by Madonna King
Joe believed Mack could have been knocked off in the 1993 election, and he expected North Sydney would soon be parked back with the Liberals, where he believed it rightly belonged. Joe was determined to bring the seat back into the Liberal camp and used the bus to increase an awareness in the community that he was the man for the job. He’d park it in all sorts of places in the hope it would boost recognition of his name, and even police demands to move it on occasionally, like when he parked it on an overhead bridge, didn’t dampen the next day’s plan for where it should go.
When campaign manager Rhondda Vanzella arrived at work, she would be met with empty pizza cartons and Coca-Cola bottles strewn around the office from the night before. Joe’s campaign to win a seat in federal parliament was hatched each day in an office in Willoughby and would often run until late at night. It was the northern regional metropolitan office of the Liberal Party, run by Vanzella, that helped Joe before focusing on a second Liberal candidate who shared the other end of the office – Brendan Nelson. Joe had already won pre-selection for the seat of North Sydney when Nelson scraped through to be the Liberals’ candidate for the seat of Bradfield – the seat Joe had first considered. Nelson would work out of the same campaign office, and Vanzella remembers Joe’s response when told he would be sharing a campaign office. ‘That’s okay,’ he said, ‘but don’t put him too close to me.’
Nelson was seen by many as an interloper, someone who had jumped the queue on the back of his Australian Medical Association presidency. Others believed he had slipped through, when the pre-selection should have gone automatically to the serving Liberal MP David Connolly (who was defeated in the pre-selection by Nelson). Either way, Brendan Nelson wasn’t a unanimous choice, and Joe was determined that he didn’t want any of that to dent his chances of success. He told Vanzella to put him in the back of the room, which had a little desk.
Despite their different roads to pre-selection, Joe and Nelson became good friends, and it wasn’t long before 20 volunteers would sit around a long table in the office stuffing envelopes – one set for Joe and another for Nelson. A big map on the wall targeted local issues, and Joe especially liked to write letters to individual neighbourhoods regarding a particular issue. His ability to fundraise also meant money flowed into his campaign.
Winning back North Sydney would provide an important jewel in the Liberal Party’s crown, and Joe wasn’t short of advice from Party officials, many of them after the prize North Sydney offered the Party and others still unsure of the moderate who was behind the Party’s hopes. Joe knew that, and door-knocked hard. This was an area where his parents had lived all his life, and they were popular locals. That helped. But Joe’s own ability to mix with big business provided him with an entry into corporate Australia, too – an advantage over many other first-time candidates. Brendan Nelson looked on, with just a hint of envy, as Joe’s supporters were given knick-knacks, such as umbrellas, and plastic bags full of endorsements. Joe’s volunteers wore tee-shirts with his name emblazoned all over the front. It was both slick and serious. Melissa, who was climbing the corporate financial ladder, largely stayed out of it. It wasn’t her thing.
The importance of Joe’s parents to his success should not be underestimated. They knew North Sydney in the same way many remote and regional Australians know their small town, and were highly regarded as a hard-working couple with strong familial and commercial roots in the area. But one broad issue threatened to dominate the campaign. In the dying days of the government, Laurie Brereton, then the ALP transport minister, opened the second parallel north–south runway at Sydney airport. The government had closed the east–west runway, meaning that aircraft noise was focused north and south of Sydney, creating what was known as the Bennelong funnel. This had the effect of reducing noise in some – but not all – vulnerable Labor-held seats, and increasing, up to three times, the amount of noise in some suburbs to the north. The debate became toxic, pitting Sydneysiders against each other. But its timing ironically also helped a band of Liberal MPs on the north shore – particularly Joe, Nelson and Howard – because their electorates were now being hammered by noise. The voters in Turramurra and West Pymble, Hunters Hill, Lane Cove and North Sydney wanted it stopped, and as the story began to dominate headlines, an unusual amalgam of supporters – from trade workers to businessmen and some local government representatives – banded together. No-aircraft-noise parties were formed. It created a riveting backdrop to the 1996 poll.
David Lidbetter was one of them. He lived in Drummoyne and certainly wasn’t an activist by nature. But now he was incensed. He’d learnt to live with airport noise, but it had grown three times under Labor’s decree. He formed DROAN (Drummoyne Residents Opposing Aircraft Noise) in 1995 with a couple of neighbours, and it grew from there. DROAN tried to rope Mary Easson, the sitting Labor member for the seat of Lowe, into their cause but couldn’t, so turned its attention to her seat. They approached Paul Zammit, a state Liberal MP who had resigned and who was standing for Lowe, and offered to help his campaign. John Howard grew the issue, promising that if elected to government, he would protect the people of Lowe. This election, at least in Sydney, was going to hear the voices of a disaffected group of voters, many of them Labor, angered by this local issue. As voters in Lane Cove and in areas between Bennelong and North Sydney became disgruntled, Joe, while not facing the same noise levels, milked it for all it was worth.
On 2 March 1996, prime minister Paul Keating was sent packing, and a big class of Liberal candidates won a seat in Canberra. It would prove a talented class. Joe sat next to Ross Cameron and Brendan Nelson on his Ansett flight to Canberra, where they joined John Fahey, Mal Brough and Jackie Kelly on their own side, as well as Anthony Albanese, Martin Ferguson and Jenny Macklin from Labor. Pauline Hanson joined the class of 1996, too. John Howard took over the prime minister’s office with a 45-seat majority, one of the biggest in Australian history. Paul Keating quickly handed the Labor reins to Kim Beazley.
EIGHT
JOE HOCKEY, WHO was considered a leader of the Party’s moderate faction, thought he was being paid back by federal government whip Alan Cadman, a conversative, when he was given an office that resembled a large broom closet. Brendan Nelson, another moderate, didn’t fare much better with his RG18 office well away from any of the action. But despite where he sat, Joe knew from the start that he had to stand out among the big-talent class of 1996. He put a call in to new prime minister John Howard. ‘How does a new guy get ahead?’ Joe asked. Howard was direct: ‘You’ve got to separate yourself from the bunch,’ he said. Joe had to find an issue and make it his own. Joe also sought Howard’s advice about continuing as a consultant at Corrs, his old law firm. Howard told him it was a good idea to keep his hand in.
Joe joined a couple of parliamentary committees, but it was his appointment as head of the Sydney Airport Community Forum (SACF) that laid the groundwork for the negotiating skills that would later prove invaluable. Time and again people refer to this role, more than the part he played in NSW’s privatisation agenda or his later roles, as moulding Joe.
The SACF was a steering committee, made up of community and political players, responsible for the discussion around how to solve the Sydney aircraft noise problem. It sat separately to an expert committee made up of Airservices Australia, Sydney Airport personnel, representatives of Qantas and Ansett and international airlines, as well as community representatives. This second group was responsible to the minister, but took its guidance, direction and affirmation from Joe’s SACF committee. Anthony Albanese, along with Paul Zammit who had stolen the federal seat of Lowe from Labor on the back of the Liberals’ airport-noise promises, was also on Joe’s steering committee. David Lidbetter from DROAN was on both committees, and provided a crucial link between the two. John Sharp, the Coalition’s new transport minister, moved quickly to have the east–west runway reopened while deliberations on what to do in the longer term got underway.
Under Joe’s leaders
hip, the SACF held its first meeting only months after the 1996 election to take a fresh look at how to carve up the noise burden across Sydney’s busy skies. A second Sydney airport was also up for discussion, but was littered with controversy. Badgerys Creek, which was only approved in 2014, was an early choice but faced growing opposition after Jackie Kelly, a favourite of Howard’s, expressed her strong demurral. Holsworthy, a military training range about 40 kilometres south-west of the CBD, was another option but carried all sorts of hurdles of its own. Kingsford Smith, the main airport, kept growing to accommodate extra flights, and with the Sydney Olympics slated for 2000, and suburb pitted against suburb, it was a big, unwieldy issue.
It was late in 1996 when a draft plan was released for public consultation. It gave respite for some suburbs, and caused distress for others. The suburbs that were helped were north of the airport and ranged from Marrickville, Leichhardt, Drummoyne, Hunters Hill and Lane Cove and, further north, up towards Pymble. The eastern suburbs of Waverley, Coogee and Maroubra, which had gone to zero noise when the previous Labor government had closed the east–west runway, were back up to about 12 per cent. Noise was also stronger in the western part of the Liberal seat of Lowe, which the Liberals had previously promised to help before the election. This was somewhat offset by reduced noise on the eastern half. But whatever draft was released, there was sure to be angst, and that proved true when the public was invited to community meetings to learn more.
One of those meetings was held in Randwick on a hot November night. Interested parties were crammed into a hall like sardines. Others lined up outside. A visual presentation was planned, but someone pulled the plug on it. Tempers flared as it became clear that the reopening of the east–west flight path was a permanent measure under the plan. A new path would also go to the east, fairly close to the home of the secretary of the department of prime minister and Cabinet, Max Moore-Wilton, who had locked heads with the young MP heading the committee. But Joe thought it was good that, after continually claiming that there was nothing wrong with airport noise, Moore-Wilton would receive some of his own medicine. ‘He kept saying there was no problem. I said, right, sharing the noise? The planes can go over Clontarf and I found his house and said this is a new flight path …’
Moore-Wilton chuckles when he hears that. ‘I never researched it but certainly I do get quite a degree of airport noise. I don’t begrudge that at all,’ he says. And what does he think of Joe’s decision to do that? ‘It can either be a character flaw or youthful exuberance and I don’t know which,’ he says.
Joe admits the whole process carried a fair amount of politics. Ahead of one meeting at Hunters Hill, he met with John Howard and transport minister John Sharp. This was before the new long-term plan, called the Long Term Operation Plan, had been finalised and Howard was edgy, worried about fronting a meeting in his own electorate unless he could deliver on a promise of reducing the noise burden. ‘He said, “I can’t go to a public meeting and not have a new flight path that shares the noise,” ’ Joe says. And the three of them, over a big map of Sydney, looked at the novel idea of having planes bank sharply when using the third runway to the north – a move that carried considerable community support. It didn’t happen immediately, but it eventually did, allowing them to use an EIS (Environmental Impact Statement)–approved flight path and lowering the impact over Lane Cove.
Selling new air paths is impossible, because where there are winners, there are invariably losers. Joe was distracted by one bloke at the Randwick meeting. Something about him was making Joe edgy. He didn’t shirk the cut and thrust, or even the odd bit of abuse hurled in his direction, but in this room, packed and hot, the hostility was building. David Lidbetter looked on, watching Joe deflect the barbs. He also watched as police took Joe aside, where they told him not to be concerned because they believed they had appropriate levels of security in place. Joe was comforted momentarily – or until they added that the man most upset in the crowd had recently been released from jail for murder. It was the same person Joe’s eyes kept being drawn to. Joe turned back to the police officer: ‘I said, where is the closest exit? They said behind him [the man]. I said, you’re kidding me.’
At the community meeting in Marrickville, it wasn’t any better. Joe was forced to deny claims that flight paths had been manipulated to spare suburbs north of Sydney Harbour and even claimed his electorate was worse off than it had been previously. Anthony Albanese, who represented the seat of Grayndler for Labor, and Leo McLeay, the ALP member for the seat of Watson, sat in the front row. It was a full house again, in the suburb’s town hall. Everyone was angry. ‘I’m glad I didn’t have kids at the time,’ Joe says. ‘It was very threatening.’
On one occasion, Joe’s car was vandalised; on another his car tyres were slashed. But it was the stickiness of this role that bolstered Joe’s negotiation skills, and he handled family members who were affected along with party stalwarts, including his bosses, in the same way he drove discussions with his opponents. On the morning the new paths began operating, Joe received a call from Nick and Kathryn Greiner who were holding their telephone receiver out so he could hear what they were now copping. And in proof that the politics of airport noise is unwinnable, Paul Zammit – the person who had won Lowe for the Liberals – was given an extra dose of noise in the final plan, clearly breaking the promise delivered to voters there before John Howard won government. In 1998, he quit the Party over the issue and contested the seat as an Independent, losing to Labor.
The hullabaloo over airport noise was also the impetus for a friendship of sorts between Joe and Labor’s Anthony Albanese, which continues today. Albanese needed to appease voters weighed down by airport noise in his own electorate, and he was the target of some of the same abuse Joe suffered as people struggled to deal with the new plans. At one meeting, Albanese remembers someone moving that the local Labor MP at the time be shot. ‘That was the emotion,’ he says.
Albanese says the unfairness in some instances was behind the anger. He gives the example of the Sydney suburb of Sydenham where a family on one side of the street had their house bought, but the mirror home on the other side of the street was determined to be outside the noise barrier. He also took Joe to visit a single mother in Sydenham where the walls to her home did not connect with the floors, exaggerating the impact of the increased noise. ‘There was a gap,’ Albanese says. ‘It was a fibro house. Standing in the house, Joe just said, “This is wrong.” ’ That one statement of Joe’s, and his attempt to fix it, is behind the respect Albanese now has for the new treasurer.
Joe worked to address anomalies in the existing noise- insulation program, including the one in Albanese’s electorate. ‘This was a young parliamentarian who was the member for North Sydney, not the member for Sydenham, who I think treated it as seriously as if it was in his electorate,’ Albanese says. ‘It wasn’t a media event; it wasn’t a circus. He was just trying to fix it. He got the minister to come down. I couldn’t have delivered that.’ Joe speaks as fondly of Albanese, and one suspects the only barrier to their friendship is ideological.
While Sydney Airport took up most of Joe’s time, he also tried to be omnipresent in Canberra. That class of 1996 wasn’t shy about having their say on any issue, a point communications minister Senator Richard Alston learnt when a backbench committee forced tighter controls on telecommunication companies over cable rollouts. Cross-media ownership was another example. The Murdochs wanted changes to both cross-ownership and foreign-ownership limits to ensure it was possible to snap up the Seven Network. Kerry Packer needed changes to cross-media rules before he could get his hands on Fairfax – a move that Murdoch was opposed to because it would deliver an advertising revenue boon to Packer. Kerry Stokes, who owned a chunk of Seven as well as The Canberra Times, was a smaller player in the market, but had a voice, too – and he was good at using it. Stokes, believing Howard had done a deal with Packer over Fairfax, took his fight to Coalition backbenchers, including th
e communications committee that was being chaired by Queensland National MP Paul Neville. Nelson, Joe, Gary Hardgrave, who was another Queenslander, and Larry Anthony, the son of former deputy prime minister Doug Anthony, were also on the committee.
This singular issue provided Joe with a lesson on the power a backbench is able to wield, and how important it is to keep its members onside. He and Brendan Nelson were in cahoots to have cross-media ownership proposals dropped because, back in their electorates, voters were saying they wanted more, not less, media diversity. While Neville as chair and Hardgrave as deputy chair did much of the running, they were being egged on strongly by Nelson and Joe, who played a less public role. But it wasn’t anonymous enough, and at one point Joe says he found himself sitting in Kerry Stokes’s penthouse. He was taken into a room he still remembers by its lack of light. Stokes walked in. ‘He said he’d heard I was prepared to roll over on cross-media,’ Joe says. ‘I said, “That’s not right, Mr Stokes.” ’
Joe left the meeting with a clear belief that Stokes was capable of using his ownership of The Canberra Times to hurt the Liberal candidate in every seat in the country. Nelson also remembers a conversation with Stokes. Stokes knew Nelson was opposed to the changes. ‘I do remember Kerry Stokes saying to me, “I’ll print how many copies of The Canberra Times and stick it in every letterbox in the country” but he wasn’t threatening me,’ Nelson says. ‘He was just telling me how determined he was on this particular issue.’
