by Madonna King
Whithear joined Joe on the roof of his North Sydney office one night to have a sneaky cigar. He tried to cheer him up. If you deliver on this and get the government out of trouble, he told Joe, you’ll be seen as a hero. But the flip side could be spun, too. If you can’t win it for them, a leading moderate in NSW would be tarnished. And with lots of voters, that wasn’t a bad way to be seen either.
But Joe’s concern was not just the fate of his own government. He now started to worry about his own seat of North Sydney. His WorkChoices sell-job meant he was travelling the nation constantly, and voters in his own electorate looked like giving him a good backhander. He reached for a chocolate, his growing girth proof of both his mood, and his shot confidence.
FOURTEEN
IT WAS SUNDAY night in September 2007, and Joe was feeling edgy. He knew he had to call prime minister John Howard and have a conversation neither of them would fancy. ‘You can’t call the prime minister and tell him to go,’ Melissa said. But Joe was adamant. He’d told other Cabinet ministers a few days earlier that he believed Howard should vacate the prime ministership, but he hadn’t had the guts, yet, to tell him himself. He walked into the children’s toy room, a big colourful space that adjoins the kitchen, and called Howard at Kirribilli House. ‘Thanks for taking my call,’ Joe began.
‘No worries,’ Howard replied. ‘I suspect I know what this is about.’
A few days earlier, as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings were playing out in Sydney, an air of panic was hovering over the Liberal Party, with a growing realisation that pulling it out of the doldrums with less than three months until the election was nigh impossible. Those inside the room at the overseas passenger terminal, where a big APEC dinner was being staged, wouldn’t have known that, but it was there that Liberal MP Alexander Downer asked Joe to come around to his suite in the Quay Grand Hotel for a chat, and he joined others, including Philip Ruddock, Kevin Andrews, Julie Bishop and Brendan Nelson, to ponder the polling that voters wanted to hit the government for six. Neither Tony Abbott nor Mal Brough was there.
Joe stood on the verandah, enjoying a cigar, when Alexander Downer opened the batting. ‘He said the prime minister had asked to speak to us. He was asking for our view on whether he should go now, and pass over to [Peter] Costello.’ A thought dominated Joe’s thinking; earlier in the year, Joe believed that Howard had been behind the publication of a suggestion that he had asked Cabinet whether the poor polling could be sheeted home to him. It had really annoyed Joe. ‘It was spun by him that he’d asked the Cabinet whether it was [him], and they’d all said no. Everyone went, hang on, I don’t remember that conversation in Cabinet.’
Now he listened, as Downer went around the room, with each person giving their view on whether Howard should vacate the prime ministership. ‘You know Bennelong,’ Downer directed the next question to Joe. ‘Is he going to hold Bennelong?’
‘No, he’s gone,’ Joe said. Joe was sure of this, based on polling in his own seat, which neighboured Bennelong. North Sydney, over the years, had slowly bitten into chunks of the Liberal stronghold of Bennelong. Howard’s own home at Wollstonecraft had dropped out of Bennelong in a 1977 electoral redistribution. Lane Cove and Hunters Hill were excised later, and it was internal polling Joe had done in Lane Cove, which he now represented, that highlighted the unpopularity of Howard. Joe told the posse of politicians that Rudd, who had toppled Beazley and been installed as Labor leader ten months earlier, in December 2006, was preferred prime minister by a big margin in Lane Cove, an area the prime minister had once represented.
‘He has to go,’ Joe told Downer. ‘He has to pass to Peter Costello and our only chance of winning is if there is a baton change to Costello.’
Joe looked across at Nelson, who stood opposite him, remembering a conversation the pair had shared months earlier. Nelson was adamant the government would end the year in Opposition. At that stage, months earlier, Joe had not been so sure. ‘They don’t like doing it but they [the public] are going to put us down,’ Nelson said. ‘It’s just time. It’s like an old family dog.’
As the year wore on, Nelson’s assessment had proved right. Rudd’s ascension had made the Labor Opposition look fresh and fight-ready. That was helped by a complacent government, in which the leadership team, including Howard, underestimated Kevin from Queensland. In January that year, as the Howard government disappeared on annual breaks, Rudd ran free. Howard himself was not panicked, though. He was preparing his own reshuffle over the Christmas–New Year break and believed a Cabinet rejuvenation would see off the new threat. Yet it was during this period that Rudd was allowed to define himself – in many ways as an alternative, younger Labor version of Howard, a stable fiscal conservative – and the Liberal team spent 2007 trying to catch up.
‘We’d come back from the dead in 2004,’ Joe says now. ‘John Howard had seen off one young Turk [Latham] and he was waiting for this young Turk [Rudd] to fade and fall apart – and he didn’t. We were completely divorced from what the punters were thinking.’
Back in Downer’s suite the conversation remained focused on Howard. The inference that hovered over discussions was that Howard wanted his ministers to ‘knife him’, rather than voluntarily step aside for Costello. None of those present liked the idea, aware that a decision to bring down a prime minister would collapse their own vote. ‘Everyone agreed that we shouldn’t give him a leave pass because we would be blamed and we would lose,’ Joe says.
Downer says: ‘It was our view if we knifed him we would go down in a huge screaming heap in the electorate. Howard was not particularly unpopular with the punters, they were just tired of him. In Liberal heartland, he was a hero. And if you knife your heroes not only do you beatify them but you do the exact reverse to yourselves as the knife wielders. You demonise yourselves.’
A few days later, Joe had not heard back from Downer, who had gone to convey the group’s view to John and Janette Howard at Kirribilli house. That’s when, on the Sunday evening after discussing it across the kitchen table with Melissa, Joe decided to pick up the phone and tell the prime minister he should step down.
‘I think you should hand over to Peter,’ Joe said. ‘If you hand over to Peter now, we have a chance of winning the election. I don’t think you’ll win Bennelong and I don’t think we’ll win the election. Our best chance is to have an orderly transition.’ They talked about it. Joe said the public had turned; when the prime minister now talked about the future, they had stopped listening because they did not believe he would be there long term. Instead, they were listening to Rudd.
‘He said, “You don’t think I’m just going to hand over to Peter Costello, do you?” ’ Joe says.
‘I was surprised. I said you set the test. You said when it’s in the best interests of the nation and the best interests of the Liberal Party …’ Joe trailed off.
Howard was adamant. ‘I am not handing over to Peter Costello. I’m not going to do that,’ Joe recalls him saying.
Howard’s memory is of a conversation a lot less pointed. ‘He had a telephone conversation with me. He only just said [that I should go] … He just said it in the same way that Mal Brough said it,’ Howard says. ‘He had wanted to put it on the record as having said it.’ In any case, the conversation ended on a convivial basis, with Howard thanking his minister for having the courage to make the telephone call.
‘And that was it,’ Joe says.
But it wasn’t. With parliament resuming it soon leaked out that Cabinet had contemplated getting rid of the prime minister. ‘I was beside myself with anger because he had invited it,’ Joe says. Joe went around to Costello’s office telling him that spin was outrageous. Joe had always been a strong supporter of Costello, but not the agitator for change he has been described as. Howard says he was never conscious of Joe pushing for change earlier on. ‘I never doubted Joe’s professional behaviour,’ he says. ‘I never ever doubted Joe’s loyalty or partnership as part of the team. I could a
ccept, quite benignly, that people might reach a point where they think it is time for a change.’
Joe was sure that now was the right time. Howard needed to step aside, and give Costello a wafer-thin chance of leading the government to victory again. He believed Howard should walk into the Party room and admit that he had sought opinion of his ministers on whether he should go, and he told Costello just that. It was a very different view from the one beginning to become public, that the Party might dispense with their leader. ‘If he won’t do that, I’ll move a spill motion on the floor of the Party room,’ Joe told Costello. Costello then left his office to meet Howard.
Later, Howard told the Party room that he had invited opinion on whether he should opt out of the prime minister’s office, and that he would only stay on for half the next term. Many believed that Howard had let everyone believe an act of disloyalty had occurred against him when he had invited it. ‘It was a joke that he could pretend that he was able to lead the Party and the Party was united behind him because everyone knew his Party wanted him to go,’ Costello says. ‘This was his sort-of concession. He came into the Party room and said, “Look I’ve decided to stay but I’ll go after the next election.” ’
Dismal polling – both public and private – for the government added to its woes, as the public embraced Rudd. Joe knew Rudd better than most on the Right, and in fact, his friendship with the Opposition leader had annoyed many of his colleagues. They believed Rudd was playing Joe – using Joe’s public profile to boost his own. Downer had grown to despise Rudd over the Australian Wheat Board saga, which had hurt the government, and didn’t like Joe joining Rudd for the ‘Big Guns of Politics’ session on Network Seven’s Sunrise each Friday morning.
At every turn, Joe was told he was helping advance Rudd’s interests. ‘Their view was that the whole reason Rudd was popular was because he was on Sunrise – get him off Sunrise and you would really dent his popularity,’ Joe says. Thank goodness they hadn’t seen the pair of them at a Christmas party at David Koch’s home a couple of years earlier. ‘I was never a threat to him, so he was nice Kevin,’ Joe says. ‘He was always nice to me. We always got on well. I remember at Kochie’s house at the Christmas party the year before he became leader, giving him advice. We stood in the corner and he said, how do I become leader of the Opposition and I gave him all this advice.’ Joe was even invited to Kevin’s daughter Jess’s wedding, but reluctantly declined on the strong advice from his office. Joe genuinely liked the Kevin Rudd he shared the Sunrise breakfast stage with, and his parliamentary colleagues got his back up when pressure rose to get rid of any contracts Kevin’s wife, Thérèse Rein, had with the department (those common law contracts came out of Joe’s department). ‘I was livid about it,’ he says now. ‘You never play the spouse.’
The whole saga came to a head in April 2007, after five years on the program, following controversy over plans to stage a pre-dawn Anzac Day service in Vietnam, a plan blamed on Kevin Rudd that led to accusations it would cheapen commemorations. For someone so adept at handling the media, Joe underestimated this story, which blared across newspaper, radio and television: FAKE DAWN.
Usually, before the segment, there would be playful banter between the two politicians and their hosts. But this Friday, conversation was cool. Joe didn’t think too much of it, and played down the story when asked about it. That infuriated many of his colleagues, because it offered Rudd, who was being blamed for orchestrating the fake dawn, a get-out-of-jail-free card. They had expected Joe to launch a strong attack on his on-air opponent.
After the segment appeared, Joe’s mobile rang incessantly, with the first call from Howard’s office. ‘You can’t keep doing this,’ he was told. That was as close as anyone got to directing him to stop it, but the warnings that their laid-back friendship was helping Rudd came thick and fast and not just inside parliament.
‘I’ll never forgive him,’ John Singleton says. ‘He was such a good talent and he had this wuss with him and he dragged him into being popular. He [Rudd] would never have been prime minister without Joe’s help. Joe carried him.’
Still, today, some of his ministerial colleagues are furious the segment continued for the five years that it did. ‘He could have used it to deal a big blow to Rudd. He never did. He wanted to be popular and that would have made him at the time unpopular,’ one senior Liberal says. ‘He would not raise any negative story about Rudd on Sunrise and that’s because the Sunrise people would have told him that that kind of negativity wasn’t popular on television,’ another says. ‘Despite being told to do that by the government, he wouldn’t have wanted to because he might have been pushed off Sunrise.’
Following the airing of the ‘Fake Dawn’ episode Joe knew that he could be blamed if Rudd won. He agreed to end it, and on 19 April 2007, David Koch announced the news the two politicians had called it quits. ‘Politics can sometimes be a pretty nasty game and it was never the intention of the segment to get bogged down in that,’ Koch told viewers. It was politics, no doubt, that ended the television tête-à-tête and while the ‘Fake Dawn’ episode was portrayed as another example of Kevin Rudd’s media manipulation abilities, it was colleagues on Joe’s side who were behind the initial leak.
Joe couldn’t turn a trick at work, or at home. It was also in mid-2007 that Adelaide, who was just over six months old, contracted chicken pox. The couple now had two small children, and Melissa had returned to work. But at home she was taking calls during the night. Joe rarely saw her angry but each night she came to bed frustrated, after spending hours on international phone calls. Melissa, despite the enormous influence she holds over her husband, was fully aware of their professional separations. She rarely discussed the details of her work with Joe but based on what she saw happening in offshore markets she wanted them to offload all the family’s investments. This was before any suggestion was being publicly made that Australia was heading into recession. ‘She wanted to sell everything we owned,’ Joe says.
Joe called David Koch, respecting his opinion. Koch says, ‘Joe rings me and says, “Melissa is making me sell everything we own. She says a recession is coming, the biggest recession since the Great Depression. I’ve convinced her to keep our house but she’s selling everything else.” I said really? This is at the height of the share market boom.’ But she picked it. ‘If ever I have any worries about the economy or the markets, I’ll ring Joe and ask what Melissa thinks,’ Koch says.
Ron Murray, a friend of Joe’s who sat atop Murray Coaches, saved a bit of money on the back of Melissa’s mind, too. He ran into Joe during the time Melissa was warning of a recession. He asked Joe whether he should sell his share investments. Joe said yes. He did, and continues to thank Melissa for her insight.
Melissa’s views weren’t being echoed by Joe’s parliamentary colleagues at that stage though, with the view that Australia would not be pulled into the same economic woes happening elsewhere. ‘And they then increased interest rates during the election!’ Joe says. He convinced Melissa to keep their family home, along with two other properties they owned, but all the family’s money was transferred to offset accounts. ‘She knew having a legal credit line from a bank was gold,’ Joe says.
He might have argued successfully to keep the family home, but Joe was more interested in trying to keep his seat. The looming election had him pitted against Mike Bailey – who had been ABC’s weatherman – and he struggled to find enough volunteers to help on his campaign. The polling he saw just before the November poll showed he might be tossed out by the voters of North Sydney. He’d talked to his staff five weeks earlier. ‘I don’t want to be one of those bosses who can’t see reality,’ he told the loyal crew. If they had offers, or wanted to look around, they should do it; he would not consider it disloyal.
On 24 November – the day of the election – he and Melissa drove to Canberra to join the Seven Network’s tally room broadcast. Joe made calls as they skirted around Sydney airport and onto the highway, t
he road he travelled each Sunday night ahead of parliamentary sittings. He called Mal Brough, who was running again in Longman. He seemed very upbeat. Teresa Gambaro, who was the incumbent Liberal in Petrie, was not as confident. Joe remembered again Brendan Nelson’s apt description: the Party mirrored the family dog, and voters thought it was time to put it down. He looked up to see a removal truck heading in the opposite direction. Rudd’s Removals ran down the side of it. Joe knew the jig was up.
FIFTEEN
IT WAS IN a $39 a night motel room in June 2008 that being in the wilderness of Opposition really hit Joe. He had been to Geelong to farewell Stewart McArthur, the MP for Corangamite until his defeat the year before, and was now headed down the highway to Gippsland where a by-election would be held the next day, triggered by the resignation of the Nationals’ Peter McGauran. As tourism minister, Joe had been feted by hotel staff, and often given the big plush room with all the bells and whistles. Not anymore.
‘A bikie was selling drugs next door and it was freezing,’ he says. ‘There was this guy on TV – he was singing with his banjo B-A-double L-A-R-A-T. Ballarat is my cit-eee.’ Joe focused on the small screen. ‘Could it get any worse?’. He got up, put on a t-shirt and walked next door to the guy plying his drug trade. ‘He looked at me and said, “I know you.” I said, I hope not. He said, “You’re a good guy.” I said thanks. He said, “You need some of this shit?” I said, I probably do but please just let me get a good night’s sleep.’ Joe returned to his bedroom. His bikie friend moved elsewhere.
Seven months earlier, John Howard’s government had been tossed out of parliament, and was still trying to find its feet. Joe had never known Opposition; neither had many others, and it pummelled them hard from the moment early voting showed a Labor Party shoo-in. Joe and Melissa had driven to the Canberra tally room from their Sydney home. There they met Joe’s advisors, including James Chessell, Emma Needham and James Newbury. The Sunrise election commentary panel, led by David Koch and Melissa Doyle, was packed and hot. Popular Labor MP Tanya Plibersek, one of the few politicians who can unnerve Joe, was also on it. A sense of foreboding filled him. The family dog was about to be put down. He thought he might lose his seat, too. But you never knew with John Howard leading the Party. Despite a shocking interview by one of his favourite MPs, Jackie Kelly, a couple of days earlier, Joe crossed his fingers and hoped that Howard could pull off the impossible.