by Madonna King
Any bruises Joe copped had to be collateral, he says. And they were largely – but the HIH saga served to teach Joe to ask questions more than once, and that when you’re in the firing line, friends are scarce, particularly if they’re politicians. He knew, with HIH, he had been left holding the ball and that he would rise or fall on his own performance. He’d relied on advisors in his office – Peter Cullen, Andrew Lumsden, Matthew Abbott – and Treasury’s Gary Potts, but in the end it came down to the art of communication and the primacy of the message; Gabrielle Trainor had helped him see that.
Joe had always been a good salesman, but this time he’d left the selling a bit too late, allowing the issue to spiral out of control. He had been hammered morning after morning, and he could not answer the questions being asked. But he had managed to get the bail-out package up over cries within his own Party room that it set a precedent and amounted to an unwarranted intervention in the market. More importantly, Joe thought it had played out well in the electorate. He was sure the royal commission the government had announced into the whole sorry saga would show that the government wanted to get to the root of the problem.
Still, as the election loomed large and the commission’s terms of reference were released, he wondered whether he might soon find himself declared collateral damage. Howard, in an effort to be thorough, had included the role of the Commonwealth – something that Joe had not expected, and he was both annoyed and flummoxed. Joe found himself a lawyer.
ELEVEN
JOE HOCKEY WANTED to know what he’d done wrong. John Howard had just offered the MP for North Sydney the tourism and small business portfolio, explaining that this was a significant job and he wanted Joe to do it. ‘But you’re demoting me,’ Joe fired.
‘I’m not,’ Howard said.
‘It is clearly a demotion,’ Joe returned.
Howard, who had just won his third victory as prime minister was losing his patience. ‘If you don’t like it you can go and cool your heels on the backbench,’ the prime minister told him.
‘Well maybe I should,’ Joe said, before Howard gave him 30 minutes to think about it.
Joe sat on the couch of his Blues Point Tower unit. He was devastated. He felt slighted, too, believing he’d taken the fall for the government on GST and on HIH and was being rewarded with a non-portfolio. He understood tourism and small business was important, but it was trivial sitting next to the big finance portfolio that he thought should be his. Perhaps it was over HIH? The royal commission was now underway and he sat, squarely, in the terms of reference. Or perhaps the prime minister just didn’t like him. Certainly it wasn’t the first time he’d thought so. They were different in many ways, and he’d butted up against him, as a junior MP, repeatedly. Joe was the young loud-mouthed moderate; Howard sided strongly with the conservatives. Joe had disagreed with his prime minister on issues such as the republic and on a woman’s right to choose and had been part of the small ginger group behind the John Stuart Mill Society. But he’d also taken a lot of bark for the prime minister, too. John Fahey, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer, was vacating the finance minister’s office and Joe thought he should be moving in. ‘I thought I’d taken the bullets on GST. I’d taken the bullets on HIH and I’d been the most prominent non-member of Cabinet and I deserved a go,’ he says.
He called Melissa at work and told her he’d just been shafted by the prime minister. She was calm; Joe wasn’t. He saw it as a humiliating step backwards and confirmation that Howard had marked him down as minister for financial services. Would Melissa like to take up one of the many job offers she had received from overseas? ‘I could get a job with [Citibank boss] Sandy [Weill] in New York,’ he told her. Melissa was more cautious and advised him to have a think about it.
Peter Costello was trying to contact him, Joe knew, but he didn’t want to talk to him yet either. Joe called Warwick Smith, a former Liberal MP who he respected, whose advice was unequivocal – take it.
Joe tried to call Sandy Weill in New York, to make sure an earlier offer to quit politics and join the world of business in the US remained, but his call went unanswered. Weill, as the CEO and then Chair of Citibank, was a global leader in banking. He’d met Joe a few years earlier when he was promoting Sydney as a prospective finance centre and Weill was planning a headquarters in Sydney. Over tea at Kirribilli with the prime minister and a group of others, Joe and Weill had hit it off. Joe maintained contact, which grew into a friendship of sorts. Later, as tourism minister, Joe would regularly send him wine from a different area of Australia, and a didgeridoo that still holds pride of place in his US office. Would he have given Joe a job?
‘Absolutely,’ Weill says now.
Thirty minutes had passed since Howard’s offer to take up the post as tourism minister. It soon became 45 minutes. ‘I was going to go,’ Joe says. Arthur Sinodinos, Howard’s chief-of-staff, had been on the phone to Joe’s chief-of-staff, Andrew Lumsden, telling him the prime minister was expecting a call back. An hour passed. Howard, at this point, was losing his patience.
Joe took Costello’s call. ‘You’ve got to do it,’ Costello said. ‘You don’t want to look petulant. If you become small business minister and you do something for small business, the heartland of the Liberal Party will love you forever.’
To Joe, even more than being offered a portfolio he didn’t aspire to, was the fact that he believed he was being punished over his performance, which he had considered robust. The controversy over rounding up the GST would have happened anyway; it was just that he was asked the question while others were on holiday. Both Howard’s and Costello’s offices had signed off on it months earlier. On HIH, APRA had not been doing its job properly, and he’d queried HIH each time it was brought to his attention. He had talked Cabinet around on the bail-out package, negotiated it through the insurance industry and muted the damage the corporate collapse could have delivered at the electoral box. He had supported Costello over Howard, but not in the way the media was making out. He knew the baton would be changed from one to the other at some stage, and it had to be orderly and at a time that would maximise the Liberals’ chances. His view was that, for the sake of all their re-election chances, they needed to work out a plan together.
Melissa called Joe back. ‘Joe, you’ve got to do it,’ she said. Like her father-in-law, she’s apt to wrap her advice in dictums with a favourite to Joe being, ‘It is what it is.’ Now, with her husband planning to pull the plug on politics, she spoke carefully and deliberately, reminding Joe of how much hard work he’d put in, for years, and how far he’d travelled. She talked him into taking the job.
‘Prime Minister,’ Joe said down the phone a few minutes later, ‘I am happy to serve as your minister for small business and tourism.’
‘I know you’re disappointed,’ Howard responded, ‘but we all have to go through occasional setbacks.’
But Joe didn’t let it go. Even now, he wonders why Howard made that decision at that time. A day later, Costello was given Treasury. Nick Minchin was given the finance portfolio.
Howard was slightly taken back at Joe’s initial reaction to his offer. ‘The operating rule in politics about promotion is if the boss offers you a job, unless it is totally humiliating, you take all of five seconds to say yes,’ he says now. And by the time Joe called Howard back, he was contemplating withdrawing the offer. Joe made his call in the nick of time. But placing Joe in finance had never been a part of Howard’s plan. He had given it to John Fahey previously, believing he was the second most qualified person of the first Howard government, having served as a premier. Following his departure, Nick Minchin stood out as the best candidate. Howard knows the leg-up a leader provides a young MP can shape their career; that’s what Malcolm Fraser did by offering him a ministry once he could, and making him treasurer only a few years later. In short, Howard saw Joe as a talented young minister, among many. ‘He was conscientious and personable in a good field,’ Howard says.
Austra
lia’s tourism was suffering, and the landscape was bleak as Joe took up his new portfolio. Ansett had collapsed a couple of months earlier, in September 2001, the same month that terror struck at the heart of the US with the attack on the World Trade Center towers. Eight out of ten of Australia’s trading partners were either in recession or heading in that direction and the tourism industry was on its knees. Joe didn’t know much about tourism, as a sector, apart from being a happy-snap tourist. But business came naturally to him, and he decided to apply business acumen to the sector.
Having accepted the portfolio, he now had to get serious about it. That wasn’t easy. To the public, he had to pretend this was the job he had coveted for life. Warren Entsch, who came to Canberra in the class of 1996, was parliamentary secretary for the portfolio and recalls Joe being devastated when assigned tourism. ‘I took him aside and said, mate, get a life.’
The September 11 attacks had provided a mini surge in domestic tourism, with people fearful of travelling long distances on planes. It seemed everyone remembered what they were doing at the exact moment the two planes slammed into the towers, snuffing out thousands of lives. Joe had been in Fiji, having just farewelled Melissa who was on a plane destined for New York. He sat in the airport terminal, ready to return to Australia, wondering what information she was being told inflight. The Deutsche Bank had offices close to the New York towers. Joe wanted to talk to Melissa; he wanted her home.
It was that same feeling, across Australia, that meant in the wake of the attacks, fewer people were travelling by air. To countries in the northern hemisphere, Australia seemed even further away than it had previously. At home, despite the mini-surge in domestic tourism, Joe found an industry stymied by a series of different pillars. One part of the industry didn’t communicate with the next, no real structure existed, and the principles that underpinned its performance were alien in the business world. The industry ran on passion, not margins. Joe began talking about targeted returns, research and development, and profited outcomes. He could see the potential, and soon started to relish the challenge.
He put in a call to Matt Hingerty, who had introduced him to the Killara Young Liberals years earlier. Hingerty, who had previously worked for Chris Brown at the Tourism and Transport Forum, took on the job as Joe’s chief-of-staff. Both of them spent wads of time talking to business. Public servants, often working for remote and disinterested ministers, were enthused and bemused, in equal measure, by how Joe tackled the tourism industry, which hadn’t had a champion like this since John Brown, a tourism minister in Bob Hawke’s government; it felt neglected.
There was also a genius in Howard coupling tourism with small business. More than 90 per cent of the nation’s tourism operators were small businesses. That appealed to Joe, as did the parallels between politics and tourism – both were nationalistic, both revolved around selling the benefits of Australia. Joe’s first ministerial role had been as an advocate for Sydney becoming a regional financial centre and just as that had sent him around the world, this job meant life on the road. ‘Wisdom isn’t pumped through the air conditioning at Parliament House,’ he’d tell his media advisor, Sasha Grebe, and others. ‘We need to get on the road and listen to people.’ And that’s what he did – borrowing a bus from Ron Murray from Murray Coaches fame, using the bus licence he got in 1995 and taking to the road. ‘It wasn’t just about being minister; he was the bus driver, too,’ Murray says. ‘He brought a rugby team spirit to it, where no-one was bigger than the team.’
Day after day, when parliament wasn’t sitting, they’d turn up in a country town somewhere in Australia with a standard itinerary – meetings with local councils and tourism bodies. Often, in smaller places, that would involve the same people. And the issues would be similar to the town they visited previously: each area believing they were God’s own garden and dismissing the need to market themselves outside their area, limited funds and public liability constraints putting a brake on fun.
Joe would always draw a crowd, on the back of his appearance on the Seven Network’s Sunrise program where Kevin Rudd was his sparring partner. Rudd had originally suggested the idea to the Seven Network, with the view to engaging Ross Cameron. On the few occasions Cameron couldn’t make it, Joe stepped in. Soon after David Koch joined the Seven Network, and his friendship off-screen made for good on-screen empathy. It wasn’t too long before Joe replaced Cameron. ‘It introduced me to an audience that has no interest in politics,’ Joe says.
That is a big boon for any politician trying to get a message across. Behind the scenes at Sunrise, like similar news shows, producers have a target viewer. In this case it was ‘Isabelle Ipswich’, a moniker for the person Sunrise was trying to attract: female, a Queenslander, likely to reside outside Brisbane in the south-east corner. Rudd and Hockey hit it off, and their easy chats were genuine. Sometimes, they’d spill over to breakfast after their appearance. They liked each other too, and it showed in the ratings. Koch says between 20,000 and 30,000 extra viewers would tune in to hear the ‘Big Guns of Politics’ segment.
‘We’d go for a drink at the pub,’ his friend Lewis Macken says, ‘and we’d lose him. We’d look over and see him at the bar with a group. They would never have voted Liberal in their life, but they were interested in him.’
During his time in the tourism portfolio, a fit of honesty on the back of exhaustion prompted a public relations disaster that could have cost Joe dearly. It was in the Victorian seat of Gippsland, a seat held by Peter McGauran with a tiny margin. The day had got off to a bad start. McGauran, the science minister, picked Joe and Hingerty up from the airport. McGauran was looking forward to Joe spreading a bit of celebrity fairy-dust across his electorate. He packed the day so that Joe could meet all the area’s key players, ending with a meeting of senior businesspeople that night. But after arriving late, they played catch-up all day, ending in the small city of Bairnsdale for the meeting billed as a tourism forum, and heavily promoted by the East Gippsland group of newspapers.
Bob Yeates, the newspaper group’s proprietor and editor and a fiercely parochial East Gippsland supporter was in Bairnsdale for the evening’s forum. Minor variations of what followed come from those in the audience, but it played out along these lines. Joe gave a solid stump speech about regionalisation, focused on Victoria, as well as a lavender farm in one area that had fought through all the public and professional liability insurance issues and still succeeded. He peppered the speech with anecdotes, admitting that small businesses would fall but that was important because people needed to try and live their dreams. It was received well, but that changed quickly once question time began.
‘I could see him, as the night wore on, visibly wilt,’ McGauran says. ‘The exhaustion was kicking in.’
The first question, from a local tourism operator, related to the local area and its potential. Joe thought for a minute before asking, ‘Where the hell am I?’ Others in the room remember his response as being slightly less direct – along the lines of ‘not much’ in answer to the area’s potential – but the effect was the same.
‘There was a moment of silence,’ Hingerty says now, ‘except one jaw hitting the table, which was mine.’
McGauran agrees. ‘It was a disaster.’
Both Hingerty and McGauran had their eyes on Yeates, who responded, ‘There’s a front page for tomorrow. The bloody minister for tourism doesn’t know where he is! What an insult.’
Hingerty knew he only had a few minutes to turn Yeates around. Yeates, now president of Country Press Australia, says: ‘I had the camera and I’m scribbling a few notes and I said that’s the headline: Minister for tourism says, “Where the hell am I in Bairnsdale.” ’ Luckily for Joe, Yeates was as fiercely parochial as he was a good newspaperman, and was open to ways out of the furore Joe had found himself in.
‘We want to meet John Travolta,’ Yeates told Hingerty. Yeates was on the local marketing committee for a planned air show and wanted to invite the movie star
. He believed that could happen if the committee – made up of a plumber, the local undertaker, Bob and the pilot – flew down to Melbourne where Travolta was visiting Qantas.
Hingerty says: ‘I thought, this is going to be some of my best work, and I still contend today that it was.’ He called a friend at Qantas and Travolta not only granted them an audience, but threw his support behind their local air show. The front page of the Bairnsdale Advertiser had found a better story than the Australian tourism minister bagging their town – although Yeates made sure he made reference to the comments inside the publication.
After Melissa, the person Joe relies on most as a sounding board is Andrew Burnes, who he met before becoming tourism minister, but who was one of the industry’s biggest advocates. Former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer had convinced Joe to do the annual Tumbatrek up Mt Kosciuszko in 1999, two years before he took on the tourism role. Burnes was on the same walk, and weighing in at more than Joe, the two found themselves huffing and puffing at the back of the pack. Burnes had his own company, the AOT Group, but he was the national chair of the Australian Tourism Export Council.
Joe, who was acting tourism minister, had spent most of his time on the phone, talking to journalists about the GST. But in between telephone calls, Andrew and Joe started talking, liking each other instantly and sparking a friendship that Joe would draw on time and time again as he climbed the ministerial ranks. From the outset of his appointment, Burnes did everything he could to sell the tourism portfolio to him. It employed 650,000 Australians, he said in one phone call to Joe, and represented 6 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Joe’s view on tourism had been formed through his own experience. He saw it as soft, ballooning with the help of poor university students looking for work, and rich families wanting to treat themselves to holidays. His travel experience, inside Australia, was fairly limited. Burnes changed that, taking Joe and Hingerty to Uluru, followed by the Kimberley and ending up in Broome.