Hockey: Not Your Average Joe

by Madonna King

  It wasn’t only Stokes attempting to influence backbench debate. Meetings were held with other media moguls, including APN’s Cameron O’Reilly. Gary Hardgrave sat down with Lachlan Murdoch in Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay and had Jamie Packer visit him at his office in Moorooka in Brisbane. Packer also flew up to Bundaberg to meet Paul Neville at local restaurant The Old Bank. They debated it over two hours. ‘He was not unpleasant, but forthright, and he said to me, “You don’t like me and my family, do you?” ’ Neville says now. ‘I said to him, quite to the contrary, I have a lot of respect for you.’ But Neville would not budge from his view that the law would give too much power to too few families.

  Nelson, too, met with Packer and Graham Richardson. ‘I remember telling [them], when they came to see me about it, that I did not want to live in a country where Mr Murdoch and Mr Packer essentially had the power to control the way my kids were going to think.’

  Back in parliament, Joe joined others in threatening to cross the floor if the new proposals came to a vote. They never did. By September 1997, six months after John Howard said cross-media rules should be scrapped, the prime minister shelved plans to change those media laws. His backbench had made it too difficult.

  As MPs in Howard’s backbench found their feet, some of the party’s moderates worried their voice was being muted by more conservative colleagues, many of whom were active in the Lyons Forum, a group of federal Liberal and National Party members and senators. The Lyons Forum, named after Joseph and Enid Lyons, who had both been members of parliament, was based on a belief that the family was the fundamental unit of society. To some MPs, its operation seemed to be cloaked in secrecy and many thought it focused on moral issues, such as marriage and the family, euthanasia and abortion, to the exclusion of others. Some moderates within the Party felt they needed to combat it in a policy sense, and that led to three Liberal MPs – Chris Gallus, Susan Jeanes and Joe Hockey – banding together to form a new group, called the John Stuart Mill Society.

  ‘Small-L liberals needed a voice in a conservative government,’ Joe says. They had meetings, and pulled in a few speakers, such as former Victorian Liberal Party director and one-time Malcolm Fraser staffer, and colleague, Petro Georgiou, who spoke on compulsory voting. But it didn’t last too long, perhaps because the Lyons Forum boasted close to 50 members and many of them senior, and because Howard insisted on coming to the first meeting of the ginger group, as well as having the right to attend any meeting after that.

  Something happened at the 1996 election and would only grow with the next election, and that was that the Liberal Party, which had been fairly Protestant in history, welcomed a big influx of Catholics to its core. That, in itself, didn’t necessarily play out in a policy sense, but was noticed in the ranks of the Party. Joe was one of them, but he was a Jesuit first and a Catholic second. Indeed, it would be unwise to underestimate the enormous influence the Jesuits continue to have on him. His first son was called Xavier Augustus Babbage Hockey. Xavier comes from the name of the Catholic St Francis Xavier. His second son bears the name of Ignatius Theodore Babbage Hockey. It was Ignatius of Loyola who founded the Society of Jesus, whose members are called Jesuits. He was helped by five other young men, including Francis Xavier. The Jesuits, back at St Aloysius’, had taught Joe to keep a moral compass but to challenge tradition; that it was okay to be both part of the team and a critic within the team. Joe likes that; it sits perfectly with him to, in his words, ‘throw a bit of ginger into the cooking’.

  Father Michael Ryan, SJ, the Jesuit priest who served as Joe’s school form master, also celebrated Joe and Melissa’s marriage and baptised all of his children. Ryan – whose counsel Joe never seeks on policy matters – remains part of the Hockey clan, spending Christmas Day in an avalanche of children’s gifts and all the noise that comes with a big celebration inside a family home. Father Ryan talks in terms of Joe being a pastoral Catholic, in the Jesuit tradition, where social conscience and social justice are paramount, but says Joe’s father’s journey has been just as important in influencing Joe as his Jesuit education.

  Joe used his maiden speech, in September 1996, to preach modern liberalism: ‘Firstly, the recognition of the inalienable rights of the individual; secondly, a belief in parliamentary democracy; thirdly, a commitment to improve our society through reform; and, finally, equality of opportunity for all of our citizens.’

  More than 100 of his supporters travelled three hours by bus, and paid $70, to hear his first speech, in which he urged people to acknowledge the barriers stopping women from reaching success. ‘For example, three times more women than men are setting up their own small businesses.’ Joe’s continued support for women, including increasing the number of women on boards and his strong support for a woman’s right to choose – heavily influenced by his wife, Melissa Babbage, whose career successes have matched those of her husband – still upsets some in his Party. This latter view stemmed from Joe’s days as SRC president at university, where a young woman came to him and told him she had to have an abortion that afternoon. On another occasion, a woman sought a student loan for abortion. It challenged his view, but he determined it was right. He was not going to consign those women to begging, or whatever else might be needed, to bring up an unplanned child.

  On the home front, it was earlier in 1997 that Joe and Melissa bought a house in Forrest, just up the road from Manuka, in Canberra. Joe was driving past and saw a handwritten sign out the front, pointing anyone interested to a Sydney telephone number. The owners wanted nothing to do with real estate agents or lawyers. So Joe, the lawyer, called his father, the real estate agent, who took the owner out for a beer. At the end of the beer, a deal had been done. The Hockeys scored the home for land value. Joe’s father didn’t mention he was a real estate agent, buying the property on behalf of his lawyer son.

  ‘The house was a piece of Hockey mercantile genius,’ former MP Ross Cameron, who moved in a few months later, said. ‘Joe brings to the Treasury what I describe as an ancient Armenian sense of where the sweet spot in the deal is.’ The home also provided a sweet spot for Brendan Nelson, whose marriage went belly-up in June 1997. He had moved into the home a few months earlier, but was struggling. He had eight-year-old twins, and financial dramas, understood by many whose marriages end quickly. Brendan put his own deal to Joe. He asked whether he could move out and sleep in a small room next to the garage, in return for paying half rent. That would then allow Joe to rent out the other room.

  Joe and Melissa cleaned up the garage, tried to decorate it, moved a bed in and even plastered a poster over a hole in the wall. In the Canberra winter Brendan Nelson used three doonas, but his room had a television, a radio, an old wardrobe and Liberal mates nearby. He remained living there until he left parliament in 2009. Nelson says Joe proved his friendship over and over. Unbeknown to him, at the time, Joe visited a close friend of Nelson’s, Dr Bruce Shepherd (also a former AMA president), telling him he was worried about him. Nelson only learnt of that conversation from Shepherd. On another occasion, Joe brought Nelson’s children shoes back from overseas, refusing to accept any payment.

  Bob Baldwin, the MP for Paterson, also called the house home-away-from-home, as did Phil Barresi, the MP for Deakin, and Ross Cameron. Jamie Briggs arrived after a by-election in 2008 to represent voters in the seat of Mayo in South Australia. Cameron stayed there until he left parliament in 2004. He says that, despite the house oozing with ambition, a cross word wasn’t spoken – not even about the republic, where Joe’s and Nelson’s views were totally at odds, even facing off against each other in a debate at Joe’s old school of St Aloysius’ College.

  On other issues, such as the gun laws that had been passed in 1996, there was a lot of agreement. But rarely was debate brought home. They’d arrive home in dribs and drabs, late, sometimes offering each other an honest review of their day’s performance, and while friendly competition led to a bit of ribbing, it was without rancour. The late news and an epis
ode of Seinfeld were regular antidotes to a day in parliament. No-one bothered to cook, meaning the oven was not even opened during one two-year period. Baldwin had the bedroom near the front door, and on a few occasions would have to get up to answer it in the dead of night. It would always be a message for the defence minister Brendan Nelson. ‘He’s in the garage,’ Baldwin would say, before stumbling back to bed. Ambition was strong, and a couple of those staying with Joe wondered whether he timed his early morning walks to cross paths with prime minister John Howard. But all of them liked him, and knew whether or not Joe supported them in the Party room, he had their back.

  Ross Cameron is proof of that, having lost his seat in 2004 after revealing he had an extra-marital affair while his wife was pregnant with twins. ‘When I got booted out – when I got sacked – I lost my job and at the same time lost my marriage. So I had a massive reduction in income and hadn’t worked out what I was going to do next. I was really focused on trying to address the family situation,’ he says. Broke, and broken, few wanted to know Cameron, who was a regular at prayer meetings at Parliament House. But a couple of former colleagues continued to check on him, including Joe and Tony Abbott. Joe called him and asked how he was coping on one occasion, offering him a car. Melissa was upgrading her car, which meant they had a spare. ‘I was very, very touched,’ Cameron, who remains friends with Joe, says. ‘I just remember feeling there are a thousand people who say to you, let me know if I can help in some way. There is a much, much smaller number who will come to you and say, I’ve got a spare car in my garage. Do you want me to drop the keys off?’

  If that is an example of Joe’s loyalty, his knack of courting controversy is best illustrated in the case involving staffer Roxanne Cameron. She had been working for Joe before the 1996 election, and then joined his staff once he was elected. Senator Bob Woods had a role in overseeing key seats in the lead-up to the poll, before becoming parliamentary secretary for health. Joe noticed Bob Woods sitting in reception a couple of times when he walked into his local electorate office. He asked him what he was doing. Woods said he was waiting to talk to Cameron. Joe didn’t think much more of it. But the visits continued, and it soon became obvious to everyone that there must be some form of relationship between the pair. Joe considered it none of his business – until one Friday afternoon when Cameron came into his office and told him she feared Woods. ‘I said, “What!” ’

  She claimed Woods, whose wife, Jane, was the daughter of senior Liberal Sir John Carrick, had been stalking her, and she was worried an apprehended violence order (AVO) would end up becoming a headline in the media. ‘I said if you’re worried, I’m running protection here – I’ll stand by you; you do what you have to.’ Cameron took out an AVO (before later withdrawing it), and the story did blow up.

  Pressure mounted on Joe, from peers in the Liberal Party, to axe Cameron from her role. He thought about that the day he inadvertently saw a fax discussing a $20,000 offer to tell her story. She was obviously engaged in the offer. It was a story the media loved: the young office worker and the senior politician. Was she the scorned woman, or the fragile young victim needing protection?

  One Saturday morning, Joe opened the door of his Blues Point Tower unit, the home he shared with Melissa, to pick up the morning papers. He wasn’t dressed for company and was met with a lightning strike of camera flashes. He had become part of the story just by keeping Cameron on staff. He got dressed, met the journalists downstairs, and said he would continue to stand by her. Behind closed doors, that was getting harder. Indeed, it was becoming almost untenable, and Joe wasn’t the only one to breathe a sigh of relief when Cameron left the office of her own accord.

  Joe’s first term in parliament had been busy and fun, but going into the 1998 election, he thought his time as an MP might soon end. The Party, which had pledged to never introduce a GST, was now banking on public support for it. It was an uphill battle. Joe strongly supported the GST but he was finding it almost impossible to sell. ‘Explaining the GST was a nightmare,’ he says. With viral conjunctivitis, he walked the streets of North Sydney trying to talk voters around to it, on one occasion clocking up an hour’s conversation with his local Cammeray butcher, trying to convince him the GST was good.

  ‘And I couldn’t. He was in my electorate. He said he was still going to vote for us but he didn’t like it and he was going to tell everyone,’ Joe says. John Brogden came back as Joe’s campaign director for the 1998 poll, immediately seeing the hurdle the GST imposed. Once voters make up their mind, it’s hard to change them, and this was a case in point. No-one favoured a GST.

  Pauline Hanson and her supporters were also looming large as a threat, and Brogden and his team set up a campaign office in an old Westpac bank office at Northbridge, working around the clock. The GST was presenting the government with a hurdle that seemed insurmountable out on the hustings. Brogden watched Joe struggle to sell it. He could sell most things, but this had him stumped. So how would other MPs fare?

  To help, staffers busily photocopied hundreds of leaflets that showed what the GST would mean to the price of fruit and vegetables. John Brogden looked at it; it revealed the complex inner workings of a mathematician’s brain, and if people in Lane Cove couldn’t understand it, they should stop trying. It was not going to work. Both men went into polling day with their fingers crossed.

  NINE

  BRENDAN NELSON SUGGESTED a deal. If John Howard phoned to offer him a ministry, he’d call Joe and let him know immediately. And vice versa. Joe had got across the line, quite comfortably in the end, but that poll in 1998 would remain his sweetest victory for a long time. Voters had stood by Joe in North Sydney, and the party across Australia, despite the GST. ‘Joseph Benedict Hockey,’ prime minister John Howard announced down the phone, ‘I’m pleased to offer you [the portfolio of] financial services and regulation.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ was Joe’s response, before letting Nelson know. A few hours passed, and Nelson didn’t call back with news of his own. Then Saturday afternoon disappeared into Saturday evening.

  ‘It got late in the day and it was obvious that nothing was happening, and Joe was genuinely disappointed for me,’ Nelson says now. So was Joe’s father. On the Monday morning, two days after his son was offered his first ministry, Richard Hockey arrived in Nelson’s office. ‘Richard was very emotional, in tears, and said, “Look, I love my son and I’m very proud of him but I can’t understand why you are not a minister,” ’ Nelson says. ‘He was very, very genuine.’

  Howard’s call to Joe had been short, but he also wanted to address one other issue. Melissa Babbage, Joe’s wife, was now a rising star at Deutsche Bank and they would need to work out the conflict-of-interest issue, Howard said. Joe soon sold his only shares in AMP, and has since left all management decisions on investments to Melissa, who says she doesn’t consult him or tell him what they are. He set up office as minister for financial services and regulation – with oversight of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), the Mint, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the National Competition Council. John Howard added another job; he wanted him to promote Sydney as the major regional financial centre, to ensure that by the time the Olympics arrived two years later it was the most important financial centre in the Asia–Pacific, after Tokyo. Peter Costello would be treasurer, his senior minister.

  Joe was tailor-made for the job: he was a banking and finance lawyer who had been involved in two significant privatisations; his wife lived and breathed finance and it was often the talk at home; and he represented an electorate rich with bankers. But Joe was also a blue-chip salesman and he set about making his mark. Just as his time leading negotiations on the new airport path laid the groundwork for many of his future abilities, the next three years would also strongly influence Joe’s political trajectory. At 33, he was the government’s youngest minister, and
he quickly learnt both the headiness of power, and the loneliness of a wrong decision. Indeed, it was on his first outing as a minister that he tripped up over the currencies of Malaysia and Indonesia, confusing the ringgit and the rupiah in a media interview. The small slip was not necessarily proportional to the coverage it received, but Joe felt it strongly. And while promoting Sydney as a financial centre opened doors and created new powerful friends around the world, it was two other issues that three years later would mark his performance down: one of those was the collapse of HIH Insurance; the other was the GST.

  Joe lured Andrew Lumsden to resign as a partner at Corrs Chambers Westgarth, taking almost a $300,000 pay cut to set up as his new chief-of-staff. Gary Potts, a deputy secretary, was his chief contact in Treasury, and Matthew Abbott came aboard as his press secretary. But months after starting the job, Joe still felt he wasn’t getting anywhere. He suspected Peter Costello, his immediate boss, whose electorate was based in Melbourne, was lukewarm about the plan to make Sydney shine, and unless Joe could get in the door of the big decision-makers overseas, he was set for failure. He complained to John Howard, who agreed to a broader brief.

  So, with the shackles off, Joe travelled to the UK, Ireland, continental Europe, the US and Asia. The young Australian salesman did everything he could to ensure a chunk of the world’s wealth was traded down-under and, while he couldn’t deliver the tax rates offered in Asia as a lure to business, he was certainly welcomed in the big money centres of London and New York. He took advice from Maurice Newman and Dick Humphry at the ASX and Les Hosking at the Sydney Futures Exchange. In London he saw Sir John Bond, the chair of the HSBC Bank. ‘How are my old friends Mr Bond and Mr Skase?’ he asked Joe. ‘Because I lost a huge amount of money on those people.’

  Singapore and Hong Kong were fighting aggressively for business in the same space, with more runs on the board, but the Australian team notched up a couple of successes. Joe and his team were able to link up international conglomerates with state treasurers and twice stopped companies from reducing their Australian presence. Sometimes Joe headed the overseas mission; other times he tagged along with the prime minister, treasurer or trade minister. But he networked just as well as they did.