by Madonna King
Then came the surprise of the 2004 election when the Coalition won a majority in both houses of parliament, giving it control of the upper house and the opportunity to govern unshackled. Not surprisingly, industrial relations came straight onto the agenda, fuelled by the findings of the Cole Royal Commission, which exposed the thuggery of the building unions but also the ardour of Howard, Costello and the then industrial relations minister Kevin Andrews. Their legislative package, WorkChoices, went further in depleting union power, promising individual contracts and delivering productivity gains that had stalled for the previous five years. The unions understood this was to be the fight of their lives and they treated WorkChoices as an ideological assault on their power.
Jamie Briggs knew industrial relations inside out; he was about to walk into the office of Joseph Benedict Hockey – someone he suspected knew near-nothing. He understood that Howard must hold Joe in high regard; he wouldn’t have put him anywhere near this portfolio otherwise. ‘This was the most important policy reform Howard ever embarked upon. The GST was very significant to him but workplace relations is, in a sense, his being,’ Briggs says. Briggs sat down in Joe Hockey’s office. ‘Joe had absolutely no idea,’ he says. As he arrived in Joe’s office he was greeted by other advisors, who were peppered around the room.
‘He wasn’t alone,’ advisor Wendy Black says. ‘Not many people around the Cabinet table really appreciated the extent to which WorkChoices had changed some of the fundamentals of the workplace relations system.’ But now it was Joe’s job to understand it, and then sell it. Big lists, made from scraps of butcher’s paper, had been plastered across Joe’s office walls. Joe, with the enthusiasm of a child on his first day at school, was explaining how he was going to lock himself in his office until he understood the minutiae of WorkChoices. He had a plan. His staff, including chief-of-staff Rod Whithear, would quiz him. But first, he needed everyone in the room to give him the knowledge he needed to understand every cranny of WorkChoices.
Everyone remained silent, mostly floored by the upfront admission by a minister that he had to grapple with his new portfolio. Most ministers would wing it, wanting to stamp their authority immediately, and not admit a weakness. ‘Come on,’ Joe was saying, ‘the knowledge doesn’t come through the air conditioners here. Give me a break – I have to get my head around this.’ Briggs looked around the room. Oh, my God, he thought.
Joe, like other MPs, knew WorkChoices was hurting the government, and he’d heard the loud community unrest. He also knew that Howard, who had told him he’d lose ‘a bit of bark’ selling the new laws, was spot on. The polls were proof of that. But Joe only understood the depth of voters’ resentment over the new laws once he took his sales pitch, as Howard had requested, on the road. When he and Whithear landed in a city, they’d immediately gauge the level of antagonism by the number of posters plastered to poles on the drive into town. They saw the Labor state government utility trucks dressing up the telegraph polls with Your Rights At Work posters, and knew they were selling an impossible message. The oxygen had been pumped out of the debate. Unions 1. The government 0.
Inside government, senior politicians clashed over how to deal with the WorkChoices conundrum: some were telling Joe to get off the planes and stop talking about it because he was adding fuel to the fire; others reminded him that he had been appointed exclusively to sell it. But within weeks of starting in the new gig, Joe knew the law would require changes if the Party had any hope of staying in Government. He sought out Briggs. ‘This is impossible,’ he told him. ‘They’ve made up their minds and we don’t have a chance to win them over.’
Briggs’s response was quick. ‘There is no way the boss is going to back down on this,’ he said. A bigger political picture was being painted around WorkChoices, too. Kim Beazley was being rolled by Kevin Rudd, and most conservative MPs thought they were heading for victory. Rudd might have been a difficult opponent for Costello, but certainly not Howard.
The final weeks of 2006 stumbled by, and as parliament headed into 2007 with a fresh Opposition leader, the focus within the Liberal camp was a fifth consecutive term. In January, Joe took a call from Howard while he was changing his six-week-old daughter Adelaide’s nappy.
‘John Howard here,’ Joe recalls him saying. ‘What are you doing?’
Joe explained he was changing his newborn baby’s nappy. ‘And he said, “Well this will prepare you well for your new job.” I said, what’s that?’
Joe didn’t really have to ask the question. He knew the answer: he was being promoted from assisting the employment and workplace relations minister, to taking his job. He finally had a seat at the Cabinet table.
Joe knew the brunt of criticism of the government’s industrial relations laws centred on two issues – penalty rates and unfair dismissals. They were stopping him making inroads to explain the rest of the policy. With Howard still on the phone, he decided not to let the opportunity pass. Would the prime minister countenance any change to penalty rates? he asked. ‘I remember him saying emphatically, like Margaret Thatcher says, “This man’s not for turning.” I’m not for turning on this.’
Howard says he chose Joe for the job because the government needed ‘a more combative public presenter’. ‘I thought Joe was a marginally better debater than Kevin,’ he says. Joe could not be more different from Kevin Andrews, whose political salesmanship had certainly not helped the campaign. Seeing he was being outwitted, Howard’s decision to appoint Joe was intended to capitalise again on his popularity and profile, largely built through Sunrise. He admitted as much at the press conference to announce the ministerial musical chairs. Joe Hockey, the man who would sell the changes, was an ‘avuncular sort of bloke’, ‘a good media performer’, and a ‘big bear of a man’.
Joe remembers every word of it. It stuck in his craw then, and it would again later, as he went through a personal purgatory to decide whether to have radical stomach surgery. ‘Okay,’ Joe thought, smiling through gritted teeth to the assembled media: ‘we’re getting the Demtel man in to sell steak knives.’ But it didn’t diminish his determination to do it. He had a seat at the Cabinet table. He felt Andrews’s frosty response. He didn’t care. It was a challenge. And he knew his appointment would momentarily floor the union movement.
Richard Clancy went to work with Joe in January 2007. He had been a senior advisor on workplace relations to Andrews, having arrived there via the Victorian bar. He, like Briggs, understood the nuances that industrial relations boasted. For those who live it, it’s addictive, the quirks and complexities the stuff of long conversations. Joe needed to understand that detail, and then translate or synthesise it into soundbites that people would understand, and support.
Along with Whithear, Briggs and senior advisor Minna Knight, Clancy tried to focus on the recurring themes that kept coming up in the unions’ Your Rights At Work campaign. They didn’t have the luxury of time; the prime minister’s order was to sell it. Joe knew that now, as employment and workplace relations minister, he would not be spared questions in parliament. He set out to learn what Clancy describes as Industrial Relations 101: ‘I think the seminal moment came when he fully appreciated the fact that under the legislation – aside from satisfying the safety conditions, of which there were five – anything else was open for negotiation.’
With parliament due to sit for the first time in 2007, and Kevin Rudd installed as the new Opposition leader, his advisors knew Joe would be targeted. ‘The first priority was to get him through the first sitting fortnight,’ Clancy says.
In an early sign of the internal chaos that would later drain Labor of support, Joe was spared. Labor had changed shadow ministers, and Joe was now pitted against Julia Gillard, whose understanding of industrial relations suggested she might carry it in her DNA. But even then, Rudd had a propensity to hog the limelight, taking the attention away from industrial relations and heaping it on himself. Joe’s office was grateful; they knew that Gillard could have made J
oe’s life very uncomfortable by drilling down to issues like Notional Agreements Preserving State Awards, and other issues that would have escaped Joe’s attention. In fact, if Labor had been more on top of its game, it could have caught Joe out at several junctures during the campaign.
But while he had escaped Labor’s fire, Joe knew it was fruitless selling the plan while penalty rates couldn’t be negotiated or traded without compensation. It was a glaring problem with the new laws. Joe had picked it up on the street. Whithear and Briggs knew it. Knight and Clancy, who had desks close to one another, would spend hours mulling over how it might be different. ‘We couldn’t answer that question,’ Clancy says. ‘You could try and explain it away, but the reality was that it was theoretically possible to offer a contract of employment without them.’
Worsening the impact of WorkChoices were the single parents it was going to hit badly, and there was no way around that. The union began targeting key seats, such as Longman in Queensland, which held a high degree of single mothers. Welfare to Work, which introduced a work obligation on single parents – largely mothers who had children aged over eight years – was now operating, and this only added salt to the wound. ‘They’re not complainers,’ Joe says. ‘But we were hitting them every which way.’
But it wasn’t just single mothers being targeted in the government’s plans. ‘We’d provided the lightning rod for every complaint you’ve ever had about your boss,’ Joe told Whithear on one trip. ‘And everyone has a complaint against their boss, so we can’t win that argument.’
Each day would start at about 6 a.m., with the union movement’s latest example – such as a teenager on a building site who had lost his penalty rates – taking pride of place in newspapers, and then on talkback radio. Emotions ran high. Security had to be called in Cairns when an event to support local candidate Charlie McKillop turned ugly. As former tourism minister, Joe knew hotel staff in Perth were making a point when he was assigned a room that looked more like a dungeon than hotel accommodation. State Labor governments were engaged, state-based unions were working together and the strength of a single message shone through, closing the door on Joe’s attempts to win voters over.
MPs were being abused in their electorates, too, and were queuing up to ask why their government was hell-bent on the reform. Senior ministers also saw the flaws. ‘Tony Abbott [health minister at the time] complained to Joe in the corridor once that his daughter was working but she only had a two-hour shift,’ Whithear says. It wasn’t worth firing up the family car to take her to work. Joe remembers the conversation. Across the board, the government’s industrial relations vision was failing and it could only blame itself. It had been the recipient of an unexpected majority in 2004, which had offered the chance for real industrial relations reform, but had failed to condition the electorate or properly explain its plans. For too long inside the party, the view had been that WorkChoices would mirror the GST. ‘We thought people would live it and then they’d find out there is no bogeyman,’ Joe says.
The NSW election, in March 2007, forced a turning point. The Liberals were expected to win in NSW and lost again to Labor, with internal polling showing that while it wasn’t the only issue, industrial relations had played a role in voters turning against the Party. The day after Labor’s Morris Iemma was reinstalled premier of NSW, Joe picked up the phone to Briggs. ‘We have to change this,’ he said.
‘Good luck,’ Briggs shot back. Briggs and the Party’s federal director Brian Loughnane both knew the problem was two-fold. First, industrial relations was Howard’s love child, and it was hard to imagine he would change, whatever the polls were saying. Second, the Cabinet didn’t really understand the reform, or how difficult it was, and it might be too late to educate them; Abbott was one of the few exceptions. But the unions had won, that was clear. It was very easy to scare people, and very hard to prove the scare might not always come true.
The following month, in April 2007, Cabinet ministers sat in Brisbane voicing their concerns about WorkChoices and the inability of the government to convince the public otherwise. Months after it was being aired on talkback and being discussed by advisors, those around the table acknowledged it was the policy around unfair dismissals and penalty rates that was the real bugbear. Excising the no-disadvantage test, in the government’s reforms, gave bosses the ability to employ with fewer conditions than they had previously been required to do. It was toxic. But what was particularly startling around this Cabinet table was the basic lack of knowledge about the laws, particularly the intricate workings of the no-disadvantage test. Senior ministers were asking questions that showed they didn’t understand the product they were selling to their electorates – the jewel reform they had pegged on their majority. One even questioned whether they had taken out the no-disadvantage test. ‘Our side was not across it and thought it would pass,’ one minister says. And as Joe points out, ‘We all underestimated the determination of the unions to run a real campaign.’
Earlier that month, on 6 April 2007, Briggs had holed himself away to work on an alternative fairness test. The word ‘fair’ had come up in internal focus groups, run out of Joe’s office. ‘The no-disadvantage test was the key,’ advisor Wendy Black says. But everyone knew Howard would never reintroduce what he had removed. That would amount to a loss, a backflip that would have the nation’s tabloid cartoonists doing spins. The word ‘fair’ curried points in the internal polling. Could a fairness test, a moniker for a reintroduced no-disadvantage test, do the trick?
Briggs put pen to paper, nutting out how it might work, and a few weeks later on Anzac Day, 25 April, a group visited the Lodge to put its case to Howard. Brian Loughnane was there. So was Briggs, advisor Peter Conran and Tony Nutt. Joe, who was in Sydney, had agreed to the fairness test, and crossed his fingers as it was delivered to Howard.
‘He hit the roof,’ Briggs says now. Two hours of discussion followed, as the men sat at the Lodge trying to talk Howard around. ‘He just didn’t want to do it,’ Briggs says. But pragmatism won out, and the prime minister tentatively agreed.
That weekend several advisors, lawyers and public servants locked themselves in the North Sydney Harbourview Hotel, just next to Joe’s office, to write up the changes; working their way through what to change, how to change it, who it would apply to, and how it would apply. A discussion on salary caps led to heated debates, particularly over whether agreements would be lodged and how they would be monitored. Briggs led the discussions when he was in the room. Clancy and Knight took over in his absence. Whithear, Joe’s chief-of-staff, as the only non-member of the ‘IR Club’ did what he could to extract something that might be communicated easily to the public. Joe visited regularly, rolling up his sleeves to help out, and two days later on 30 April 2007, Howard agreed to the changes. Joe knew they would never win the looming election with WorkChoices, but the fairness test gave the government a fighting chance.
James Chessell, who had been Joe’s media advisor before becoming a policy advisor, and his replacement Emma Needham, had their work cut out for them, trying to cut through the negative stories that dominated debate. Each morning, the media calls would start at 6 a.m., and go through until 9 p.m. With the odd exception, the story would garner coverage at the top of the news, whether it was the newspaper, breakfast television or current affairs radio. ‘Bastard bosses’ became the flavour of the month, and the Liberals’ eleventh-hour fairness test did nothing to abate the voter anger over it. It was relentless.
Seven days a week Briggs, acting on Howard’s authority, would be demanding Joe front the cameras and sell the plan. Joe’s media strength was also his weakness, a point his staff tried repeatedly to change during this period. They sat him down, explaining how he could beat Julia Gillard in a debate on most days, but then occasionally blow himself up on commercial radio. The problem was, Joe wasn’t a robot, and the down-to-earth persona he showed on Sunrise, sometimes didn’t work in a political environment. One advisor gives the ex
ample of Penny Wong and her ability to repeat the same message over and over again. ‘Joe said he wanted to be himself because that’s why people liked him,’ he says.
As with so many things in life, the release of the government’s new fairness test came down to timing. The shadow of the 8 May Budget grew long. John Howard had an announcement in his back pocket about the fairness test and a new Ombudsman, and had a final meeting with Joe in Melbourne two days before it would be made public. ‘But there was no feeling that we’d fixed this or we could now win the election,’ one advisor, who sat in on the meeting, says. ‘We’d just put lipstick on a pig, really.’
Labor had released its industrial relations policy, earlier that month, but were drip-feeding extra chunks of it through April. It was going down like a lead balloon. Howard wanted to see Labor bleed, and had delayed the announcement for a few days. Then eventually, he picked up the phone to the nation’s editors, one by one, briefing them on the changes before announcing them publicly in Melbourne on 4 May.
It didn’t make any difference. The battle was lost; the unions, more than the ALP, had outsmarted the Howard government by tying WorkChoices to everything – price rises, safety issues and the cost of living. The government looked and acted tired. Squabbles between Costello and Howard continued to get louder. Rudd looked fresh and energetic, popping up across the nation. The atmosphere in government offices, including Joe’s, was despondent. In human services, the mood had been serene and calm, staff joking that the biggest worry was an occasional story in The Australian about people rorting Centrelink. Now, with the battle almost definitely lost, the smile Joe wore on Sunrise disappeared. His demeanour was dark as the government marched towards an inevitable defeat.