistant for NSW environment minister Tim Moore in 1988. Hingerty didn’t know where he wanted to go career-wise and felt stuck between supporting the Green cause over conservation issues such as the Franklin Dam and being a north shore middle-class Liberal. The latter won out, and when he saw the electorate assistant’s job going in a Wilderness Society newsletter, he jumped at it. Not long after that, in the weeks after the NSW Liberals won at the 1988 poll, Don Harwin approached him for a chat at the level-six staff cafeteria at Parliament House. He’d found someone, Harwin told him, and wanted to install him in Hingerty’s Killara Young Liberal Party branch, which was looking like an empty shell after boasting hundreds of members during the Whitlam era.

‘I think he might have been casting around for someone who didn’t have preconceived ideas about Joe and hadn’t been involved in Sydney University political stoushes,’ Hingerty says. In fact, Harwin picked Hingerty because he thought he would quickly gel with Hockey. And it was, according to Hingerty, an ‘instant bromance’. ‘He was this passionate rugby-playing man’s man … I was a bit of an outsider and he appealed to me straightaway.’

Matt took Joe to his first Young Liberals meeting at Killara and Joe walked away as an office holder. Harwin had picked a branch where Joe would shine quickly. ‘The last thing I wanted was for him to languish – I didn’t want him to lose interest.’

Joe set about launching Project Killara 100, an ambitious bid to build the number of members to 100 from fewer than 20. He wanted to act quickly, both to make a splash and to increase the branch’s influence on the Young Liberals Council. He managed to lift the membership base to 80, which was no mean feat, although the principle he had learnt at university, of providing free beer, assisted numbers. If anyone had looked too closely they might have found the names of several people who called the local cemetery home, too. Joe’s Killara stint provided a springboard into the NSW Young Liberals. Ongoing friction between the moderate and conservative elements of the Party meant he narrowly missed his first bid at state office, as finance director, but a year later, at the end of Don Harwin’s first term as president, he parachuted Joe into the position of senior vice-president. That ran against the wishes of many, and Harwin knew it. But his whole ticket had been elected, and he considered it his right. He was not a close friend of Joe’s. In personality terms, they were poles apart. But he knew that one day Joe Hockey would be a major player in parliament and he saw his job as ensuring that trip was a smooth one.

The Young Liberals didn’t only grow Joe’s political ambition, it provided an introduction to his future wife, Melissa Babbage. In early April 1991, Young Liberals across NSW were gathering for their annual state convention at Redleaf, a hotel-motel in Blackheath, at the foot of the Blue Mountains. Joe was the Young Liberals state president, and he was a king among princes. All sorts of policies were on the agenda for the two-day confab – from Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras to condoms in prisons and drug policy. A forum on the Middle East was planned, along with a convention dinner with NSW police minister Ted Pickering. In its very early days, the republic debate would also get an airing.

But that was all a sideline to the main game. Politics was for the mad, the lonely and the ambitious, so the saying went, before one Party elder added sex and sandwiches to expectations, too, and certainly the number of parties matched the number of planned policy debates. Joe was sitting at a desk at the front of a room when Melissa Babbage slipped into the back row. John Brogden sat beside him, with another Young Liberal, Murray Happ. Melissa, who had joined Don Harwin’s Georges River Young Liberals branch, was running a tad late. She had caught a train to Blackheath after Trent Zimmerman had promised to pick her up, but forgot.

Boasting the Australian schools junior number-one ranking for 400-metres running when she was just 17, injury would ensure that Melissa had to pull out of the 1988 Olympic selection trials – her dreams of representing her country all but over by the age of 22. A headstrong, no-nonsense sort of girl, outspoken, with a clear view of what she wanted and how she wanted to do it, Melissa took it all in her stride, but off the field she had reached a crossroads. She had gone on to graduate as a physiotherapist and started working in a private practice (the Sydney Swans one of her bigger clients), but it just didn’t fit with who she was and where she wanted to go. She went hunting, both professionally and personally, to find out what would make her happy. First, she quit her job and returned to the University of NSW to study commerce. At the same time she sought out new interests and was keen to develop how she thought. That led her to the Georges River Young Liberals – she didn’t want to be a politician, ever, but she was interested to see how policies came about. Her knowledge was limited, but she believed Labor valued homogeneity and the Liberals encouraged individualism. That put her squarely in the latter camp, and it was only a couple of weeks after joining her local branch that Harwin suggested she go along to the annual Young Liberals shindig.

As Melissa arrived at the convention late, she took up a seat next to a young Lucy Hooke. Joe saw her and turned to John Brogden. ‘Get a load of her would you – where is she from?’ Joe asked. Brogden looked up at Melissa, and Lucy who stood next to her. ‘Mate, I don’t know but did you see the girl she’s next to?’

The party that followed the next night saw John Brogden and Melissa Babbage, or Babbs as he called her, talk well into the night. Their brothers had played football together as front rowers at St Patrick’s at Strathfield a few years earlier. They got on well. So did Joe and Lucy. The four of them talked, and drank and flirted, and by night’s end Joe was focused only on Melissa, and it was Lucy who had won John’s attention. The next day, Joe drove Melissa home to Roselands, where she lived with her parents, opting for the scenic drive past his parents’ Leura holiday home. They started dating. So did John and Lucy, who were engaged the following January and married in December 1992. (Lucy’s father, Frank, would also later become crucial in Joe’s pre-selection bid in North Sydney.) That annual conference provided fertile ground for marriage. Another couple who first laid eyes on each other at the annual convention would go on to marry, too. One weekend. Three marriages.

After being driven home from that convention by the Young Liberals president and Corrs lawyer, Melissa was smitten. She had had other young suitors, but Joe was different. He’d had other girlfriends, too, but after dating Melissa for a few weeks, he was besotted. Melissa’s childhood had not been dissimilar from Joe’s. Both were intelligent children, who did well at school without having to try too hard, although Melissa’s dedication to any task probably beat Joe’s. Both their parents worked hard, valued family, and encouraged their children to aim high. Melissa, a year younger than Joe, was born in 1966 – the year Harold Holt’s government romped home to win with the biggest majority in federal parliament’s history. Patricia and Terry were raising their young family in Roselands, in Sydney’s south-west; Melissa would be their second and middle child. Tim had arrived six years earlier, and Simon would arrive three years later. It was a happy, normal suburban childhood without great riches to throw around. Melissa was educated at the local Catholic primary school, Regina Coeli at Beverly Hills, and then the all-girls Catholic high school St Ursula’s College at Kingsgrove. Terry worked in senior management in Customs, and while the family shared an interest in news, and what was happening politically, they did it from a distance, never aspiring to become part of any political jaunt.

Melissa and Joe shared an easy relationship, initially based more on a love of parties and movies than Melissa’s passion for exercise. Most importantly, they clicked with each other’s families. On their first meeting, Melissa was taken with Joe’s parents, especially how down-to-earth his mother seemed to be. And she admired his father, his work ethic, and his ability to make something out of nothing. She didn’t know at first what Joe’s background was; he seemed as Australian as the next bloke, and her admiration for Joe’s father only grew as she learnt of the life he had led before arriving on Australian shores. ‘I remember he said to me once you can work hard when you’re young or you can work hard when you’re old and it’s much easier when you’re young,’ Melissa says. In fact there are several pearls of wisdom that Melissa uses regularly now, courtesy of her father-in-law. ‘He’s always said, at various times when we were selling or buying, that it doesn’t matter what you think it’s worth; it’s only worth what someone is prepared to pay for it.’ And she likes the advice he gave Joe. ‘He told him to make his mistakes while he’s still alive because he can’t help him when he’s dead.’ From day one, Richard saw how driven Melissa was, and what a match she was for his boy. He liked her, and knew Joe would do well with her as a life partner.

Joe’s presidency of the Young Liberals was marked by ruthless ambition, both for himself and the small coterie of moderates who worked with him. That didn’t only include Zimmerman and Brogden, but also Matt Hingerty, who served as the Young Liberals public relations director, Murray Happ as activities director and Greg Parker as political officer. Joe always had an angle to approach a task in a new way – as he had with Project Killara 100. ‘The pattern of Joe’s modus operandi in politics was really evident back in those days in that he is very much a big- picture person, he’s an ideas person,’ Zimmerman says. Often the executive was drawn from the offices of politicians, and the post of presidency fitted into their daily routine. Joe came from the outside – a smart-talking well-dressed young lawyer from Corrs. He was working long hours there, making good money and even better connections. But the economy was troubled and some young lawyers were being laid off. That meant he had to work harder, but he carried a healthy ego to and from work, a legacy of the attention he received as SRC president.