by Madonna King
His staff didn’t tell him the first results in from his seat of North Sydney. They were from Naremburn, a booth where his dad was known and loved. It had just fallen to Labor. But it was a piece of news, handed to him on a scrap of paper, which got him into trouble. Passed on to him by James Newbury, it read: ‘Howard in trouble’.
In the emotion of the night Joe blurted the news out on live television. It wasn’t long before one of the prime minister’s advisors picked up his phone to provide Joe with a frank assessment and remind him that it wasn’t his job to make predictions or stray into the prime minister’s territory. But seat after seat was falling, and everyone soon knew a change of government was inevitable. On Labor’s side, staff were gloating. On the other side, they were downcast. A decade of government had come to an end. Joe was exhausted, and glum. The crew from the The Chaser comedy show was watching for their chance. With a big thought bubble in tow, carrying the word ‘FUCK’, they headed Joe’s way and it was only an accidental tripping that allowed Joe to escape a final humiliation. Back at the Hyatt, Joe had a drink before he returned with Melissa to their Canberra home. ‘It will break me if it’s a decade in Opposition,’ Joe told her.
‘You haven’t come this far to give up now,’ Melissa responded. Joe went to bed, waking the next morning to find the name plates on his parliamentary office already being changed. But that was only a sign of the policy and political chaos that was yet to come.
Ahead of the first parliamentary sitting, the key players all met in the office of new leader Brendan Nelson. ‘We’d never done it before. None of us had ever been in Opposition,’ Joe says. ‘We didn’t know how to frame a question. We didn’t have any advisors. We just sat there at the first meeting and looked at each other and thought, what do we do now?’
With Howard sent packing, the Party had to first search for a leader. Joe had announced the death of WorkChoices immediately following the election, but policy vacuums followed for months as the Party struggled with its new direction, first under Nelson and then under Turnbull. Costello signalled early on that he would not make a claim to the top job. Joe had begged Nelson, his friend and flatmate, not to run for the leadership; he told him that whoever became leader now would never be prime minister.
Nevertheless, Nelson wanted to give it a go and the final challenge was between Nelson and Turnbull. Abbott had indicated he would stand, but withdrew on the eve of the vote, knowing he did not have enough support. Joe told Nelson he wouldn’t vote for him, and he didn’t, making for good dinner table conversation at the home they shared in Canberra. ‘Both [Nelson and Turnbull] were his friends,’ one staffer says. ‘Joe was forlorn and moping around like a little puppy the morning of the ballot. What he found most difficult was that he was friends with both of them. He was visibly stressed. He knew at the end of the day he would have let down one friend.’
But Joe knew who would get his vote. ‘Malcolm was absolutely determined to become leader,’ Joe says, and few believed he would stop at anything to get it. In Joe’s view, whoever took the reins would only be there until it was Turnbull’s turn. ‘We were going to have Malcolm at some point and then he’d burn out, and he did, and in the interim we lost Brendan.’
But it was more drawn out than that. Nelson beat Turnbull 45 to 42 after the 2007 election, giving Nelson a go at the top job. Joe was given the health portfolio, his least favourite policy area. Nelson’s thinking had nothing to do with Joe not voting for him in the ballot. As a former head of the Australian Medical Association, Nelson knew health needed a retail politician. He also believed Joe would grow in stature in a social policy portfolio, and health headed the list of those. He told Joe he had ‘drawn the short straw on WorkChoices’ and the health portfolio would allow him to remake himself. ‘He didn’t like it,’ Nelson says. ‘I was trying to help him not hurt him.’
Joe says: ‘I hated it. I thought he was kidding.’ Nelson stood his ground, and with minor negotiation, Joe was also given what he wanted – the job of manager of Opposition business.
Dr Ginni Mansberg was a general practitioner doing a spot of television commentary when she saw the gig advertised as an advisor to Opposition health minister Joe Hockey. Needing full-time work, she jumped at it. During the interview, Joe asked her whether there was anything she wanted to tell him. ‘I’ve never voted for the Liberal Party,’ she said. ‘And he pissed himself laughing,’ Mansberg says. ‘He thought that was an absolute riot and from that moment, we gelled.’
That is not an isolated story; it feeds others like it, showing that Joe relishes having people around him who think differently. Similarly, he would often get someone in the office who disagreed with him to draft a speech he had to deliver on a topic. The stem cell debate in 2006 – where MPs voted on scientists being allowed to clone embryos to extract their stem cells for medical research – is a good example of that. Joe voted in favour of the law change, but only after hours of debate with Emma Needham, an advisor in his office who was opposed to it.
‘I envy those who see these issues as black or white,’ Joe told parliament in his stem cell speech. ‘I certainly do not.’ He went on to tell parliament the Jesuits had instilled in him the importance of a free and informed conscience, along with a sense of faith and compassion. ‘Will this Bill improve or harm the human condition?’ he asked. ‘I believe that anything we can do to improve the quality of life, we should do.’
Still, Mansberg says Joe struggled with the idea of the health portfolio – making no secret he had no passion for it – just as she struggled with the politics. He would have been a terrible health minister, she says, because he couldn’t cope with children suffering illness or disabilities. ‘He would have been shaving his armpits to find the money … he’s an absolute soft-touch,’ she says. Mansberg says her former boss also came to her rescue when conservative staffers barraged her after she admitted being a fan of Julia Gillard and never voting Liberal. She stayed because she believed that one day he would be prime minister, and she wanted to ensure he understood good health policy.
Nelson’s leadership run was largely strangled by those looking over his shoulder. He also had older members, such as Costello, Downer and Mark Vaile, evaluating his decisions. Joe had found Opposition hard, but it was even harder for older Liberal and National MPs who weren’t showing the same energy they boasted in government. That was the impetus for Cardboard Kevin, a huge cardboard cut-out of the new prime minister, which was carried into the parliamentary chamber. It was used to highlight Rudd’s absence from parliament, but also to provide Opposition MPs with a big morale boost. It worked. Labor had scheduled parliamentary sittings for Fridays, but Rudd was absent for the first one. His cardboard presence, thought up by Joe and Nelson and organised by party boss Brian Loughnane, caused bedlam, led to good TV coverage for the Opposition, and reignited a spark of enthusiasm among Liberal and National MPs.
It was also during this time, with Joe as manager of Opposition business, that Anthony Albanese, one of his closer friends on the other side of parliament, found a chink in his armour. ‘Sometimes his emotions can get the better of him,’ Albanese says. As leader of the house, Albanese was Joe’s opposite number and sometimes he would call Joe to alert him to a procedural change in parliament. ‘He would be genuinely offended,’ he says. ‘He would get angry about things he couldn’t change and weren’t, in the scheme of things, that significant. Perhaps he had difficulty in adjusting from government to Opposition.’
One senior Liberal claims Joe spent part of his time unofficially ‘managing’ Turnbull. ‘Malcolm has an extraordinary mind, but he’s not very patient.’ In one of the early leadership meetings, in Nelson’s office, staffers remember Turnbull exploding. ‘He stormed out of the room in the middle of the discussion about tactics for the day and slammed the door and everyone is sitting there absolutely shell-shocked,’ the senior Liberal says. Two minutes later, Turnbull returned. Some people bottle up their anger; others explode and it disappears into
thin air. Turnbull boasts the latter trait. He walked back into the room, sat down, and wanted to ensure he was allocated a question. ‘He acted as though nothing had happened. Joe just burst out laughing – and that completely calmed the situation.’
A second senior staffer describes it as ‘wrangling Malcolm’. He claims he heard more than one loud argument between Turnbull and Joe. On one of those occasions, Joe took offence to Turnbull suggesting a way of asking questions, believing he was both sanctimonious and patronising. Joe threw the pack of questions at him. ‘Then you write them, you fucking arsehole,’ Joe was heard to say, before storming off.
While Joe had voted for Turnbull, his friendship was stronger with Nelson, who didn’t trust Turnbull. From the sidelines Melissa watched the relationship between Turnbull and her husband oscillate between friend, colleague and competitor. ‘Internally, people would say Malcolm’s a bloody bright guy but he’s not political and that would play itself out on the floor of parliament. He, at the end of the day, would operate like a barrister. There was no tactical wiliness.’
Melissa’s description of Joe’s time in Opposition is akin to a big semi-colon between sentences. He didn’t quite know what was next. The couple had a two-year-old son, a nine-month-old daughter, and Melissa had returned to work full-time. Like any woman in the same situation, she was putting one foot in front of the other. She says Joe remained optimistic at home, in part because of her no-nonsense way of seeing things. ‘It is what it is,’ she’d repeat. But she also saw Opposition as a positive step for Joe. She knew it could round out his plans and his views. She hoped Joe saw it that way, too.
In April 2008, Joe took a holiday. He was determined to stay a politician, but he needed a good dose of perspective. He went to the Anzac Day ceremony at the Somme in France. ‘When you feel sorry for yourself, you just have to look at what those young kids went through. It gives you perspective,’ Joe says. He travelled with close friend Andrew ‘Burnesy’ Burnes, and learnt quickly that his friends in high places while he was in government weren’t so keen on him now he was in Opposition. High commissioners in two countries, who had previously pawed all over him, didn’t want to know him. He found it tough, mainly because he likes people.
In Paris, he and Burnes rented a three-door car and went exploring. From there, they flew to Beersheba, where the Pratt family had asked him to help unveil a statue as a tribute to our diggers. Burnes says Joe grappled with his future during those weeks. He’d been in the spotlight, on this singular career trajectory, and all of a sudden the music stopped. The emails stopped. No staff were available to organise flights or cars. Rudd and Labor had won convincingly, too, meaning this lifestyle was unlikely to last only three years.
Burnes says Joe didn’t wallow in it but his friend’s soul-searching coloured their trip. It weighed on him that he had two young children and a wife who had already made significant career compromises. But there were also more obvious ways Joe had to adapt to his new life. ‘Joe discovered there were queues and some people had to stand in them – including sometimes him,’ Burnes says with a laugh. Joe returned to Australia a few kilograms heavier, but with his sense of humour intact.
Others in the Party were going through the same career quandary. Joe brushed off an indirect approach, from sources within NSW parliament, to take over from Barry O’Farrell in NSW. John Singleton admits he was also on Joe’s case to switch to NSW politics. ‘I rang Joe because I was in fear that the Liberals would get in and do fuck-all, a fear which has been proved well-founded,’ he says. ‘I said, mate you’re odds-on to be treasurer or longer odds-on to be premier of NSW. Why can’t you run?’
Joe quickly quashed the idea, but those approaches were driven by the Party’s showing in NSW. That concerned Joe, but he wanted to play in the national arena. On one occasion, he had a conversation with Turnbull with the two of them nutting out how the Party might get over the line in NSW. ‘It wasn’t about doing over Barry; it was just we couldn’t afford to lose,’ Joe says. ‘So we had a conversation and he thought I was raising with him that I wanted to do it [lead the Party], and I thought he was raising with me that he wanted to do it. We were at cross-purposes and both agreed that the other one should do it!’
All the while, tensions between Nelson and Turnbull festered. Turnbull wanted to be leader, and, to give him credit, he didn’t hide it. Whoever had nabbed it after Howard would have had the same chase from Turnbull. He considered himself most deserving of the gig, and was happy to fight for it. Nelson describes it as ‘a perfect storm’: Kevin Rudd, an astonishingly popular prime minister, Peter Costello, who could have had the job of Liberal leader but didn’t want to, and Malcolm Turnbull, who really wanted it.
Costello, the one person who could have walked into the leadership if he had chosen to, didn’t really know what he wanted, as evidenced by a meal he shared with Joe once Turnbull had become leader. Joe and Costello met for dinner, behind the big brass doors of La Rustica in Kingston, at Costello’s invitation. ‘I want you to be deputy,’ Joe heard him say. ‘It was at a table in the middle of Kingston where everyone could see,’ Joe says. ‘He said he was going to move, [that] it’s got to be dealt with – I’m ready to lead – will you be my deputy?’
Joe jumped at the chance, and left the dinner believing that he would be Costello’s deputy within weeks. Joe had an enormous fondness for Costello. He looked up to him, particularly politically. But the offer made over dinner never eventuated. Without talking to Joe about the plan again, Costello later announced his retirement plans. Nelson says he remembers Joe relaying the conversation to him. It is written in Joe’s diary: ‘Dinner, with Costello, at La Rustica – 10/3/2009.’
Costello says it never happened: ‘I was never coming back. I announced after the election I was standing down. I was waiting for the by-election and I was negotiating my post-political life. I was never coming back. I was never doing deals with Joe or anyone else. I’d gone. My mind had left the building.’ When pressed, Costello says this might have happened before the 2007 poll, or he could have been talking about Joe running as deputy to someone else. Joe still uses Costello as a sounding board on policy.
Turnbull won a ballot for leader on 16 September 2008, defeating Nelson by 45 votes to 41. Joe again voted against Nelson, who was still living in his garage. ‘My view was just that it was a matter of time. The Party had no money and Turnbull was promising that the Party would have money. It was just all unsustainable.’
Nelson says he was disappointed Joe showed an allegiance to Turnbull, but that it didn’t alter their friendship. Joe wasn’t interested in leading the Party then, but it was at around this time, in 2008, that he first started to think of when he might be in a position to nominate as leader. His Sunrise persona lived on in public, and he’d hear repeated requests for him to make a run. Turnbull’s leadership had meant Joe could also swap portfolios with Peter Dutton, moving from health to finance, and that was gift enough. Five months later, he succeeded Julie Bishop as shadow treasurer.
It was during this period – first as Opposition finance spokesman and then as Opposition Treasury spokesman – that Joe’s demeanour would change. The soft-hearted big bear of a man would disappear, in an orchestrated campaign to be seen as an alternative treasurer. Around the shadow Cabinet table, he was a lonely voice arguing against the Rudd government’s $42 billion stimulus package, announced in early 2009.
‘The Building the Education Revolution [which was part of the package] was a complete crock of shit. It was meant to be a stimulus measure but it had none of the elements of that,’ Joe’s then chief-of-staff Andrew Kirk says. ‘You can’t use infrastructure like that as a stimulus measure.’ Kirk deserves much of the credit for changing the perception of Joe as a big-hearted softie. He also authored the ‘debt and deficit’ line that would become the Opposition’s mantra in attacking the big-spending Labor government. Ironically, now in government, that’s changed. The ‘debt and deficit’ argument doesn’t work so
well when you need to lift the debt ceiling. How does Kirk, who now works for the NSW government, see that? ‘When you are confronted with the rest of the world printing money to pay for their deficits and an endless increase in debt, then it is very difficult to stand against that. Austerity was destroyed.’
A few months after Rudd announced the stimulus package, the Godwin Grech story broke. Led by Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull, voters heard that Kevin Rudd and/or his treasurer, Wayne Swan, had helped a car dealer seek money from OzCar, a government agency. This would have meant they had misled parliament. The Opposition celebrated its king hit. Some on Labor’s side weren’t unhappy with Kevin Rudd being pulled down a peg or two either.
Former prime minister Bob Hawke and his wife Blanche d’Alpuget were at a dinner party at Joe’s house on the night after the claims were made public. ‘He was convinced that was the end of Rudd,’ Joe says. Both men, unlikely friends spanning different ages and political affiliations, talked about the political fall-out as they had a cigar on Joe’s balcony. Joe’s friendship with Bob Hawke hasn’t been well publicised but goes to Joe’s ability to network, and have friends in all camps. It can be traced back to 1996, when Joe was door-knocking his electorate in a bid to become the MP for North Sydney. He knocked on Bob Hawke’s door, but no one was home. A quick look at the electoral roll provided him with a bit of political ammunition. Two Mrs Hawkes were registered at the address in Joe’s electorate – Blanche and Hazel.