by Madonna King
Overnight, two of Joe’s friends – Jeremy Melloy and Dr Lewis Macken – snuck into the hospital room to check on him. Having navigated through the winding corridors, and with the permission of a nurse, they entered his room. Painkillers were being administered through a drip. The next morning, Andrew Burnes and Melissa were bedside. ‘I was as sick as a dog,’ Joe says now.
He sucked on ice and sips of water, before becoming violently ill. It was his wedding anniversary and his daughter Adelaide’s sixth birthday. On day two, he graduated to sipping clear soup, juice and cordial, and eating jelly. He didn’t feel a whole lot better, but he’d been told to be patient; this would take time. He wondered whether anyone, outside the handful of close friends he had told, had any idea where he now lay.
By day four, his absence had been well and truly noted. Everyone was looking for him. Wayne Swan, the federal treasurer, had recanted his promise of a Budget surplus. This was a defining moment for Labor, allowing the Opposition an assault on its integrity and its economic credibility. Joe, as Swan’s opposite number, had been stalking him over the issue. Abbott was excited; the Opposition needed to make a public statement, calling the government to account for what they saw as another broken promise.
With the exception of a handful of family and friends, Joe had kept his operation secret. At work, he’d told his chief-of-staff, Grant Lovett, and his private secretary, Angela Scirpo. And outside work, at the last minute, he’d told a few friends, including Jeremy Melloy, Peter FitzSimons and Lewis Macken. His Melbourne mate Andrew Burnes knew earlier because he’d promised to have the operation in tandem, before changing his mind.
Joe knew the operation would feed leadership speculation, but it was a personal decision not to tell other colleagues. Now Tony Abbott was demanding a joint media appearance, within a couple of hours, in the heart of Sydney.
Joe picked up the phone to Melissa. ‘He calls and says he has to do a press conference and I couldn’t believe it,’ Melissa says, ‘but he was adamant. I thought it was madness.’
‘I went ballistic,’ Andrew Burnes said when he found out, ‘absolutely ballistic.’ But after Melissa helped dress him, Joe set off to the press conference at the Commonwealth Parliament Offices on Sydney’s Phillip Street. Once there, he focused on standing. Everyone kept asking him if he was okay. He knew he wasn’t. He felt sick. A surreptitious look under his coat showed the wound was leaking blood. Peta Credlin kept looking at him. She knew something was wrong, and cornered him. Joe asked to go to a room where he could sit down.
‘I’ve just had 80 per cent of my stomach removed,’ he told Credlin and Abbott. ‘Oh, my God,’ Credlin responded, and Abbott sat down with a speed Joe will never forget.
Melissa picked him up and took him home. ‘He looked so unwell and was unwell,’ she says. ‘He veered between sweating and nausea and being grey.’ Joe climbed back into bed.
A few weeks later, down in the family’s holiday house at Stanwell Park, south of Sydney, Joe felt better. His body, which seemed useless in the days leading up to Christmas, was working again, and a cut-down figure spent time walking along the beach. He knew gossip would be rife, once people saw his thinner frame. They’d think he was terribly sick, or angling for Tony Abbott’s job perhaps. Either way, he knew he had to make a public appearance sometime, and that was in his thoughts when he ran into Sydney spin doctor Sue Cato, a near neighbour, who noticed immediately Joe’s new girth, but made no comment.
A couple of days later, her journalist friends Jennifer Hewett and Pamela Williams swung by to toast the New Year. They, too, saw him – and couldn’t help but ask. His response – that he was eating less and exercising more – didn’t wash, and he could see it in their response. He sought the advice of friends Lisa Wilkinson and Peter FitzSimons, who told him to make it public and not give it exclusively to any media outlet. Within a couple of days, Sue Cato heard The Australian Financial Review was chasing the yarn, and put in a call to Joe. Her advice was similar. Tell the truth, don’t make any big deal of it, and move on. It appeared in The Australian Financial Review soon after.
Neither Joe nor Melissa was surprised at the response to it though. All of a sudden Joe Hockey was serious. ‘What Hockey’s drastic weight loss dedication indicated was a deep commitment to changing his life,’ The Australian’s Dennis Shanahan wrote, ‘and simultaneously, his image and impact.’
Jolly Joe was gone. ‘Everybody knows that fat people are perceived differently,’ Melissa says. ‘There’s no doubt about that. People no longer see him as the party boy; he is taken more seriously. He doesn’t have to be the jolly life of the party anymore.’
That suits Joe in the Treasury portfolio. John Howard is quick to point out that treasurers can’t be popular. He wasn’t. Keating wasn’t. And Joe won’t be either. Joe’s operation has made that all a bit easier.
‘His confidence has increased. It took him up a level. It wasn’t about looking good; it was the culmination of him making a decision and to heck with what people think,’ his chief-of-staff, Grant Lovett, says.
‘Whenever anyone wanted to embarrass Joe, or cut him down, it was always something to do with his weight – this fixed it,’ Christopher Pyne says. It is easy to draw parallels between a lack of discipline with food and a lack of discipline at work, and that was the centre of the taunts against Joe. Even now, on his own side, a minister quips that the operation is illustrative of Joe’s personality; some people lose weight the hard way, he says, and Joe took the easy road.
But those comments too easily skirt the pain behind the years of trying to lose weight, and the constant barbs about it. Andrew Burnes remembers Joe showing him photographs of himself as a boy. They are not displayed around the house. ‘He said he’d been fat all his life, and it wasn’t until I saw those photos that I really appreciated how much this had affected him throughout his whole life.’
The operation was a big step in the remaking of Joe. He’d focused on gaining a bigger intellectual ownership of his portfolio. Tick. He’d stopped stunts like dressing in pink tutus. Tick. He’d articulated the foundations of his beliefs. Tick. The operation was the obvious next step. And it worked: people did take him more seriously and he found saying no – something a treasurer needs to say over and over again – easier. It also removed a significant hurdle in his goal of being prime minister of Australia one day.
Ben Fordham, a good friend of Joe’s, remembers being a young reporter in Canberra. ‘I asked a bloke about Kim Beazley once and he said to me, mate, he’s never going to be prime minister because no-one wants a fat bloke as prime minister.’ Andrew Burnes agrees: ‘Would the Australian public want a fat PM? I don’t think so.’
It might not be politic, but it’s true, and those on the inside also believe a big girth is a quick way of shortening a career trajectory. Alexander Downer says, ‘People often say that of large people – they’re lazy; that’s why they’re large. It’s not in my experience remotely true.’ But the perception remains.
As former NSW Liberal premier Barry O’Farrell once quipped: ‘When I lose weight and shave off the beard, then you’ll know I am after the Liberal leadership.’
At work, Joe was a new man, and at home, he’d improved his chances exponentially of one day walking Adelaide, his only daughter, down the aisle.
TWENTY-ONE
THE DINNER WAS understated, but as much a signal of the Coalition victory as the figures that would flow in nine days later, on 7 September 2013. On this night, Joe Hockey, Tony Abbott and Brian Loughnane sat around the table inside the Park Hyatt in Melbourne. Peta Credlin and a few other favoured staff were there, including Joe’s chief-of-staff, Grant Lovett. Hockey and his team had just flown in from Ballina, and while they’d been sent there to give a boost to a local National Party candidate, it was what had been unfolding in Canberra that dominated their day.
On a plane, high above NSW, word had filtered through of claims by Labor’s Kevin Rudd that a massive hole had been found in the
Coalition’s costings. Flanked by treasurer Chris Bowen and finance minister Penny Wong, Rudd had made these claims, which – if true – would have given Labor its biggest boost of the campaign. More than that, given the stumbles Joe had made in previous years, it could have raised insurmountable hurdles in public opinion about his ability to hold down the treasurer’s job, and the ability of an Abbott team to govern.
Tony Ritchie, Joe’s media advisor, had watched Kevin Rudd make the claims on his phone. Suspended above the clouds, it was impossible for Joe to respond, a bit like the time you spend in the doctor’s waiting room, when you can do nothing but perhaps feel anxious. Joe knew costings were the biggest risk to a Coalition victory and he knew he couldn’t afford to stuff up. That’s why, at markers through the campaign when Labor would make some claim, he would ask whether the accusations were biting in the electorate. The internal research was showing it wasn’t, feeding Joe’s view that Labor was targeting its message to the press gallery in Canberra, not the voters of Australia. Both Lovett and Ritchie watched their boss. They’d both seen him anxious before; they’d seen him tired and angry, down in the dumps and fired up. But this time it was different. A hole in the costings could cost all of them the future they’d banked on, but the shadow treasurer was calm. ‘He’s got it wrong,’ Joe said.
Kevin Rudd was in full flight. He knew as well as Joe that costings were the single issue that could impede the Coalition’s run to victory, and provide a boost for his own. A $10 billion fraud had been waged on Australian voters, he claimed, with Coalition policy costings overstating deliberately identified savings. He released internal costing documents, announcing that figures from the Treasury, the finance department and the parliamentary Budget office exposed the black hole. Elections are not always won and lost on what is right; often it’s the perception. So while Joe knew his figures were right, and while his staff had checked and rechecked every costing, the stakes were high. Before the plane started its descent into Ballina, Joe picked up his phone and called Dr Martin Parkinson, the head of Treasury. His first words hid his conviction. ‘Is this true?’ Parkinson, now deep inside the caretaker period of government, told him he would get back to him.
In an election campaign, a single issue usually comes to dominate the day. It might be the story plastered over the front page of a state newspaper, then picked up by talkback radio. It might be a slip-up, made by an experienced politician, on breakfast television. On Thursday 29 August 2013, it was Rudd’s accusation of a $10 billion hole in Coalition costings that dominated campaign talk. It was a good strategy. Voters were concerned about rising debt levels and the ability of governments to manage taxpayer funds. And as much as the public hadn’t taken to Wayne Swan as treasurer, they didn’t really know Joe Hockey. He had the moniker of ‘Sloppy Joe’, and his critics claimed he wasn’t across his brief. Could it be true? Could there be a $10 billion hole in his costings?
Talkback callers lit up switchboards across the nation. Inside the Coalition’s campaign headquarters in Melbourne, the national debate was being monitored, as anxiety levels began to creep northwards. All along, Coalition strategists knew that costings would be the brunt of Labor’s attacks. That’s why, behind the scenes, they had been front and centre of Brian Loughnane’s planning. But one slip could derail everything. Phones played out a symphony in campaign headquarters, as Party officials tried to contact each other. Joe knew, this time, that Labor had it wrong and he didn’t wait for Parkinson to come back to him. He picked up the phone to Channel Nine’s political editor, Laurie Oakes.
Around noon, Treasury staff contacted Joe’s office, seeking specific information be supplied to them. His office agreed, and the next two hours dragged along. But then, as they were winging their way back to Melbourne from Ballina, word filtered through that a statement would be posted on the Treasury website. In the clouds, Lovett was unable to bring it up on his computer, although the email from campaign headquarters made it clear. The statement was a nasty back-hander to Rudd, with the heads of Treasury and finance disowning the figures used by Labor to make its claim.
In short, the statement delivered a rebuke to Kevin Rudd, shattering Labor’s focus and burying doubts about the Opposition’s credibility. On the flip side, it showed Joe’s confidence, his determination that he had it right. To Ritchie, it was the day he saw the strategist and the politician meld into one in his boss. He grabbed the plane’s satellite phone and placed calls – first to Laurie Oakes, and then to Mark Riley at Channel Seven, followed by the ABC’s Sabra Lane and then the newspapers, one by one, starting with The Australian, then The Australian Financial Review, and then each of the state newspapers. ‘We made sure no-one missed out,’ Ritchie says.
‘That was a real turning point,’ Lovett says. ‘I got the sense, at that point, that the hard yards had been done, that they’d thrown everything at us. It had been a monumental screw-up by Rudd.’ But Lovett says he saw in his boss, from the moment the claim was made, an absolute conviction it was wrong. ‘Joe was calm all day,’ he says. And that’s because, unlike previous campaigns, Joe didn’t take any staffer’s word on costings. He trusted his team, but he signed off on every figure himself.
That evening, having arrived in Melbourne and been seated at a dinner table inside the Park Hyatt, Lovett allowed himself a slight smile, too. No-one would show any cockiness, but the tone showed an understanding that they had just won, hands down, the most important day of the campaign.
This campaign was unlike any Joe had experienced before. He spent the start of most weeks in Melbourne and spent the rest of the time travelling the nation, only returning to his own electorate for a few days during the whole campaign (which was run by Pam McLeland). The autonomy he had was only tempered by a few early morning calls, sometimes while boarding a plane, from Credlin, directing a change of plan. It was busy but never frantic, without the peaks and troughs of other campaigns. A sense of inevitability enveloped the Coalition offensive.
A 5 a.m. walk, or a game of squash between Joe and Lovett, would start the day, before a phone call with the leadership team to analyse the morning’s media, receive a political summary from campaign captain Loughnane, and hear a few words from Tony Abbott, before nutting out the message for the day. Lovett had quit his high-paying job running fixed income at UBS when Joe lured him to his office in 2012. Melissa and Lovett had known each other since the early 1990s, and Joe picked up the phone with her encouragement. Lovett decided to give it a try, and after a part-time stint soon became full-time chief-of-staff. After Lovett’s first week in the job, Joe fronted him, asking what he thought of him. The two had known each other socially – Joe had been to Lovett’s engagement party – but Lovett had been working outside Australia through the Howard government years. ‘My understanding of politicians during that period was purely the headlines you get from overseas,’ he says. ‘Working with him wasn’t what I expected.’
Lovett nominates Joe’s work ethic and his ability to get across a brief as the two attributes not portrayed in the news media he had read before joining the office. He says Joe’s Rolodex of contacts is probably unrivalled. ‘I don’t think any of them are friends – or not my idea of a friend,’ he says.
Joe’s handful of close mates starts with the friends he made in Year 3, including Jeremy Melloy and Lewis Macken, who still meet regularly for a cards night. Another group, including author and good friend Peter FitzSimons, former Wallabies coach Robbie Deans and a big team of locals, including Sydney businessman Bob St Julian, all meet at 6.30 a.m. three mornings a week at Balmoral Beach to kick a ball around. ‘While Joe is constantly reminded that he belongs on the “right wing” he fits in seamlessly,’ jokes St Julian. Joe’s been going on and off since 2000, despite his job now putting a lid on his availability. But no special treatment is meted out when he does turn up. St Julian says that when the Howard government lost the 2007 poll, Joe was flat for a long time. ‘He lamented how so many people who used to call him stopped call
ing. It was an insight into who his real friends were. The boys at Balmoral didn’t help, constantly asking him if he had anything to do today. To assist, we would often tell him about school fetes in need of someone to do the sausages.’ Joe was given a big calculator by the group on his appointment as treasurer.
Ironically, not all of Joe’s network of friends know each other, and he divides his free time between his old schoolfriends, his work friends, and, in the case of Peter FitzSimons and Ben Fordham (and others in the media), his media friends. Andrew Burnes is the exception; Joe considers him a friend, a colleague and a business advisor, and Andrew reciprocates with spades of loyalty. Alan Jones describes this quality as ‘pick and stick’ and Joe is the textbook case; when he picks allies, he sticks with them.
Lovett doesn’t see himself as Joe’s friend but as his chief advisor. ‘I see my job as taking everything away from him that he doesn’t need to be involved with so he can do his job,’ he says. Joe also dismisses any political advice given to him by staff, saying any political judgment is his alone to make. But at the beginning of the 2013 campaign, Lovett determined that he would be at Joe’s side every waking moment. Joe felt confident, more so than previously, in being the gatekeeper and in standing up to other ministers about the economic credibility of the Coalition. He focused on the narrative, but he understood every figure. Lovett and Joe worked closely with Senator Mathias Cormann, the campaign spokesperson, who was living out of Joe’s house in Canberra. The team worked in sync. ‘When we had a message to sell, we’d give it to Mathias to start painting the picture,’ one advisor said. ‘It was an excellent tag team.’