Hockey: Not Your Average Joe

by Madonna King

  Now, as Young Liberals president, he planned a takeover of Sydney’s local government. It was as ambitious as it was far-fetched, but the publicity generated along the way did wonders for Joe’s profile. Joe, along with his vice-presidents Zimmerman and Brogden, all wanted to get into parliament and they saw a stint on the North Sydney Council, which had a strong Independent representation, as the stepping stone to bigger and brighter things. It quickly went by the wayside, although Zimmerman was later successful in being elected to council. Matt Hingerty ran as well. They had learnt from Young Labor in the 1960s and 1970s, and found that episode instructive in their unashamed bid to win seats. The secret was to plan, plot and use the Party’s network to get an elected position. They wanted to emulate the success of Paul Keating, who had come through Young Labor, along with Young Liberals John Howard and Philip Ruddock.

  Joe saw a strong self-pitch as central to his success and the success of his reign, and he made his move there early. Soon after his election as Young Liberal president, the NSW minister for school education and youth affairs, Virginia Chadwick, was lined up to appear on the front cover of the Young Liberals magazine. Zimmerman, who had conducted the interview, had given her that assurance.

  ‘Joe said no,’ Zimmerman recalls. Joe told his vice-president that he was going to be on the front cover. ‘It was the first time a Young Liberal president had put themselves on the front cover of the magazine. I remember having a slanging match with him.’ Zimmerman sat down and wrote a note to Joe, outlining formally his concerns. ‘And then I remember picking up the phone and getting a ten-minute tirade of abuse,’ he says. Brogden remembers it, too. ‘That was classic Joe Hockey brass. More front than David Jones,’ he says, laughing. ‘We all thought it was outrageous, unacceptable’. Joe led from the chin in his first interview in the magazine, too. It was conducted by Hingerty.

  Hingerty: One of the areas of controversy in your previous positions on the Young Liberal Executive was your tendency to spend long periods overseas. Can you give an undertaking that you will spend the next 12 months in Australia?

  Hockey: No.

  Hingerty: Would you like to elaborate on that?

  Hockey: No.

  Joe listed his most memorable lifelong moment as standing in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza at sunset in 1982; his favourite food was okra beans, his favourite band Genesis and his favourite singer Phil Collins. Rachel Ward topped his list as favourite actress, with Abbott and Costello’s Join the Army his favourite movie. Ben Chifley was listed as his hero and when asked who the person he’d most like to meet would be, he answered ‘a banking and finance lawyer that can play rugby’. Why? ‘So she could fill in for me whilst I get on with my politics.’ Joe was full of himself and his own importance, and his whole team was poised to pounce when a seat looked like becoming vacant.

  His presidency was effective, by any standard. His team restructured the policy committee, grew membership by 50 per cent and left the budget in surplus. Joe said what he thought, baiting the conservatives with his support for compulsory student unionism, and his acceptance of tobacco sponsorship for the magazine. ‘He was so single-minded. He didn’t worry too much about the criticism; it was all part of a greater plan – to go as far as he could go,’ Hingerty says. But there was no doubt that while Joe focused on a public role, he was helped by the work ethic of his three vice-presidents, who carried the day-to-day load. ‘He had the highest media profile that any state president had had. He courted it. He was an ambitious person,’ Zimmerman says. ‘But Joe was not strong on the administration of the movement and some of the nitty-gritty that came with it. I don’t think there would have been a single person in the Young Liberals or the Liberals who did not know and expect him to seek pre-selection. He stood out. Joe’s always had that something that pulls you out from the pack.’

  Certainly he skated through the ranks of the Young Liberals, from branch policy, vice-president and secretary of the Killara Young Liberals to a delegate of the Young Liberals Council, policy vice-president, a member of the Young Liberal federal executive to NSW divisional president. The wind was behind his sails, helped by a talented executive, a self-sought high media profile and the patronage of Don Harwin. The national presidency of the Young Liberals beckoned in early 1992. It was the prize at this stage, providing a seat on the federal executive of the Party, and Joe and his backers arrived for the Melbourne convention at the Hilton hotel full of hope and expectation. It turned into an ugly conference. A battle between conservative and moderate states enveloped policy debate, and animosity saturated every discussion. Petty factional politics and bad manners meant speakers were ignored, humiliated or boycotted by delegates. Stephen Forshaw, the ACT’s Young Liberal candidate who was employed as the press secretary to the ACT Opposition leader Trevor Kaine, arrived at the conference thinking he didn’t stand a chance of getting the top job, although he was struck by one good omen. He was allocated a room on the same floor as the entire West Indian cricket team. ‘I had all sorts of interesting people coming and going at all hours of the night,’ he says. His room had originally been allocated to Malcolm Marshall, their lead strike bowler. ‘I got to my room and there was a fruit basket with a note – Dear Mr Marshall, welcome to the Hilton.’

  It wasn’t until the early hours on the morning of the ballot that Forshaw thought he might be a player. He, like many, had just assumed Joe Hockey from NSW would be appointed to the post. Other states knew a few months earlier that Joe would be a contender, and believed that despite the number of conservatives, he would walk into the job. It didn’t prove that easy. Joe had the backing of the hard Left of the NSW Party, and that frightened many of the Centre and Right delegates. But the Centre and Right factions couldn’t agree on a candidate to take Joe on. Sandra Mutch was from Western Australia, where the joke ran that wets and drys in the Party didn’t exist, just ‘drys and arids’. David Stevens was standing from Victoria. He too was a conservative candidate but his backers didn’t want Sandra Mutch, and the West Australian crew were not keen on David Stevens. It soon became clear that Joe would win, in a similar way to how he had taken the SRC presidency; he’d run straight up the centre to victory. A moderate, Joe was seen as too left-wing for the conservative states, and as John Hewson continued to prosecute Fightback – a conservative economic plan to reshape Australia – they believed he could undermine it and damage the Party’s position in the lead-up to the election.

  Delegates from WA, Victoria and the ACT held a meeting. The way the voting worked ran like this. Each division had six delegates to the federal council, plus the two federal office bearers. That meant 44 council members were eligible to vote. But a couple in the West Australian camp were so hell-bent on keeping David Stevens out that they were going to back Joe Hockey. The Victorians were threatening to do the same to shut Sandra Mutch out. On the numbers, it looked like Joe would win 24 to 20, or 25 to 19. It was 2 a.m. on the day of the ballot when it became clear a circuit breaker was needed. ‘Everyone looked at me, and said, “we’ll back him”,’ Forshaw says. It was a palatable compromise, but meant the numbers looked locked at 22–22. Stephen gave his best shot at his speech to decision-makers, knowing he was up against Joe’s oratory. He talked about the need for the Party to be rock solid in the lead-up to the 1993 election, the size of the task, and how the Young Liberals needed to be a broad and inclusive organisation. He hit the right buttons, because someone changed their vote, giving Forshaw an unlikely victory over Hockey, 23 votes to 21. ‘We still to this day have no idea who that was,’ Forshaw says.

  Joe was devastated, and demoralised, and he found it hard to hide his feelings. Indeed, Forshaw says he was not gracious in defeat. ‘I think he didn’t speak to me for the entire rest of the convention. Joe was clearly very hurt that he had lost and it really was down to the fact that this had been laid out for him; the path had been laid for a long time for him to be heir apparent to the job.’ Forshaw, who later became friends with Joe, says people
shouldn’t underestimate his competitiveness or his ability to ‘adapt’ to an argument. ‘Joe is a take-no-prisoners sort of guy and I would never describe Joe as that soft cuddly affable type of guy. He is ruthlessly competitive and hates losing.’ But history had shown he could also change his views. ‘I’ve seen Joe move from being someone who was very much hard Left in the Young Liberal days to someone who argued against same-sex marriages. I was almost taken aback. That’s not the Joe, whom, in 1992, I ran against.’

  Joe’s relegation to the loser’s spot in the race to become the 1992 Young Liberals federal president was the first time his ascendancy had been slowed, and he found it difficult. He had failed, and he wasn’t used to doing that. But he’d learnt a lesson. Count the numbers. Once. Twice. Three times, because numbers won out over personality every time. It’s a lesson he would have to learn again, much later. Returning to work, at Corrs, he found it hard to focus – the taste of politics was coursing through his veins. He loved the hurly-burly, the intrigue, the ability to make a difference, and he wanted to do it again.

  As the months went by he continued to wrestle with work at Corrs. Edward Cowpe was Joe’s supervising partner and, even though Joe was young, Cowpe found him efficient and engaged. Joe had taken the reins of a fairly large mortgage settlement program where he had to liaise with banks, brokers and agents to allow settlements to occur. It was also the early days of the very first credit card securitisation programs being launched by big retailers. Joe was involved in reviewing the documents and helping negotiate the deals. He worked hard, and late, and although Cowpe was his supervising partner, he had other masters, too.

  Cowpe says that, around that time, Joe was the subject of a heinous bullying incident. Part of his job involved a huge coordination effort to ensure one loan could be repaid and another taken out at the same time. A couple of settlements fell over, or were called off. Joe walked into Cowpe’s office. ‘I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m dead,’ he said. Joe explained a second settlement had fallen over within a week and one of his superiors had ‘blown his stack and ordered him to stay in the office until he was spoken to in two hours’ time’. Cowpe told Joe to go home and was later met by the senior colleague, who stormed into his office looking for Joe. A nasty argument ensued. Cowpe says there was no doubt Joe was the victim of bullying. He tried to intervene. The next day the colleague turned his venom on Joe, who stood his ground. Joe puts the incident down to a difference in politics, and knows he fell out with some in the firm through his very public political opinions.

  But the final straw, he says, was a visit to a family in Chatswood on behalf of a bank. ‘On a Friday afternoon I had to go and serve notice to seize all their assets,’ Joe says. ‘There were two families – two husbands and wives. They were in business together and they had an office on top of the Pizza Hut in Chatswood.’ They had been unable to pay their loans, crippled by high interest rates. Joe remembers climbing the stairs, carrying the notices. He asked to speak to those named on the forms. ‘They were all standing around in this one room and I said … I’m here to serve notice to seize your assets. They all burst into tears. It was terrible. Everything – their home, cars, house. Everything.’ Joe, retelling the story more than 20 years later, tears up. ‘That broke me. I walked out and went to the Willoughby Hotel and thought, I can’t do this. I didn’t get into law to break people.’

  Around this time, in March 1993, Joe and Melissa got engaged – after Melissa presented Joe with an ultimatum. Joe remembers it along these lines: ‘Melissa said I couldn’t have the milk without the cow, basically,’ he says. Melissa scoffs at – and dismisses – how her husband remembers the conversation.

  ‘I had obviously made up my mind that he was the guy for me. At some point I said to him that no man is going to get more than two years out of me without making a decision one way or the other,’ she says. ‘And then I went on a bit. I said I wanted to get married in the summer and I needed nine months to organise a wedding.’ Joe negotiated for a few minutes, but was shocked. He didn’t quite know how to answer the ultimatum and wondered out loud whether four years was a more suitable length for a courtship than two. Melissa stuck to her guns. ‘I thought two years was good enough a time,’ she says. ‘You can make up your mind in that time.’

  Melissa wasn’t impressed. ‘Four years? Nobody’s getting four years of the best years of my life,’ she told him, and the conversation ended soon after. Joe’s parents had often indulged him. Melissa hadn’t; he knew the ultimatum was genuine. He had already made his decision, but it provided the impetus to begin plotting his proposal. Melissa didn’t make that easy either. In early 1993, Joe organised a weekend on the Gold Coast, at a unit his parents owned. Melissa thought it was a romantic getaway, and was slightly put out when she realised another couple had been invited along, too. Not knowing who they were, their faces obscured by a closed car window, she started an argument, only silenced when she found out it was her best friend. It was all part of the proposal lead-up Joe had planned but he kept his counsel, even on the way home, when Melissa expressed how tired she was. Melissa’s job involved long hours and increasing responsibilities. Halfway through her commerce degree, she took a job at Bankers Trust and continued to study part-time. Now she had graduated and was working hard, trying to make her way up the corporate ladder.

  When they arrived back at Sydney airport, a limousine picked them up. ‘That was the moment I realised, but I was already thinking I really want to go to bed,’ she says. Joe lived in an apartment in Blues Point Tower, at McMahons Point on the lower north shore. The limousine stopped at a small park nearby. ‘Then out of the bushes jumps this fellow with a violin playing – it’s nine or ten o’clock at night,’ Melissa says, ‘and he’s playing Phantom of the Opera and Joe gets down on his knees.’

  They were married on 18 December 1993, at St John’s College at Sydney University, with Joe supported by his brothers, Colin and Michael, Jeremy Melloy and Lewis Macken. Melissa’s friends Catherine Dean, Stacia Morris, Marie Umbrazunas and Maree Holland were bridesmaids. It was a stunning hot Sydney day and the chapel sparkled as the St Aloysius’ boys’ choir welcomed guests. The flowers arrived late, but only Melissa noticed. Both Joe and Melissa made speeches, with Melissa’s father wishing Joe luck making a life with one of the highly strung Babbage women. That was a code Melissa understood. Melissa comes, down the line, from the Charles Babbage family; her great-great-great-grandfather was an English polymath credited with inventing the idea of a programmable computer. Charles’s three sons came to Australia from the UK and Melissa was a descendant of one of them – Henry. But, inside the family the reference to highly strung women remains a small joke, many of them believing that Charles’s wife, Georgiana, had played a larger role than ever acknowledged.

  It was during their honeymoon in Kenya that Joe mentioned he might run for Liberal pre-selection for the NSW seat of Bradfield, named to honour the engineer who oversaw the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Dr John Bradfield. Billy Hughes was the first to hold it, but now it was in the hands of Liberal MP David Connolly, who had represented the Bradfield voters for two decades. In that time, he’d failed to make the ministry, and talk now centred on whether the blue-ribbon seat was deserving of a bigger rising star. It was one of the safest Liberal seats in the nation, a prized asset for the party. And Joe was toying with the idea of being the young star who might take it on.

  Melissa was taken aback and her response to Joe was frosty. ‘I always knew that he would be a politician at some point and I went into the marriage assuming that would happen when he was 50 or 55,’ Melissa says. ‘Is this a conversation we should have had a week ago when I could still get out of this?’ she asked him, as they sat in a tent. But her question was largely rhetorical. Joe had supported Melissa when she was trying to reconstruct her career path, encouraging her study and supporting the long hours she was putting in. They were both young and ambitious and children didn’t feature in their plans. Melissa’s
career at Bankers Trust was going from strength to strength, and she would encourage her new husband to do what he wanted.

  SIX

  THE SALE OF the Government Insurance Office (GIO) was a priority in George Souris’s in-tray when NSW premier Nick Greiner asked him to interview a young lawyer from Corrs. Now Joe Hockey, looking like a hulky front-row forward, sat across the desk from the minister for sport, recreation and racing and minister assisting the premier. ‘What’s your view on the republic?’ Souris asked. It was an unusual question, and Joe knew he was addressing a National Party stalwart, but had always been vocal about his support to dump the monarchy. ‘I believe Australia should be a republic,’ he answered. Joe noticed that Souris didn’t flinch.

  ‘What about abortion – what’s your view there?’ Souris asked.

  ‘A woman has a right to choose – it’s her body,’ Joe said, expecting some reaction. None.