Hockey: Not Your Average Joe (20 page)

SEVENTEEN

Joe woke on
an unusually cool December 2009 morning ready to take over the reins of the Liberal Party. His mind was still reeling from the previous evening’s events, a circus ride of negotiation, deliberation and discussion. He dressed and headed off to parliament for a vote that would end Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership of the Party and write the MP for North Sydney into the nation’s history books. He had been a reluctant candidate, but if he had stopped to consider the events of the past year, this next step seemed inevitable.

The lead-up to this day had been tumultuous, but even so, Joe was warming to the idea of becoming the new Liberal leader, Opposition leader and alternative prime minister. To script, a spill vote was carried and the job of federal Liberal leader was open. He would now stand against Tony Abbott, and expected to walk out of the room as leader. MPs in his own Party – those now about to vote – had consistently told him that is what they wanted. The public seemed to want it also; the latest Newspoll showing voters believed Hockey was the best person to lead the Party. Sitting at 33 per cent, he was clear of Turnbull at 30 per cent and Abbott at just 19 per cent.

As nominations were called, Joe stood up, followed by Abbott. A sense of expectation filled the room. Everything was going to plan. Joe knew he had the numbers to beat Abbott, and in a few moments he would be voted in as the Party’s new leader. But then, almost as if in slow motion, the script started to change. Turnbull stood up, joining both Abbott and Joe, who looked shocked. ‘He looked across the room at me, and smiled,’ Joe says. For a moment, Joe was stunned; he had left a conversation with Turnbull believing that if a spill motion was carried, Turnbull would not put up his hand in the ensuing ballot. That was the also the view of Joe’s supporters. But while Joe was rocked by Turnbull throwing his hat in the ring, he didn’t think, for a moment, he would garner sufficient support to warrant any change of plans. ‘We thought, this is going to be humiliating for him,’ Joe says.

Others agree. ‘Thinking Malcolm was in for the chop, several people voted for him so that he wasn’t humiliated,’ one MP says. A vote was taken, and Joe received 23 votes. Abbott received 35, and Turnbull’s tally reached 26. Joe was excluded from the second round where Abbott defeated Turnbull 42 to 41, installing him as Liberal Party leader. One unnamed MP voted informally. Joe felt humiliated. He had been out-played in politics, his favourite game.

Across the room, jaws dropped. Abbott was quick to speak, telling his colleagues that he felt ‘humbled and daunted’ by his elevation to the top job. Senator Nick Minchin, one of the Party’s elder statesmen, who had been encouraging and cajoling Joe to run, walked over to him. ‘If I’d known this was going to happen I would have swung ten votes behind you, to get you ahead of Malcolm,’ he said. Much later, Joe found himself walking with Turnbull and his wife, Lucy, to their plane at the Canberra airport. ‘I was filthy,’ he says. ‘But I was a bit relieved, too. I thought, we are going through all these people. We’re clearing the decks. Abbott won’t last long and at least that gives me a free run. I’m next, and if I’m next, I’m not going to have all these people undermining me.’

That Tuesday 1 December 2009 carried a litany of lessons for Joe, not least how Abbott, to whom he has grown closer since then, would own the position and eventually, in September 2013, lead the Party to victory. But the other more immediate lessons revolved around numbers and trust – the former he had too few of, and perhaps too much of the latter. Despite Joe intervening on several occasions when Turnbull’s volatile leadership would target someone, their relationship had always been warm. Joe helped him get pre-selected, supported his promotion, and willed him to succeed.

‘Joe always starts off very trusting with people – in my opinion sometimes too trusting,’ Melissa says, ‘That’s with everyone. His starting position is always positive. But after the leadership thing, that really annoyed Joe and he won’t trust Malcolm again.’

The basis for that is an agreement Joe says he had with Turnbull that the outgoing leader would not stand for the leadership if a spill motion was successful. His decision to do that had wrong-footed Joe, split the moderate vote, and handed the leadership to Abbott.

In fairness, Turnbull recalls events differently. ‘I can’t speak to what he thought and it was a very confusing and difficult period,’ Turnbull says. ‘Emotions were running very high. The fog of war was very heavy but the fact is – and the record shows – that I said publicly that I was going to stand.’ That is correct. Two days earlier, on 29 November, Turnbull gave an interview to Laurie Oakes of the Nine Network. Turnbull confirmed he was running and stipulated that he felt everyone in the Party room should have a say.

By Joe’s account, it was the day after this interview, when Joe had decided to contest the leadership, that Turnbull told him that if he lost a spill motion, he would not run against him in the leadership vote that followed. Turnbull disagrees, saying, ‘… the Sunday before the ballot I said I would stand. Why would anyone imagine that I would then do something different?’

It was only a few days earlier, sitting around his pool with Melissa and their five-week-old son, Ignatius, that Joe really believed he might run. His name had been raised over and over, and with polls bestowing on him strong community support, he’d believed it was his for the taking from the moment Turnbull had wrong-footed himself on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS). It was a silly error, and Turnbull should have acknowledged that the shadow Cabinet position on the CPRS had not won the support of the Coalition Party room. His refusal to acknowledge the view of others in his Party had infuriated MPs and the Party was tearing itself to shreds; its base wound up by Alan Jones and commercial radio talkback.

Kevin Rudd had proposed an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which Turnbull supported, against the tide of many on the conservative side. Joe says Turnbull knew his leadership couldn’t survive, but wanted to drive his ETS position through the Party, and had then promised to hand the leadership to him. ‘Malcolm said to me you will take over,’ Joe says. ‘Let me get this through. He was playing with dates for a leadership ballot.’

But divisions in the Party over the ETS grew quickly. Turnbull survived a spill motion moved by Kevin Andrews in the last week of November 2009 but it was a big knock because Andrews was not seen as a serious leadership contender. Within days, senior frontbenchers, including Abbott, Nick Minchin, Eric Abetz, Tony Smith and Sophie Mirabella, all moved to the backbench, signalling the end of Turnbull’s leadership. Abbott, who the previous month had told a colleague he wanted to be a candidate if a spill eventuated, decided he would run against Turnbull. However, he agreed he would change that plan if Joe decided to challenge.

Joe had always supported an ETS. ‘I entirely believed in climate change and in the markets, so I believed in the emissions trading scheme,’ he says, ‘and I wasn’t prepared to change my position.’ But he said he wanted to respect those in the Party who didn’t support the scheme. All weekend, he vacillated. Jamie Briggs, who grew close to Joe during the industrial relations period, was now an MP and a close advisor, encouraging him to run for leader, as were Christopher Pyne, Nick Minchin and Peter Dutton.

Minchin, a wily elder statesman, was one of the few who was looking strategically at it. He was keen to get the ETS off the table, and saw Joe as the pragmatic leader that the Party would envelop. At no point, though, did anyone really countenance a scenario where he wouldn’t have the numbers. A handful of friends and colleagues – like friend and NSW colleague Marise Payne and his chief-of-staff, Andrew Kirk – urged him not to run, but they were the exception. ‘He hadn’t built a case of why he should be leader,’ Kirk says matter-of-factly. That requires some years of really focusing on becoming leader. Joe had only just started that process,’ Kirk says. ‘I was really annoyed with everyone else. Furious,’ he says.

Joe’s Hunters Hill street had reporters packed in at both ends. He didn’t have to go outside to see that. Delta Goodrem, who was staying nearby, had called and tipped him off. Joe’s head was filled with two issues. Firstly, he had two small children, and a newborn baby. Was this really fair on Melissa? Melissa dismissed that consideration. Joe was already away many nights each week and she couldn’t see that this would make a significant difference. And she says it was secondary to the issue that mostly filled Joe’s thoughts. ‘At the time it was not about him being the leader. I remember we sat down at the pool house and talked for hours. It wasn’t about him. The conversation was about how he could stop the Party from imploding,’ she says. ‘The Left was trying to get him to do something; the Right was trying to get him to do something and he was trying to reconcile the two.’

Melissa says, in retrospect, Joe should have adopted a strong line, and told both sides to either accept the ETS or not; he needed a basis for his nomination, and the ‘structure’ for the bid was missing. ‘Because he felt he was doing the right thing for the Party as he saw it … he got lost a bit in that. The great lessons of the great leaders are just dogged conviction. Look at Howard. Look at Hawke. Look at Keating. Just dogged conviction. I’m not saying he didn’t have conviction, but because he was trying to do the right thing by the Party and bring them all together, something got lost in that. He won’t make that mistake again …’

Joe decided he wanted to see John Howard, and trailed by reporters from Sydney’s
Sunday Telegraph
, he pulled into the driveway. This itself is intriguing given their relationship but Joe, despite denying it, wants to be one of Howard’s favourite sons. Joe asked for advice, and Howard gave it to him. They had to have an ETS because that was what was promised. Howard says he presumed on that weekend that the leadership would be transferred to Joe, and he offered him any help he needed. But it was Howard who also, in a roundabout way, provided the inspiration for Joe’s eventual stance – a wishy-washy verdict that MPs would be allowed a conscience vote on the ETS legislation. ‘I don’t think it was very good advice from John Howard,’ Costello says now. ‘So here’s the question: Was he trying to help him or not?’

On the eve of the leadership ballot, Joe sat in his Parliament House office. Friends walked in and out. Several of Joe’s advisors played with the idea of a ticket with Joe and Julie Bishop, who would bring a number of votes with her, but Peter Dutton, the former police officer from Queensland, took second spot on Joe’s ticket. Joe still wanted to mend both sides of the Party. He had started the day not really sure whether he would run in the ballot the next day. He wanted to be seen as the doer, not the un-doer. ‘I said John Howard had a free vote on the republic and he had a number of free votes. I thought that gives everyone the chance to get it off their chest, and gets it through.’

The idea sprang from a comment by Senator George Brandis, who suggested the shadow ministry could be afforded the same latitude backbenchers were given and allowed to vote against the Party’s position, without repercussions. That is technically different from a conscience vote, where the Party does not have a position, but nuances were lost in the desperation to find an answer. Brian Loughnane jumped on the idea, and Joe quickly owned it. One of Joe’s good friends, Christopher Pyne, says it settled the problem of having a winner-takes-all approach. ‘The idea was that somebody shouldn’t win and somebody shouldn’t lose. If we could come out of this with everyone feeling they had been respected and their personal positions maintained he would have been able to say that he had adopted the same attitude Howard had done on the republic.’

Peter Dutton, however, didn’t like the idea. He tried to talk Joe around, unsuccessfully. ‘I knew it would be a fatal blow. Essentially the leadership battle was a referendum on the issue. Joe equivocating with a conscience vote meant the passage was assured through the Senate and that was exactly the opposite of what – in the end – the vast majority of the Party room wanted.’

Howard says he heard, on the news, that Joe had promised a conscience vote. ‘I rang him and said Joe you can’t; you’ve got to make a decision. And he said, “But you allowed a conscience vote on the monarchy,” and I said that’s different. It’s an entirely different thing; this is a basic economic issue. That cost him the leadership. You’ve got to have a position. If Turnbull had put keeping the Party together ahead of policy purity he probably would have remained leader. Only Abbott was able to undermine Rudd in the way he did. If the ballot had gone another way I’m not sure we’d now be in office.’

It was this stance by Joe – of allowing a conscience vote – that gave Abbott reason to renege on his promise to support Joe, and run. Joe’s plan, which also included asking tweeps what he should do, didn’t solve the problem in Abbott’s mind. It failed to move the Party forward in the direction Abbott and his supporters wanted, but it also showed an indecisive stance by Joe.

Nick Minchin remembers sitting in Joe’s office on the day before the vote. Minchin and Abbott had a firm agreement – Abbott would not put his hand up, but would back Joe. Abbott had reluctantly bowed out, accepting that a unity position was the best way forward for the Party. That meant the worst case scenario would be that Turnbull would run against Joe, who would romp home. At their last meeting for the day, Minchin and Abbott wanted to discuss how they would proceed the next day. ‘He [Joe] announced,’ Minchin says, ‘and I remember the occasion very clearly – that we should have a conscience vote on this [the ETS]. Both of us were almost speechless and shocked, and then I said, come off it Joe, your first act of leadership will be to say I don’t have a clue and you can all do what you like. You’ve got to be kidding. That’s completely unacceptable.’ But Joe wouldn’t budge. Abbott and Minchin returned to Abbott’s office. ‘We agreed in those circumstances Tony had no alternative but to run.’

Two considerations drove Joe to that decision. First, he supported a CPRS and his staff handed him 17 pages of public records where he had publicly declared as much. Second, he was influenced by Howard and the lure of making everyone happy. But it was the former that tied him in knots; he supported a CPRS and would not countenance any change to that. In retrospect, it would have been easy to weave a way of both supporting the CPRS and taking a position against it in the leadership ballot. As Minchin says, he could have declared his support for it but highlighted the valid grounds for voting against the particular Bill in question. That would have been a ‘perfectly sensible and credible and defensible position’.