Hockey: Not Your Average Joe (18 page)

Ron Murray, a friend of Joe’s who sat atop Murray Coaches, saved a bit of money on the back of Melissa’s mind, too. He ran into Joe during the time Melissa was warning of a recession. He asked Joe whether he should sell his share investments. Joe said yes. He did, and continues to thank Melissa for her insight.

Melissa’s views weren’t being echoed by Joe’s parliamentary colleagues at that stage though, with the view that Australia would not be pulled into the same economic woes happening elsewhere. ‘And they then increased interest rates during the election!’ Joe says. He convinced Melissa to keep their family home, along with two other properties they owned, but all the family’s money was transferred to offset accounts. ‘She knew having a legal credit line from a bank was gold,’ Joe says.

He might have argued successfully to keep the family home, but Joe was more interested in trying to keep his seat. The looming election had him pitted against Mike Bailey – who had been ABC’s weatherman – and he struggled to find enough volunteers to help on his campaign. The polling he saw just before the November poll showed he might be tossed out by the voters of North Sydney. He’d talked to his staff five weeks earlier. ‘I don’t want to be one of those bosses who can’t see reality,’ he told the loyal crew. If they had offers, or wanted to look around, they should do it; he would not consider it disloyal.

On 24 November – the day of the election – he and Melissa drove to Canberra to join the Seven Network’s tally room broadcast. Joe made calls as they skirted around Sydney airport and onto the highway, the road he travelled each Sunday night ahead of parliamentary sittings. He called Mal Brough, who was running again in Longman. He seemed very upbeat. Teresa Gambaro, who was the incumbent Liberal in Petrie, was not as confident. Joe remembered again Brendan Nelson’s apt description: the Party mirrored the family dog, and voters thought it was time to put it down. He looked up to see a removal truck heading in the opposite direction. Rudd’s Removals ran down the side of it. Joe knew the jig was up.

FIFTEEN

It was in
a $39 a night motel room in June 2008 that being in the wilderness of Opposition really hit Joe. He had been to Geelong to farewell Stewart McArthur, the MP for Corangamite until his defeat the year before, and was now headed down the highway to Gippsland where a by-election would be held the next day, triggered by the resignation of the Nationals’ Peter McGauran. As tourism minister, Joe had been feted by hotel staff, and often given the big plush room with all the bells and whistles. Not anymore.

‘A bikie was selling drugs next door and it was freezing,’ he says. ‘There was this guy on TV – he was singing with his banjo B-A-double L-A-R-A-T. Ballarat is my cit-eee.’ Joe focused on the small screen. ‘Could it get any worse?’. He got up, put on a t-shirt and walked next door to the guy plying his drug trade. ‘He looked at me and said, “I know you.” I said, I hope not. He said, “You’re a good guy.” I said thanks. He said, “You need some of this shit?” I said, I probably do but please just let me get a good night’s sleep.’ Joe returned to his bedroom. His bikie friend moved elsewhere.

Seven months earlier, John Howard’s government had been tossed out of parliament, and was still trying to find its feet. Joe had never known Opposition; neither had many others, and it pummelled them hard from the moment early voting showed a Labor Party shoo-in. Joe and Melissa had driven to the Canberra tally room from their Sydney home. There they met Joe’s advisors, including James Chessell, Emma Needham and James Newbury. The
Sunrise
election commentary panel, led by David Koch and Melissa Doyle, was packed and hot. Popular Labor MP Tanya Plibersek, one of the few politicians who can unnerve Joe, was also on it. A sense of foreboding filled him. The family dog was about to be put down. He thought he might lose his seat, too. But you never knew with John Howard leading the Party. Despite a shocking interview by one of his favourite MPs, Jackie Kelly, a couple of days earlier, Joe crossed his fingers and hoped that Howard could pull off the impossible.

His staff didn’t tell him the first results in from his seat of North Sydney. They were from Naremburn, a booth where his dad was known and loved. It had just fallen to Labor. But it was a piece of news, handed to him on a scrap of paper, which got him into trouble. Passed on to him by James Newbury, it read: ‘Howard in trouble’.

In the emotion of the night Joe blurted the news out on live television. It wasn’t long before one of the prime minister’s advisors picked up his phone to provide Joe with a frank assessment and remind him that it wasn’t his job to make predictions or stray into the prime minister’s territory. But seat after seat was falling, and everyone soon knew a change of government was inevitable. On Labor’s side, staff were gloating. On the other side, they were downcast. A decade of government had come to an end. Joe was exhausted, and glum. The crew from the
The Chaser
comedy show was watching for their chance. With a big thought bubble in tow, carrying the word ‘FUCK’, they headed Joe’s way and it was only an accidental tripping that allowed Joe to escape a final humiliation. Back at the Hyatt, Joe had a drink before he returned with Melissa to their Canberra home. ‘It will break me if it’s a decade in Opposition,’ Joe told her.

‘You haven’t come this far to give up now,’ Melissa responded. Joe went to bed, waking the next morning to find the name plates on his parliamentary office already being changed. But that was only a sign of the policy and political chaos that was yet to come.

Ahead of the first parliamentary sitting, the key players all met in the office of new leader Brendan Nelson. ‘We’d never done it before. None of us had ever been in Opposition,’ Joe says. ‘We didn’t know how to frame a question. We didn’t have any advisors. We just sat there at the first meeting and looked at each other and thought, what do we do now?’

With Howard sent packing, the Party had to first search for a leader. Joe had announced the death of WorkChoices immediately following the election, but policy vacuums followed for months as the Party struggled with its new direction, first under Nelson and then under Turnbull. Costello signalled early on that he would not make a claim to the top job. Joe had begged Nelson, his friend and flatmate, not to run for the leadership; he told him that whoever became leader now would never be prime minister.

Nevertheless, Nelson wanted to give it a go and the final challenge was between Nelson and Turnbull. Abbott had indicated he would stand, but withdrew on the eve of the vote, knowing he did not have enough support. Joe told Nelson he wouldn’t vote for him, and he didn’t, making for good dinner table conversation at the home they shared in Canberra. ‘Both [Nelson and Turnbull] were his friends,’ one staffer says. ‘Joe was forlorn and moping around like a little puppy the morning of the ballot. What he found most difficult was that he was friends with both of them. He was visibly stressed. He knew at the end of the day he would have let down one friend.’

But Joe knew who would get his vote. ‘Malcolm was absolutely determined to become leader,’ Joe says, and few believed he would stop at anything to get it. In Joe’s view, whoever took the reins would only be there until it was Turnbull’s turn. ‘We were going to have Malcolm at some point and then he’d burn out, and he did, and in the interim we lost Brendan.’

But it was more drawn out than that. Nelson beat Turnbull 45 to 42 after the 2007 election, giving Nelson a go at the top job. Joe was given the health portfolio, his least favourite policy area. Nelson’s thinking had nothing to do with Joe not voting for him in the ballot. As a former head of the Australian Medical Association, Nelson knew health needed a retail politician. He also believed Joe would grow in stature in a social policy portfolio, and health headed the list of those. He told Joe he had ‘drawn the short straw on WorkChoices’ and the health portfolio would allow him to remake himself. ‘He didn’t like it,’ Nelson says. ‘I was trying to help him not hurt him.’

Joe says: ‘I hated it. I thought he was kidding.’ Nelson stood his ground, and with minor negotiation, Joe was also given what he wanted – the job of manager of Opposition business.

Dr Ginni Mansberg was a general practitioner doing a spot of television commentary when she saw the gig advertised as an advisor to Opposition health minister Joe Hockey. Needing full-time work, she jumped at it. During the interview, Joe asked her whether there was anything she wanted to tell him. ‘I’ve never voted for the Liberal Party,’ she said. ‘And he pissed himself laughing,’ Mansberg says. ‘He thought that was an absolute riot and from that moment, we gelled.’

That is not an isolated story; it feeds others like it, showing that Joe relishes having people around him who think differently. Similarly, he would often get someone in the office who disagreed with him to draft a speech he had to deliver on a topic. The stem cell debate in 2006 – where MPs voted on scientists being allowed to clone embryos to extract their stem cells for medical research – is a good example of that. Joe voted in favour of the law change, but only after hours of debate with Emma Needham, an advisor in his office who was opposed to it.

‘I envy those who see these issues as black or white,’ Joe told parliament in his stem cell speech. ‘I certainly do not.’ He went on to tell parliament the Jesuits had instilled in him the importance of a free and informed conscience, along with a sense of faith and compassion. ‘Will this Bill improve or harm the human condition?’ he asked. ‘I believe that anything we can do to improve the quality of life, we should do.’

Still, Mansberg says Joe struggled with the idea of the health portfolio – making no secret he had no passion for it – just as she struggled with the politics. He would have been a terrible health minister, she says, because he couldn’t cope with children suffering illness or disabilities. ‘He would have been shaving his armpits to find the money … he’s an absolute soft-touch,’ she says. Mansberg says her former boss also came to her rescue when conservative staffers barraged her after she admitted being a fan of Julia Gillard and never voting Liberal. She stayed because she believed that one day he would be prime minister, and she wanted to ensure he understood good health policy.

Nelson’s leadership run was largely strangled by those looking over his shoulder. He also had older members, such as Costello, Downer and Mark Vaile, evaluating his decisions. Joe had found Opposition hard, but it was even harder for older Liberal and National MPs who weren’t showing the same energy they boasted in government. That was the impetus for Cardboard Kevin, a huge cardboard cut-out of the new prime minister, which was carried into the parliamentary chamber. It was used to highlight Rudd’s absence from parliament, but also to provide Opposition MPs with a big morale boost. It worked. Labor had scheduled parliamentary sittings for Fridays, but Rudd was absent for the first one. His cardboard presence, thought up by Joe and Nelson and organised by party boss Brian Loughnane, caused bedlam, led to good TV coverage for the Opposition, and reignited a spark of enthusiasm among Liberal and National MPs.

It was also during this time, with Joe as manager of Opposition business, that Anthony Albanese, one of his closer friends on the other side of parliament, found a chink in his armour. ‘Sometimes his emotions can get the better of him,’ Albanese says. As leader of the house, Albanese was Joe’s opposite number and sometimes he would call Joe to alert him to a procedural change in parliament. ‘He would be genuinely offended,’ he says. ‘He would get angry about things he couldn’t change and weren’t, in the scheme of things, that significant. Perhaps he had difficulty in adjusting from government to Opposition.’

One senior Liberal claims Joe spent part of his time unofficially ‘managing’ Turnbull. ‘Malcolm has an extraordinary mind, but he’s not very patient.’ In one of the early leadership meetings, in Nelson’s office, staffers remember Turnbull exploding. ‘He stormed out of the room in the middle of the discussion about tactics for the day and slammed the door and everyone is sitting there absolutely shell-shocked,’ the senior Liberal says. Two minutes later, Turnbull returned. Some people bottle up their anger; others explode and it disappears into thin air. Turnbull boasts the latter trait. He walked back into the room, sat down, and wanted to ensure he was allocated a question. ‘He acted as though nothing had happened. Joe just burst out laughing – and that completely calmed the situation.’

A second senior staffer describes it as ‘wrangling Malcolm’. He claims he heard more than one loud argument between Turnbull and Joe. On one of those occasions, Joe took offence to Turnbull suggesting a way of asking questions, believing he was both sanctimonious and patronising. Joe threw the pack of questions at him. ‘Then you write them, you fucking arsehole,’ Joe was heard to say, before storming off.

While Joe had voted for Turnbull, his friendship was stronger with Nelson, who didn’t trust Turnbull. From the sidelines Melissa watched the relationship between Turnbull and her husband oscillate between friend, colleague and competitor. ‘Internally, people would say Malcolm’s a bloody bright guy but he’s not political and that would play itself out on the floor of parliament. He, at the end of the day, would operate like a barrister. There was no tactical wiliness.’

Melissa’s description of Joe’s time in Opposition is akin to a big semi-colon between sentences. He didn’t quite know what was next. The couple had a two-year-old son, a nine-month-old daughter, and Melissa had returned to work full-time. Like any woman in the same situation, she was putting one foot in front of the other. She says Joe remained optimistic at home, in part because of her no-nonsense way of seeing things. ‘It is what it is,’ she’d repeat. But she also saw Opposition as a positive step for Joe. She knew it could round out his plans and his views. She hoped Joe saw it that way, too.

In April 2008, Joe took a holiday. He was determined to stay a politician, but he needed a good dose of perspective. He went to the Anzac Day ceremony at the Somme in France. ‘When you feel sorry for yourself, you just have to look at what those young kids went through. It gives you perspective,’ Joe says. He travelled with close friend Andrew ‘Burnesy’ Burnes, and learnt quickly that his friends in high places while he was in government weren’t so keen on him now he was in Opposition. High commissioners in two countries, who had previously pawed all over him, didn’t want to know him. He found it tough, mainly because he likes people.

In Paris, he and Burnes rented a three-door car and went exploring. From there, they flew to Beersheba, where the Pratt family had asked him to help unveil a statue as a tribute to our diggers. Burnes says Joe grappled with his future during those weeks. He’d been in the spotlight, on this singular career trajectory, and all of a sudden the music stopped. The emails stopped. No staff were available to organise flights or cars. Rudd and Labor had won convincingly, too, meaning this lifestyle was unlikely to last only three years.

Burnes says Joe didn’t wallow in it but his friend’s soul-searching coloured their trip. It weighed on him that he had two young children and a wife who had already made significant career compromises. But there were also more obvious ways Joe had to adapt to his new life. ‘Joe discovered there were queues and some people had to stand in them – including sometimes him,’ Burnes says with a laugh. Joe returned to Australia a few kilograms heavier, but with his sense of humour intact.

Others in the Party were going through the same career quandary. Joe brushed off an indirect approach, from sources within NSW parliament, to take over from Barry O’Farrell in NSW. John Singleton admits he was also on Joe’s case to switch to NSW politics. ‘I rang Joe because I was in fear that the Liberals would get in and do fuck-all, a fear which has been proved well-founded,’ he says. ‘I said, mate you’re odds-on to be treasurer or longer odds-on to be premier of NSW. Why can’t you run?’

Joe quickly quashed the idea, but those approaches were driven by the Party’s showing in NSW. That concerned Joe, but he wanted to play in the national arena. On one occasion, he had a conversation with Turnbull with the two of them nutting out how the Party might get over the line in NSW. ‘It wasn’t about doing over Barry; it was just we couldn’t afford to lose,’ Joe says. ‘So we had a conversation and he thought I was raising with him that I wanted to do it [lead the Party], and I thought he was raising with me that he wanted to do it. We were at cross-purposes and both agreed that the other one should do it!’