by Madonna King
With a big and loud group of friends, he played hard and worked hard enough. Despite, as a young child, telling everyone who would listen that he wanted to be prime minister one day, by the time Joe was in third-year university he hadn’t mentioned a political career to anyone for quite some time. That’s why there is an irony in the five-minute decision that determined he would run for president of the University of Sydney’s Students’ Representative Council (SRC), the post that would eventually propel him into federal politics. Back then, it was simply a movie pass that Joe was seeking. He’d popped down to the SRC, where the woman at the front counter had dismissed his query. He thought she was rude. She probably thought he was an upstart, but Joe was furious. His fees went to paying her salary and that meant she was in his service. ‘I would have liked her to be nice to me,’ Joe says, ‘so I thought I should give politics a go.’
Of course, that simplifies things. Joe’s schooling showed he had always been interested in politics, or what it could achieve. He’d learnt that as a kid, by having the local cricket nets fixed. He saw politics as a way of changing the status quo. But it offered much more: he loved public speaking, peddling influence and being at the centre of things, and it played to his competitive streak. And it was that single interaction with the SRC over movie tickets that prompted him to return to his room at St John’s College, sit down and outline a plan to run as a candidate for president. He didn’t know whether his beliefs sat squarely with the Liberal Party, but he had a hunch they might, so he ventured down to a meeting of Liberal students to ask about the process of running for a position on the SRC. ‘They said I’d have to wait three years for a turn. I said but my degree is only three years and they said well bad luck, we have a hierarchy here,’ Joe says. He went away still unclear whether the Liberal Party was his natural home, but determined he would set up a Party of his own anyway.
It was the next step along the student politics path that provided the impetus for Joe’s on-campus political win. College students stick together, sharing the same social lives, often dating each other and holding a privileged position on campus. Their interests, broadly, lie in studying and socialising, rarely campus politics. Joe thought it offered the political equivalent of low-hanging fruit, and he could capitalise on that. He went to the college heads and explained to them how he wanted to form a political party. Soon after, he set up the Varsity Club to build a membership base that could provide the springboard for the Varsity Party. A student from each college was chosen to join Joe’s ticket, with Anthea Fawcett from Women’s College becoming Joe’s campaign manager.
Joe manufactured to have SRC ballot boxes at the colleges, making them present at the big college parties. Driving an old Peugeot 504 and using a crackly aged megaphone, he would drive from college to college singing his own praises. It could have been a scene stolen from The Blues Brothers. Joe provided beer – big kegs that sat beside each of the ballot boxes, reminding students of the largesse offered by candidate Joe Hockey. He played to the students’ tune, offering any student who had signed up to the Varsity Club free beer. For those who hadn’t, entry cost $5. ‘So we turned every booth into a party, and built up my numbers,’ he says.
Joe doesn’t pretend it was all legitimate. The law school appeared to be a problem booth for his candidature, so it was very convenient for Joe when a fire alarm sounded off at the time the ballot box was to be collected. No-one ever saw it again. Anthea Fawcett says Joe was both a marketeer and a showman, painting his Party as an apolitical student organisation that eschewed Party politics. The college votes were central to that.
‘I was the campaign manager, not that I had to manage much because Joe had a fairly strong idea of what he wanted to do. That included his posters of Happy Joe Hockey in his rugby jersey with hockey stick messages,’ Anthea says. Those posters showed off a crudely drawn picture of Joe holding a football and claiming he would be Independent – with the right policies and the right attitude. A cartoon was drawn on the bottom of the posters where one person was digging into a barrel marked ‘Creating a Man’. Someone stops by and says: ‘You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel now.’ To which the creator responds: ‘I think I’ve got just enough slime left to create the politicians.’ It targeted Party politicians in the same way that has, in more recent times, given voter support to Independents such as Clive Palmer and parties like One Nation. Back then, it suited Joe’s purpose to be seen as outside the big parties, because he wasn’t on the inside of any of them. ‘Joe didn’t get too lost on detail,’ Anthea says. ‘He was happy to play the rugger-bugger … that appealed to most college voters.’
Greg Parker met Joe at a history tutorial in first-year university, and marvelled at his ability to encapsulate a sophisticated brief in minutes. Greg gave him notes for one subject, but saw that Joe ended up with a distinction, and he only scored a credit. He soon saw it was because Joe was better at sucking out the crucial information, and telling a story with it. This is central to how Joe still works. He can get across a brief quickly, but doesn’t see the same value in being able to parrot off specific numbers. He looks for the narrative, the story in the brief, and tells it wonderfully. The trouble is, this ability to communicate well can at times be a double-edged sword. When John Howard would later pull Joe into Cabinet and ask him to help sell a smelly industrial relations policy, his ability to skim a brief and use it to tell a bedtime story would feed the view that he had little depth. Invariably his supporters paint the first picture, his detractors the latter, but there is no doubt that Joe has always performed better in areas he loves.
At university Joe received a couple of high distinctions, but failed one law subject and scraped through on a couple of others because they didn’t hold his interest. ‘He didn’t work very hard,’ one lecturer, who had Joe in his class, said. ‘Joe Hockey was not a very good student. He got away with a reasonable pass but he didn’t work very hard.’ Indeed, that lecturer said he warned his high-school-aged son that if he acted up in school, he might be the next Joe Hockey. He doesn’t elaborate on what his son might think now, with Joe the nation’s treasurer, but it was a rare take on the boy from Northbridge. Other lecturers and tutors describe him as friendly and interested.
It was 3 a.m. on the day the final votes were being tallied, when Joe asked Anthea how he was faring, whether there was a chance he would be the new SRC president at Sydney University. ‘She just laughed at me,’ he says. ‘She said I didn’t stand a chance.’ The early figures showed this to be true. Joe scored low on the primary vote, but beat the Christian candidate by a handful of votes. His preferences flowed to Joe, and pushed him ahead of the Labor nominee. In turn, Labor preferences came to Joe, too, ahead of the Liberals’ Michael Hughes, whose preferences helped Joe to get ahead of the Socialist candidate. The preferences mimicked a koala scrambling up a tree from branch to branch, eventually smiling, sitting atop it. Joe, the Independent candidate for the Varsity Party who had corralled the votes of college students, had won the prestigious position of SRC president. What’s more, he’d made it as an Independent. ‘He’s dined out on that ever since,’ Anthea says.
Damyon Lill, who had been at school with Joe since Year 3, but who had not become a good friend until university, remembers the moment Joe was declared the winner. ‘No-one expected it. And I’ll never forget his father. He was full of absolute pride and joy. I didn’t appreciate it until that night and then it clicked how much it meant to Joe’s father, too.’
Joe had been elected to head the 59th University of Sydney Students’ Representative Council for 1986–87. If it wasn’t in Joe’s plan, he had played it beautifully. Accepted into Duntroon. Tick. Accepted into Sydney University, whose alumni boasted prime ministers, governors-general and Nobel laureates. Tick. Accepted into St John’s College, the former home of a gold-plated network of men across a range of disciplines. Tick. Accepted into law. Tick. And now he had become the first Independent president in Sydney University’s 136-year history.
Jeremy Melloy walked into the SRC president’s office the next day to see his best friend sitting in the president’s chair. Behind him sat a huge photo of a chimpanzee with the word BOSS scrawled across it. ‘I nearly burst out laughing,’ he says.
FOUR
THE SURPRISING SUCCESS of Joe’s first political campaign left him on a high, but it was soon replaced by an audacious bid to take on the federal government over student fees, an ill-conceived campaign that propelled Joe both onto the national television news and the national political stage.
The protest had started hours earlier, when 40 kegs and hot weather had lured thousands of students onto the front lawn of Sydney University. It was 25 March 1987, the day students in Sydney had decided to tell Bob Hawke and Susan Ryan what they thought of the government’s plan for a $250 tertiary ‘administration’ fee. Joe addressed the students, many of them as uninterested in the fee debate as they were interested in the free beer. But that didn’t stop Joe’s fiery speech. He yelled and demanded better action. He warned of the thin edge of the wedge, and used every other cliché he could think of. He told the throng of students that the government didn’t care about them. And then he told them to drink up. ‘On the buses,’ he yelled, urging the huge crowd to climb aboard one of the 40 coaches his team had organised. Like sheep, and with both the hot sun and beer beginning to take effect, they climbed aboard, and the buses poured into Central Station to join other students ready to roll down to Town Hall.
Union activist Jack Mundey took to the stage before Joe, providing a speech that ignited a passion for free education even in those who were expressing disappointment that the free beers hadn’t followed them down to Town Hall. As Joe walked onto the stage he was briefed by NSW Institute of Technology communications student Steve Lewis: ‘Your magic words are that you are going to tell Susan Ryan [federal education minister] what you think.’ Joe wasn’t fully across what was about to happen, but things were moving fast. As Lewis had advised, Joe finished his brief speech, declaring to the crowd of thousands: ‘I’m going to tell Susan Ryan what I think!’
As at the starter’s pistol in a running race, the students surged out the doors of Town Hall towards the Department of Education offices. That’s where the script ended. As the students poured into the building, Joe joined them. He took the packed lift to a floor where someone said they should alight, ready for a fight. But when the doors opened, it was obvious they’d misjudged their move. Behind a counter a small group of women were packing up for the day. They were responsible for administering Austudy payments, and were startled by the rowdy group cramming to fit in the office. Susan Ryan, meanwhile, was almost 300 kilometres away in her Canberra office, watching the drama unfold on television.
Joe had worked up a sweat. The chants of ‘no fees’ and ‘bye-bye Susie’ rang out, egged on by the dozens of cameras capturing every move. Joe had made it to the 20th floor of the Sydney Plaza building, which housed the Australian Government Department of Education’s Sydney headquarters. More than 700 students had stormed the building, surging onto the 11th, 13th, 17th and 20th floors. Outside, Goulburn Street was closed between Pitt and George streets. But that didn’t stop the helicopter Joe could see out the window monitoring every move, or the police dogs on the ground, or even the SWAT teams that were pouring into the building. Joe had been told police were taking off their name badges, ready to belt students into submission. The television journalists were demanding to know what would happen next. They were planning to cross to their news desks to describe the protest.
‘We didn’t have a plan,’ Joe says. He picked up a phone and dialled Parliament House, asking to be put through to the education minister. The cameras were rolling. ‘Is Susan Ryan there?’ he demanded. ‘This is Joe Hockey.’ A bank of cameras focused closely on Sydney University SRC’s 59th president, ready to capture his next move and deliver it to lounge rooms across the country. Joe was put on hold. It couldn’t end like this; he knew Susan Ryan would not come to the phone, lured by student thugs wanting their two minutes on television. So he pretended she was on the phone and gave her a dose of what he was thinking. The moment was captured, portraying Joe dressing down the federal education minister, without anyone knowing he was on hold, listening to the English folk song ‘Greensleeves’.
Eventually the news crews packed up. Mostly, the students were invited to leave, without charge. But some stuck to their guns and it turned ugly. Antony Sachs, a 22-year-old University of NSW student who later went on to become Labor stalwart Anthony Albanese’s advisor, was caught in a lift with police. ‘At some point we agreed to leave and most people left by the stairwell. I was grabbed by a cop and there were a few of us in a lift. I was manhandled, had my arms held behind my back and shoved against the wall of the lift.’ In searing pain, Sachs was led to a waiting ambulance, finding out later he had dislocated his shoulder. Paddy wagons filled with other students. Some of them were taken around the corner by police, and let go. Others were taken to the Sydney Police Centre at Surry Hills to be charged under federal law with trespass and under state laws of resisting arrest. Several were charged with assault.
The next day, Joe had his first interview with John Laws on his morning radio show. Joe Hockey, SRC president, was being talked about. But the interview didn’t start well, with Laws focusing on ratbag students. Joe had been tipped off that Laws loved cars, and kept bringing the conversation back to that. ‘I said not many students had money but we wanted to work hard; we wanted one day to have a car collection like he had. The conversation ended with him saying I sounded like a good young man but he didn’t know what was occupying my head,’ Joe says. But Joe didn’t win everyone over with the take-no- prisoners approach on tertiary fees – which also included his call for supporters to vote Democrat in the Senate in the next election. Some thought he should have gone in harder, led from the front and been arrested like other students.
Posters soon appeared around university, labelling him as ‘Judas Hockey’. Most of the police had given the students the chance to leave the building, before being arrested, and Joe was not prepared to pay the fines of those who now faced trespass charges. ‘We won’t pay the fines because it was their choice to be arrested and I don’t think every student should pay the fine for one student who had the choice to leave,’ he told students through the pages of Honi Soit, the university’s student newspaper.
Not everyone saw it that way. ‘Joe Hockey was quite prepared to lead people to occupy the education department offices, but where was he when the police started dragging people away by the hair and arresting them?’ student Mike Brown asked in a letter to Honi Soit. ‘Why wasn’t he prepared to take the consequences of an action he started? Nice one Joe – we know you didn’t want to be late for dinner, and besides, what would the Solicitors and Barristers Admission Board think?’
It wasn’t long before Susan Ryan agreed to meet Joe, and a small group of students, in her Canberra office. When they arrived the following month they ran into prime minister Bob Hawke. He immediately singled Joe out. ‘You leave my bloody education minister alone,’ he spat, before walking off. But it was in fact finance minister Peter Walsh who had been scheduled to meet the students that day. He sat in his chair, the sun streaming over his shoulder directly into the students’ eyes. He looked and acted uninterested. Thirty minutes passed and then he turned on them, asking Joe why he should pay the fees for an old woman to go back to university to study Arts. Soon after, they were kicked out.
‘That was his view – that it was a basket weaver in her 60s going back to university,’ Joe says. Outside Walsh’s office, political reporter Mungo MacCallum took Joe and his colleagues for a beer in the Parliament House bar. Before an hour or two had passed, word began to filter through: Bob Hawke had called an election, to be held in July 1987.
Susan Ryan says she was not popular around the ministerial decision-making table by siding with the students over their opposition to the tertiary charge. ‘I was totally of the
Whitlam view that you invest in the population in this way and the economic cost of that is repaid many times over. However, I was on the losing side in this because the concept of user pays and so forth had taken hold in our government. Every budget I’d fight it and every budget I’d get bashed up,’ she says. She liked the student activism, a spirit of being heard. ‘But I wasn’t well disposed towards Joe when this episode [the sit-in] happened.’ Ryan was in the old Parliament House, deep in budget preparation. The education portfolio enveloped universities, colleges of advanced education, TAFE, schools and the ACT schools authority. She also held the status-of-women portfolio. ‘I was pretty busy,’ she says, ‘and I remember one of my advisors ran in and said the students had occupied my office in Goulburn Street … and that they weren’t going to leave until I talked to them.’
Ryan didn’t entertain Joe’s request to join her on a nationally televised telephone call. It was a stunt. ‘Not only were they asking to speak to me – I think their original demand was that I fly up there and meet with them. It was very cheeky. I said no, and that they could come down and meet me.’ Police were also calling her advisors, wanting to know whether to press charges. She told them not to. But she also knew that their arguments wouldn’t wash with her colleague Peter Walsh. ‘If I was very sympathetic to the students’ cause to the universities, Walsh was the opposite, absolutely the opposite. He was, from the very beginning, the main advocate of charging fees, saying who are these middle-class wankers, and why should workers’ taxes be paying for their education? He was very hard. So they drew the short straw when they got Walsh, rather than me.’ (After the 1987 election, Susan Ryan was moved from the education portfolio. John Dawkins replaced her, overseeing the introduction of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme.)
It was the Hawke government’s fee plan that elevated Joe to the political main stage, but he used his election as SRC president to make a name for himself on campus, too. Indeed, according to Honi Soit his impact was akin to taking a ‘jackhammer to jelly’. But Joe saw the SRC as a service business, believing its $350,000 budget should be used to provide services to the students who funded it. From day one, his relationship with the editors of Honi Soit was fractious, and eventually he put them on ‘contract’, demanding regular, consistent publications.