Hockey: Not Your Average Joe

by Madonna King

  But divisions in the Party over the ETS grew quickly. Turnbull survived a spill motion moved by Kevin Andrews in the last week of November 2009 but it was a big knock because Andrews was not seen as a serious leadership contender. Within days, senior frontbenchers, including Abbott, Nick Minchin, Eric Abetz, Tony Smith and Sophie Mirabella, all moved to the backbench, signalling the end of Turnbull’s leadership. Abbott, who the previous month had told a colleague he wanted to be a candidate if a spill eventuated, decided he would run against Turnbull. However, he agreed he would change that plan if Joe decided to challenge.

  Joe had always supported an ETS. ‘I entirely believed in climate change and in the markets, so I believed in the emissions trading scheme,’ he says, ‘and I wasn’t prepared to change my position.’ But he said he wanted to respect those in the Party who didn’t support the scheme. All weekend, he vacillated. Jamie Briggs, who grew close to Joe during the industrial relations period, was now an MP and a close advisor, encouraging him to run for leader, as were Christopher Pyne, Nick Minchin and Peter Dutton.

  Minchin, a wily elder statesman, was one of the few who was looking strategically at it. He was keen to get the ETS off the table, and saw Joe as the pragmatic leader that the Party would envelop. At no point, though, did anyone really countenance a scenario where he wouldn’t have the numbers. A handful of friends and colleagues – like friend and NSW colleague Marise Payne and his chief-of-staff, Andrew Kirk – urged him not to run, but they were the exception. ‘He hadn’t built a case of why he should be leader,’ Kirk says matter-of-factly. That requires some years of really focusing on becoming leader. Joe had only just started that process,’ Kirk says. ‘I was really annoyed with everyone else. Furious,’ he says.

  Joe’s Hunters Hill street had reporters packed in at both ends. He didn’t have to go outside to see that. Delta Goodrem, who was staying nearby, had called and tipped him off. Joe’s head was filled with two issues. Firstly, he had two small children, and a newborn baby. Was this really fair on Melissa? Melissa dismissed that consideration. Joe was already away many nights each week and she couldn’t see that this would make a significant difference. And she says it was secondary to the issue that mostly filled Joe’s thoughts. ‘At the time it was not about him being the leader. I remember we sat down at the pool house and talked for hours. It wasn’t about him. The conversation was about how he could stop the Party from imploding,’ she says. ‘The Left was trying to get him to do something; the Right was trying to get him to do something and he was trying to reconcile the two.’

  Melissa says, in retrospect, Joe should have adopted a strong line, and told both sides to either accept the ETS or not; he needed a basis for his nomination, and the ‘structure’ for the bid was missing. ‘Because he felt he was doing the right thing for the Party as he saw it … he got lost a bit in that. The great lessons of the great leaders are just dogged conviction. Look at Howard. Look at Hawke. Look at Keating. Just dogged conviction. I’m not saying he didn’t have conviction, but because he was trying to do the right thing by the Party and bring them all together, something got lost in that. He won’t make that mistake again …’

  Joe decided he wanted to see John Howard, and trailed by reporters from Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph, he pulled into the driveway. This itself is intriguing given their relationship but Joe, despite denying it, wants to be one of Howard’s favourite sons. Joe asked for advice, and Howard gave it to him. They had to have an ETS because that was what was promised. Howard says he presumed on that weekend that the leadership would be transferred to Joe, and he offered him any help he needed. But it was Howard who also, in a roundabout way, provided the inspiration for Joe’s eventual stance – a wishy-washy verdict that MPs would be allowed a conscience vote on the ETS legislation. ‘I don’t think it was very good advice from John Howard,’ Costello says now. ‘So here’s the question: Was he trying to help him or not?’

  On the eve of the leadership ballot, Joe sat in his Parliament House office. Friends walked in and out. Several of Joe’s advisors played with the idea of a ticket with Joe and Julie Bishop, who would bring a number of votes with her, but Peter Dutton, the former police officer from Queensland, took second spot on Joe’s ticket. Joe still wanted to mend both sides of the Party. He had started the day not really sure whether he would run in the ballot the next day. He wanted to be seen as the doer, not the un-doer. ‘I said John Howard had a free vote on the republic and he had a number of free votes. I thought that gives everyone the chance to get it off their chest, and gets it through.’

  The idea sprang from a comment by Senator George Brandis, who suggested the shadow ministry could be afforded the same latitude backbenchers were given and allowed to vote against the Party’s position, without repercussions. That is technically different from a conscience vote, where the Party does not have a position, but nuances were lost in the desperation to find an answer. Brian Loughnane jumped on the idea, and Joe quickly owned it. One of Joe’s good friends, Christopher Pyne, says it settled the problem of having a winner-takes-all approach. ‘The idea was that somebody shouldn’t win and somebody shouldn’t lose. If we could come out of this with everyone feeling they had been respected and their personal positions maintained he would have been able to say that he had adopted the same attitude Howard had done on the republic.’

  Peter Dutton, however, didn’t like the idea. He tried to talk Joe around, unsuccessfully. ‘I knew it would be a fatal blow. Essentially the leadership battle was a referendum on the issue. Joe equivocating with a conscience vote meant the passage was assured through the Senate and that was exactly the opposite of what – in the end – the vast majority of the Party room wanted.’

  Howard says he heard, on the news, that Joe had promised a conscience vote. ‘I rang him and said Joe you can’t; you’ve got to make a decision. And he said, “But you allowed a conscience vote on the monarchy,” and I said that’s different. It’s an entirely different thing; this is a basic economic issue. That cost him the leadership. You’ve got to have a position. If Turnbull had put keeping the Party together ahead of policy purity he probably would have remained leader. Only Abbott was able to undermine Rudd in the way he did. If the ballot had gone another way I’m not sure we’d now be in office.’

  It was this stance by Joe – of allowing a conscience vote – that gave Abbott reason to renege on his promise to support Joe, and run. Joe’s plan, which also included asking tweeps what he should do, didn’t solve the problem in Abbott’s mind. It failed to move the Party forward in the direction Abbott and his supporters wanted, but it also showed an indecisive stance by Joe.

  Nick Minchin remembers sitting in Joe’s office on the day before the vote. Minchin and Abbott had a firm agreement – Abbott would not put his hand up, but would back Joe. Abbott had reluctantly bowed out, accepting that a unity position was the best way forward for the Party. That meant the worst case scenario would be that Turnbull would run against Joe, who would romp home. At their last meeting for the day, Minchin and Abbott wanted to discuss how they would proceed the next day. ‘He [Joe] announced,’ Minchin says, ‘and I remember the occasion very clearly – that we should have a conscience vote on this [the ETS]. Both of us were almost speechless and shocked, and then I said, come off it Joe, your first act of leadership will be to say I don’t have a clue and you can all do what you like. You’ve got to be kidding. That’s completely unacceptable.’ But Joe wouldn’t budge. Abbott and Minchin returned to Abbott’s office. ‘We agreed in those circumstances Tony had no alternative but to run.’

  Two considerations drove Joe to that decision. First, he supported a CPRS and his staff handed him 17 pages of public records where he had publicly declared as much. Second, he was influenced by Howard and the lure of making everyone happy. But it was the former that tied him in knots; he supported a CPRS and would not countenance any change to that. In retrospect, it would have been easy to weave a way of both supporting the CPRS and taking a positi
on against it in the leadership ballot. As Minchin says, he could have declared his support for it but highlighted the valid grounds for voting against the particular Bill in question. That would have been a ‘perfectly sensible and credible and defensible position’.

  Costello says it wouldn’t have mattered if he had changed his mind; Abbott had already done that. Kirk also thought the conscience vote lacked a disciplined view. ‘I said, if you do that, everything we’ve talked about – consistency, discipline – will be chucked out,’ Kirk says. ‘You’ll just be another wishy-washy Kim Beazley.’

  Joe’s decision to promise a conscience vote also took Briggs by surprise. Instinctively, he thought people were not going to give their precious vote to someone who was not going to have two feet in either camp. And he was of the belief that Joe should have taken a position other than Turnbull’s – to deliver a clear verdict. ‘I always thought – I still do – he [Joe] had the certain cover to run for leader that he’ll never get again, which is the right-wing patriarch Nick Minchin running his numbers for him,’ he says. ‘Nick basically said to him, Joe if you support the abolition of us proposing this I’ll throw all of our support behind you. It would have been game over.’

  In what was another significant set-back to Joe’s bid to become leader, he didn’t call all of those MPs who he thought had his back. Short on time, he had relied on Briggs to lobby other MPs. Briggs made a few calls, but the approach was flawed. Senior MPs didn’t want a new MP calling them on Joe’s behalf. If Joe wanted their vote, he could pick up the phone himself, they thought. In the hurly-burly of politics, you mightn’t attach much weight to that, but at least two senior MPs remain miffed that Joe was not making the calls himself. ‘Any politician worth his salt would have turned over every stone to make sure they were going to win,’ one said. ‘After all, Abbott was working his guts out ringing everyone.’

  Another senior Liberal agrees. ‘On that occasion, Joe didn’t do the work. Abbott said he was going to run; he should have got on the phone and called everyone. That feeds the view that he has this destiny thing where he should get things easily.’

  One of Joe’s supporters took a call from a third MP late on the night before the ballot. ‘One of them was at dinner with four of his colleagues, so there were five of them at dinner,’ he explains. ‘Some people were saying you either call yourself or you get an older statesman of the Party to call. That was a tactical mistake.’

  But Briggs was picking up another problem, too. Those who put themselves on the line to get rid of the ETS were telling him that they couldn’t then support Joe’s conscience vote. They wanted him to take a strong stand. ‘What the fuck is his position on carbon tax?’ one senior person bellowed down the phone to one of Joe’s colleagues. ‘When you’re in politics and you’re asked what your favourite colour is, you can’t say tartan.’

  Despite all of this, Joe would still have won if not for Turnbull beating him on the first vote. No-one even contemplated that scenario because Joe was convinced Turnbull had told him, and he had told everyone else, that he was not running. Turnbull is just as adamant that that did not happen. ‘Malcolm had pledged to me that if there was a spill motion that was carried he wouldn’t run,’ Joe says. ‘I believed him. I trusted him. I thought I would win.’

  The only time Joe lost his cool, in the lead-up to the vote, was when he saw Family First Senator Steve Fielding playing kingpin on television. Fielding held a crucial vote on whether the legislation would go to committee. Joe asked to see him on Monday, the day before the leadership vote. This was the first real leadership battle where social media carried every nuance, and cameras, including Sky News, were everywhere by the time Fielding knocked on Joe’s door.

  Not wanting to talk in front of Minchin and Brandis, Fielding and Joe went to another room. ‘I’d be happy to consider sending it to committee but this has to be between you and me,’ Joe remembers him saying. Meeting over. Until ten minutes later, when Joe was diverted to Sky News revealing, courtesy of Fielding, that Joe had requested it go to committee, a proposal Steve Fielding believed he couldn’t countenance.

  ‘We just looked at the TV and thought what? Did we speak to the same person?’

  The following morning, just ahead of the leadership vote, Fielding swung back past Joe’s office. Just as had happened the previous evening television cameras captured the moment. Joe spoke first. ‘I said, can you shut the door for a sec?’ The door shut, Joe says he gave Steve Fielding a character assessment he hopes he will never forget. ‘I said listen, mate, I’m going to count to five and if you’re still here when I get to five, I’m going to rip your head off. I said I never want to see you again you deceitful prick. One. Two. Three. Four. And he ran out. And that was the last time I ever spoke to him. I was so angry. You don’t treat me like that.’ (Steve Fielding did not respond to several requests for an interview on this matter.)

  But Joe’s Party didn’t treat him much better, soon tossing out his leadership plans in the first vote, and writing him into history as slipping up. Two days later, under Abbott’s shiny new leadership, the Party voted against the ETS in the Senate, with two senators crossing the floor.

  The loss jolted Joe, and it took four weeks for him to mull over what had happened. Tony Abbott immediately asked Joe to stay in the Treasury portfolio. Melissa didn’t want him to take it. ‘My view was that he should go to the backbench. That’s what I said he should do. I said let them do what they’re going to do. You’ve got a five-week-old and a three- and four-year-old – go to the backbench and have another crack at it later. But he was adamant that he wanted to be part of trying to get rid of the Labor government,’ Melissa says.

  Joe accepted the job of remaining Opposition treasurer. He also tried to smooth things over with Turnbull. They had a make-up dinner at a Canberra restaurant to restore their working relationship. Later, Joe says Malcolm told him how hard it had been during that period and how he’d struggled with it. ‘I think that was his way of saying I’m really sorry I dudded you.’

  Has he learnt to trust Turnbull again? ‘I’m still going through that process, but I won’t write anyone off forever.’

  Melissa is more black and white than her husband. ‘There will always be distrust there,’ she says, carefully. Joe’s father has passed down to Joe a string of advice, and Joe passes others on to his staff. One of his favourites is ‘Hold your nerve.’ Of all the lessons in his failed leadership bid, that might be the hardest to navigate if the leadership question arises again. He won’t be as trusting. And next time, he’ll do the numbers. But can he hold his nerve?

  EIGHTEEN

  JOE APPROACHED THE end of 2009 having spent the better part of three decades immersed in the daily whirl of politics – first as a student politician, then as a state political advisor, a federal MP, junior minister, Cabinet minister and then a senior Opposition frontbencher. He’d come to politics interested by the notion of how it could deliver results by helping people, such as replacing local cricket nets, and how he could be in the middle of that. Call it the inherited sense of obligation from an immigrant dad made good in a new country or the obligation to serve that came out of a Jesuit education, but Joe’s fascination with politics revolved around what it could deliver for those who had chosen him to be their representative. He was very much to the middle rather than the Right of his Party at a time when the Labor Party had been elected with a leader who had also seemed determined to take his Party more to the middle ground. While Joe was Liberal through and through, his philosophical positions were developed rather than innate. This is a peril of modern politics, where focus group responses can go further than guiding the political message and easily stray towards creating the policy position. What was becoming evident in Australian political life was a desire for leaders to stand for a values position – not just to trot out the best lines and espouse what voters had told them through political research.

  Considered one of the nation’s best political communic
ators, Joe had been brought forward by his former leader John Howard to sell the unsalvageable WorkChoices, not because of his policy skills but because of his salesmanship. He consistently stood out in research as one of the most admired politicians in the nation. He had the appeal of being a ‘good bloke’, someone you’d want to have at your home for a barbecue – regardless of your political stance. The Sunrise phenomenon was an important part of building the Joe Hockey political persona. But, as important as Sunrise was in shaping the political message, it did not allow the scope to colour the picture, to permit a politician to go further than glib responses to the issues chosen by morning TV hosts. Joe was a great political salesman but history is not kind to political leaders whose prime skill is just to shape a message. It was clear that was the limit of Kevin Rudd’s political skill; his attempts to wrap his message in a philosophical position through his critiques of the capitalist system moved him from being the pleasant middle Australian Kevin ’07 to someone beholden to left-wing thinking the nation thought Labor had long left behind.

  The Liberals had the same problem. Nelson, as first leader against prime minister Rudd, had a background as a moderate and he had to continually bury the fact that he was once a member of the Labor Party. Turnbull was the Labor voter’s preferred leader but he had to carry the baggage of the republican campaign, a cause more closely aligned to Labor priorities than traditional conservative values. By the end of the year, it was becoming apparent to Joe that the leadership baton could one day come his way, and that he could perhaps achieve his schoolboy ambition of being prime minister. But what sort of prime minister? Aside from being a good bloke, what did Joe Hockey stand for? For the first time, Joe started to seriously consider colouring in the picture of who he was. For, by then, the one other person who could claim the leadership had well and truly defined who he was and what he stood for.