by Madonna King
There is no doubt that the human services portfolio saw Joe return to favour, especially in the eyes of John Howard. It could have been a poisoned chalice. In fact, a colleague early on told Whithear that some of the Party’s conservative MPs had seen Joe’s performance here as a win-win. If he’d done a good job, there would have been good money savings and the government would benefit. If he’d failed, and some hoped he did, it would take out a leading moderate in NSW. And that wouldn’t have been a bad thing, according to them, either.
Ironically, it was during Joe’s stint as human services minister that he turned away from blatant factionalism. That was partly influenced by Whithear, who worked hard on the conservative side of the Party to offset the image of the ‘wet Palestinian’. It was also helped by Joe’s ambition. Foot soldiers for the NSW moderates still spoke to him regularly, but now Joe wanted to embrace the whole Party, be a decision-maker for the whole team. But if Joe’s handling of HIH had led to the stint he hadn’t wanted in tourism, the human services gig cemented in people’s minds where his abilities lay.
Peter Shergold was impressed. He was aware of the moniker ‘Sloppy Joe’. ‘Some ministers are good at the higher level but don’t get to understand the detail,’ he says now. ‘Joe was one of those ministers who understood how to do this job – yes he had a department to do it – but he had to understand the detail.’
Shergold, who is widely respected on both sides of politics, believed Joe had another talent that would allow him to climb higher. ‘I really liked the way, having got on top of the detail, he could put complex things into an easy-to-understand narrative. That’s a real skill,’ he says.
The same skill had stood out at university, and in understanding a legal brief. But Shergold was aware that also meant some people thought the simple narrative was all that Joe had to offer, and he didn’t doubt what a big logistical task his department represented. But at its centre was the need for someone who loved dealing with people. Many politicians don’t really like people; some do and Joe sat firmly in that camp.
In fact, it was Joe’s genuine liking for people and his passion for history that led him in April 2006 to join a ten-day trek along the Kokoda Track to Isurava for the Anzac Day ceremony. His initial enthusiasm for the trip, however, was sorely tested when on day three he found himself on the side of Mount Bellamy, exhausted and covered in mud, the physical strain taking a toll.
Pathos enveloped his mood and his 135-kilogram frame was reeling from fatigue; his shoes were swallowed by mud, hiding the first signs of the foot rot that had taken hold. Tired and hungry, his mind kept turning to the young men who had lost their lives on the same journey to this damp, dark and unfriendly battleground. He was angry with himself that he couldn’t even acknowledge their heroics by making it all the way to Isurava, the site of a planned Anzac Day ceremony in a few days’ time. His wide leather hat hid tears, as well as the lyrics of ‘Danny Boy’, the song one young soldier sang through the night to his brother on this same track, as he lay dying in his arms. He had it typed out and it was stuck, with a picture of his only child, Xavier, into the lining of his hat.
Brian Freeman, a super-fit 50-year-old whose company Centori runs regular Kokoda walks, looked over his shoulder to see one of his charges give up. He knew from the outset this was an unusual group by any standard. Joe Hockey was a Howard government minister, Kevin Rudd was a Labor leadership aspirant and David Koch starred on Sunrise, where the two politicians slugged it out each week. A film crew added to the celebrity status, as the group of 22, along with 15 porters and two medics, snaked their way along the track. The 96-kilometre trail was like climbing Everest from sea level. They would need to scramble up 10,000 cumulative metres to reach Isurava. It was a great leveller. The 30-degree heat and 95 per cent humidity didn’t favour seniority or celebrity. Here, everyone had to put one foot in front of the other for up to 12 hours a day, crawling through mud, water and dense scrub. At the end of each day they would take off their wet clothes and towel-dry their scratched bodies, before feeding on dehydrated dinner packs of lamb and vegetables or spaghetti and meatballs. They’d gulp them down, pretending it tasted fine, before crawling into a dry mosquito-proof tent and falling asleep.
The first day had been slow, especially crossing the Goldie River. Freeman had taken hundreds of people along the track, but that week’s trail was one of the wettest he had experienced. Rivers rose quickly and the trail soon became slippery, muddy and slow. In fact, it had taken the group the whole first day to get from Owers Corner, 50 kilometres east of Port Moresby, to just past the Goldie River, a route that, if looked upon favourably by climate and condition, could take as little as one hour.
Day two wasn’t any easier. Joe made the ten-hour trek to the small village of Iroibaiwa, although a sense of achievement filled the bravado and talk at the campsite when Joe insisted on people learning a verse of the words of ‘Danny Boy’:
But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying
If I am dead, as dead I well may be,
You’ll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say an Ave there for me.
Joe had done his homework before flying into Port Moresby, and it was the story of Stan and Butch Bisset that had made carrying each foot in front of the other possible. Stan, a Wallaby, and his big brother, Butch, were part of the 2/14th Battalion, who found themselves defending Australia against the Japanese on the Kokoda Track. They were helping another battalion hold off the Japanese at Isurava when Butch was badly wounded and died in Stan’s arms. To Joe, who had enjoyed a prosperous childhood, it was heartbreaking and he found he had to hold himself in check each time his mind wondered onto the Bisset brothers. That was why he carried the words to ‘Danny Boy’ in his hat on the trek, to give him strength when he wanted to give up, and to remind him of what others had lost to grant such freedoms. Joe was also on a personal journey. He owed so much to his father, who had been forced to live some of his formative years in an orphanage, before joining the army at the tender age of 15, and arriving in Australia as a 21-year-old. Joe knew how hard his father had worked to ensure he grew up believing he could do anything or be anyone. He knew he owed his father more than he could ever repay, just as he owed Stan and Butch Bisset a lot more than he was now giving.
‘It was very emotional,’ Joe says. ‘How unworthy am I? I’m not carrying a gun, I’m not being shot at and I can’t even get up this bloody hill. I was really angry with myself but I couldn’t take one step. My body wouldn’t move.’
Freeman already liked Joe. He had been referred to him by John Singleton, and he was expecting someone who might have had a slightly bigger ego. He was used to that. Celebrities or big wigs making the trek, talking constantly about themselves, some of them wanting the star treatment. He looked at the big bulk in front of him. Joe wasn’t like that. He didn’t care if he was talking to Kevin Rudd or David Koch or Trekker No. 21. He reminded Freeman of Singleton, or Singo as they all called him, in that way. Both of them could charm anyone, from the porters, to the villagers they came across along the way. They were both genuinely interested in everyone, too. And fiercely patriotic.
Freeman also knew, while the television cameras were along to film the Anzac Day ceremony for Channel 7’s Sunrise program, that Joe was doing this climb for all the right reasons. Looking at him now, he wasn’t too perturbed. Day three on the Kokoda Track was always the hardest. Few walkers could acclimatise in 72 hours. Reality was hitting home, too. There was almost another week of putting their feet, one in front of the other, up the mountain. Joe wasn’t helping himself either, Freeman thought. He knew he wasn’t taking his advice to eat small amounts regularly. Now he saw the self-loathing in Joe’s hunched figure. He was thinking that he was too fat and too lazy to make the climb young men, carrying their life in a knapsack, had made in 1942. The stakes were also higher with this group, Freeman knew. ‘If Joe didn’t finish Kokoda, he’d be on the front page of every paper in A
ustralia,’ Freeman says. ‘There’s no doubt that weighed on him. And then the fear of failure creates anxiety, no matter who you are.’
Freeman, having done this trek with so many different personalities, knew all Joe needed was a sugar hit. He handed him lolly snakes, one after the other, almost pushing the first one into his mouth. The sugar hit would get him up, and then it would be back to one foot after the other, for hours until they reached their next camp, which had been named after Captain Sam Templeton of the 39th Battalion, who lost his life near Oivi on 26 July 1942. The next stop, for Freeman’s group, was Templeton’s Crossing.
Everyone handles Kokoda differently, and Freeman was watching this group closely. On some of these trips, tempers could flare. At other times the enormity of the trek could be overwhelming and a walker would need time, by him-or herself, to gather their thoughts. Freeman referred to them as ‘moments’, and they were common. A trek like this gave everyone a big shot of perspective. With this group, so far, it was more physical ailments he, the medic and doctor were watching out for. Kevin Rudd had foot rot set in early. The pain it brought could be excruciating, with each nerve ending screaming for attention. The television crews were slowing the climb down, but the fact that Rudd, Hockey and Koch got on so well also made the going easier. That had been obvious earlier on day three when they’d made their way across Brown River. Rudd had lost his footing and fallen over, and Joe had reached out to grab him. It was in a small tributary that ran into Brown River, just after lunch, that it happened. The whole group was mucking around, smiles brought on by their first dose of sunshine. In the water, some were having a swim, trying to dislodge the mud that caked to their bodies. Cameras were filming. Joe and Kevin were talking and laughing, when Kevin dropped the soap. He went to grab it, underestimating how quickly the water was flowing. ‘He stumbled on some rocks and lost his footing,’ Freeman, who was watching from the bank, says. ‘Joe grabbed him, and that became the story of Joe saving Kevin.’
At the halfway point, at a little village called Efogi, the group dragged their feet into camp at about 5 p.m. one afternoon. Local villagers came out to see them, and Joe, as always, was mucking around. One of them gave him a cigarette, which he quickly enjoyed. Inhaling deeply, Joe started to feel slightly better. David Koch looked over, realising immediately that Joe was enjoying a marijuana joint. ‘Do you know what you’re smoking?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know what it is,’ Joe quipped back, ‘but it’s pretty good.’ Freeman had no idea what the banter was about, but he knew his group, despite being exhausted, was only a couple of days away from Isurava, and the Anzac Day ceremony that was the crux of the whole walk. There, two days later, more than 100 trekkers paid their respects to those Australians who lost their lives in 1942. Joe was 8 kilograms lighter.
It was at Con’s Rock, just before Isurava, that the magnitude of the trek hit almost all of the walkers. The rock is small and flat, and in 1942 it became a field operating table in a desperate bid to stem the loss of lives of young Australian men. It was here, also, that Butch Bisset took his last breath, in the arms of his brother. Joe took out the words of ‘Danny Boy’, but no-one needed them by that stage. They’d learnt them each night. It was just a small tribute, hardly anything really, but they sang every word of it, their voices ringing out in the silence, and breaking as they reached the last verse.
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me!
Joe’s fists were clenched. He felt privileged, and overwhelmed. He thought he also understood a little more about what his father went through as a young man, seeing friends killed, living the pain of war, hoping for something better. But here, on Anzac Day 2006, Joe felt tiny. The sacrifices that these young Australians had made in 1942 were incomprehensible. He took his hat off, and cried. Tears washed down the cheeks of dozens of grown men and women dwarfed by the magnitude of what had happened in the jungle in 1942. Back in Canberra, the preparations were underway to announce the access card he had championed. Joe looked down at the trench foot that had torn the skin from his feet. His was no worse than those who stood next to him. Kokoda had taught Joe that you set your own limits, and now he was going to reach higher.
THIRTEEN
JAMIE BRIGGS POPPED around to Joe Hockey’s office in the ministerial wing of Parliament House. Joe had just been made assistant workplace minister, in addition to his human services portfolio, and Briggs, John Howard’s industrial relations advisor, wanted to provide him with a good brief. To be honest, he didn’t rate Joe Hockey too highly. Many of his friends were from the Right of the Party in NSW and they weren’t singing Hockey’s praises. ‘My sort of impression going to see the guy was he’s a lightweight, that he won’t know what he’s talking about,’ Briggs says. It didn’t sit too well with the young policy advisor who had a background in industrial relations, and who had worked both in campaign headquarters and the prime minister’s office. ‘What’s the boss thinking?’ he wondered as he swung through the front door of Joe’s office.
Howard was thinking that his industrial relations plans were floundering. It was mid-2006 and while Kevin Andrews, as employment and workplace minister, had been doing a solid job of developing the laws, he wasn’t starring in communicating it. The Party had embraced the changes six months earlier in a Party room meeting, which was characterised more by the level of excitement it created, than any understanding of the new laws. Most MPs considered it part of the government’s reform agenda, and didn’t think too much about how it might play out in their electorate. Joe was one of them.
Now, six months later, a ruthless and well-heeled campaign by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) had wrong-footed the government. MPs knew it was hurting the Party, as well as their individual re-election chances, and there seemed no way of combatting the polished campaign, blaring out each morning on TV and radio with damaging examples of how the WorkChoices reform agenda would destroy families. Talkback hosts were swallowing those examples, and finding some of their own.
Howard believed Joe had the knack of explaining difficult concepts to people. He’d heard him regularly on Network Seven’s Sunrise, and seen the response. Most people were suspicious of politicians, and Howard knew that wasn’t the case with Joe. Sunrise had pushed Joe into lounge rooms across Australia, and voters seemed to engage with him easily. That was behind Howard’s decision to make him assistant workplace relations minister, helping Kevin Andrews deliver the message to voters, while a new parliamentary taskforce, chaired by Victorian MP Phil Barresi, would provide campaign ideas and advice.
Until the 1980s, Australian industrial relations had largely been built around orthodoxies set out in the Federation period Harvester Judgment, which centralised wage control and based it on living costs and an ability to bargain, rather than on productivity. Employers fought about the quantum of wage increases and complained about the influence of trade unions in their workplaces. But rarely did they consider tackling the system that delivered certainty to them and their employees. In a world where Australia’s competitiveness was based on commodity prices, and the performance of manufacturing was protected by tariff walls, productivity was a second-rung issue. But the balance began to change through the 1970s and early 1980s as unions flexed their muscles more and showed greater willingness to bring the country to its knees through assaults on key industries, such as fuel, electricity and telecommunications. More and more employers began to query the orthodoxy but received little joy from the Fraser government, and were lulled into security by the election of the Hawke government and its consensus approach to industrial relations.
Conservative politics in the 1980s was buoyed by watching what was happening elsewhere in the world, particularly the UK, where the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher took on and defeated the unions that were stifling her cou
ntry. A consistent voice for reform through this period was John Howard who, from Opposition, took a lead in changing the orthodoxies. Economic decisions of the Hawke government made changes to labour laws inevitable. The floating of the dollar, banking deregulation and lowering of tariff walls meant that labour could no longer be insulated from the forces of competition that demanded more from every business input.
While Howard argued the case (as a fairly lonely voice) from the political wing of conservative Australia, some employer ‘mavericks’ took a lead in using civil law to break union power. They included future Howard government ministers Peter Costello (in a case called Dollar Sweets in Victoria) and Ian McLachlan (then of the National Farmers Federation in the Mudginberri Abattoir dispute in the Northern Territory). There’s little doubt that the Prices and Incomes Accord in 1983 delivered productivity gains but they were not enough to make Australian businesses as competitive as they had been against emerging economies where labour costs were much lower.
The 1990s saw that orthodoxy shift and conservative politics was unanimous in agreeing that individual workers should have the right to write individual contracts with their employers. The Hawke, then Keating, government had only gone as far as legislating for groups of workers to form enterprise agreements with their employers. The Howard government, once elected, introduced Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) – effectively individual contracts that included clauses guaranteeing their signatories could not be disadvantaged against union employees. But, importantly, this began to erode the power of unions, particularly in smaller workplaces where they had little visibility other than to collect fees. Come 2000, Australia was heading into a boom and while the Howard government had made strides in industrial relations, there was no great appetite to take giant leaps. Instead, there was a belief that AWAs would continue to erode union agreements delivering incremental productivity gains.