Hockey: Not Your Average Joe

by Madonna King

  In addition to Andrew Burnes, Joe relied heavily on others and set up a pseudo cabinet of business advisors. Peter Hurley, who was the national president of the Australian Hotels Association when Joe took on the role, remembers each catch-up being more like a ‘meeting with a finance man, not a marketing man’. Terry Jackman, then chair of Tourism Queensland, remembers both Joe’s drive and his ability to play the political game. That’s an astute point, and indeed Joe picked business-savvy entrepreneurs who also had the ear of Howard. These people not only knew the prime minister; they sometimes served as his counsel for advice, and Joe saw ingratiating himself with them as a step towards rebuilding the fractured relationship he believed he had with Howard. Inadvertently, in talking to Howard, Joe hoped this group of businessmen would also be selling the government’s tourism minister.

  Joe’s parliamentary secretary for tourism at the time was Warren Entsch, federal MP for Leichhardt in Queensland’s top end. Apart from moving to Canberra in the class of 1996, Entsch and Hockey were worlds apart. Joe, the Sydney University graduate, was a lawyer and political operative. Entsch left school at the age of 15, did a stint as a toilet cleaner in a railway, and despite having no interest in politics ended up in parliament. It was during a visit to the Mareeba wetlands that Joe asked Entsch where his property was, and told him he wanted to buy a farm. ‘I thought, what’s a friggen Sydney bloody lawyer thinking, wanting to buy a place in Far North Queensland?’ Entsch says now. He suggested the Hunter Valley would sit more neatly with Joe. It didn’t.

  Despite their seeming differences, Joe and Entsch became firm friends and a few years later Joe and Melissa ended up buying the property neighbouring Entsch’s in northern Queensland. In 2003, Joe and Melissa would become the proud owners of 222 acres of farmland just outside Malanda on the Atherton tablelands, snuggled between the Ker and Great Dividing ranges. The Babbage-Hockey clan would travel up a couple of times a year to stay in the 1934 farmer’s cottage and go on to develop strong ties with the previous owners and their new neighbour, Entsch.

  Mick Konig had owned the dairy farm for 20 years before selling it to Joe and Melissa – the Babbage Hockey’s calling it Platypus Creek. Konig says Joe drove a hard bargain, telling him he didn’t want the dairy cows as part of the deal, but Konig could see that Melissa wasn’t a silent party to the transaction either. When she talked, everyone listened. He gives, as an example, a chat she had with him while Joe and Entsch were discussing the purchase of some cattle. Konig saw they were wild, having come from the Gulf, earning the nickname in his vocabulary of ‘cape geese’. ‘I was standing on the side looking and Melissa said, “What do you think of these cattle?” I said I’d take them out and shoot them straightaway. She said, “Alright we’ll get rid of them.” ’ Melissa then walked down to Joe and Entsch, and told them to get rid of them, before walking back up to Konig and asking him to stay on as manager.

  Within a short time of Joe and Melissa taking over, it shifted from a dairy to beef farm, the meat destined for a butcher in Townsville. In good times, it boasted 400 head. With its undulating hills and big dams, the farm looked as though it had popped out of a picture book. Joe would spend his time on the farm speeding around on the motorbike, driving the tractor too fast, helping to brand cattle and doing a spot of fencing. Often, when he returned to the big smoke of Sydney, Konig would spend a couple of days fixing Joe’s mistakes. ‘He’s not a farmer,’ Entsch says. ‘He used to drive Mick crazy when he’d get onto the quad bike or tractor and Mick would have to fix it up.’ Konig just smiles; his loyalty to Joe stops him saying anything.

  At the centre of Joe’s time as tourism minister, however, was the development of a white paper. All new ministers, after an election, get a written brief that includes a statement of expectations. John Howard had asked Joe for a strategy for tourism. This could have been interpreted in many ways – but Joe seized on it. Tourism should have its own white paper just like the defence portfolio, he decided, before quickly calling a meeting and unveiling the idea. Hingerty caught the eye of David Mazitelli, who was the deputy secretary of the department of industry, tourism and resources, as Joe explained his grand plan. ‘You could see it in David’s eyes – at first he’s thinking who is this bloke?’ Hingerty says. But Joe was adamant.

  Howard had wanted a plan for tourism, and he was going to get one, on steroids: a ten-year-plan, outlined in a white paper, which would lift tourism from its rut and propel the nation forward.

  ‘Every minister wanted their own tourism strategy and as soon as you got a new minister you got a new tourism strategy,’ Mazitelli says. He was, understandably, a bit sceptical. ‘My initial view was, here we go again, another one.’ But it didn’t take long before Mazitelli was won over by Joe’s insistence that this would be a genuine whole-of-government document. The plan would go through from a discussion paper, to a green paper and then a white paper, resulting in a plan that, with Cabinet’s endorsement, would become policy. Mazitelli was onside. Entsch believes it was a risk that paid off. Joe promised it publicly, with bells and whistles, and if he couldn’t deliver it, it would smash his political career.

  Yet, it was inside the Cabinet room that Joe felt he confronted most resistance. His senior minister was Ian Macfarlane, who had the prized industry portfolio, and Joe felt he was constantly trying to rein him in. Entsch, from the sidelines, saw it as professional jealousy. ‘When there was an opportunity, Macfarlane as the senior minister would stand up and address the crowd and say he was the senior tourism minister and remind people. People didn’t listen; Joe was their champion,’ Entsch, an unashamed admirer of the new treasurer, says.

  When the green paper – the precursor to the white paper – was leaked to the media after a Cabinet meeting, Joe, without any real proof, suspected his colleagues. The upshot however, was that Joe had been rolled in Cabinet, reflecting serious reservations around the decision-making table. ‘They opposed it; everyone thought it was a trivial industry,’ Joe says now, despite the irony of him holding a similar view when offered the portfolio.

  Nick Minchin, finance minister at the time, says, ‘He basically came to Cabinet with what I regarded, as finance minister, as something of a rather large and overly generous and ambit claim upon the government for funding for tourism. Where there were bids for taxpayers’ funds that I thought lacked merit, I’d do my best to make sure they didn’t succeed.’

  So Cabinet sent Joe back to have a fresh look at tourism, and particularly the taxpayer dollars thrown at it. Still, Joe stood his ground. Sure, he reduced the size and ambit of his plans, but was adamant he needed a huge financial boost if it was to be seen as a legitimate business industry. The green paper relied heavily on having a tangible commercial response to rebuilding the nation’s tourism sector.

  Ken Boundy, who ran the Australian Tourist Commission, which later became Tourism Australia under Joe’s portfolio, believes the final white paper gave credibility, for the first time, to the industry. But it did more than that. It showered the industry with love, and changed how it was perceived.

  Tourism had always been measured by a headcount of people coming through our airports. If it went up, it was viewed as a good year; if it went down it was a bad year. But the terror attacks in September 2001, as well as the Ansett collapse, showed it was more about the money being spent than numbers. Tourism was a business not a pastime, and that was the crux of the white paper – a shift from numbers to profitability. A second focus looked at what we had to offer to attract greater patronage. Overall, it was a new way of looking at tourism, in the same way you might look at the banking or construction or building industries. Having industry onside helped mould the paper, and sell it.

  Chris Brown, who headed the Tourism and Transport Forum and whose father, John Brown, had been the Hawke government’s tourism champion, says industry pulled out all stops to get it across the line. For example, every single electorate in the nation was mapped, showing the number of tourism jobs in each MP’
s seat. ‘We worked with him to take that through to government to help him sell it,’ he says. So with industry backing, and despite some Cabinet colleagues scoffing at the amount of money Joe was seeking, kudos for the plan built, including inside the prime minister’s office.

  Exceptions exist to most rules, and so does it to the claim that all of industry was onside. Joe had regular barneys, too; one of the most notable was with Qantas after it announced it wanted to raise the airline’s foreign shareholding. ‘I wrote to Cabinet and said, basically, over my dead body,’ Joe says. Joe’s view was that they couldn’t have it both ways – trade off the spirit of Australia with their own marketing and then be owned by a foreigner. ‘It was not on,’ Joe says.

  Chris Brown remembers the stalemate. ‘Geoff [Dixon, the head of Qantas] and Joe weren’t really chummy at that point in time and I remember thinking, how do I not get in the middle of these two,’ he says.

  That exchange provides an interesting backdrop to the decision Joe had to make, post-election, when Qantas sought a government-backed debt guarantee. The same can be said for the debate about the second Sydney airport, because one of the people Joe has clashed with most is undoubtedly Max Moore-Wilton, the former secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, hand-picked by Howard. He is now Sydney Airport Holdings Ltd chairman. Back in 2003, Moore-Wilton (who had moved to Sydney Airport) labelled the young tourism minister a ‘galoot’ for suggesting the airport pay for anti-terrorism security changes demanded by the government.

  ‘I take a view about politics and politicians that they are doing a public service,’ Moore-Wilton says. ‘It’s the job of those of us who interact with them to assist and help them but [also] to speak frankly to them.’ So, does he believe Joe has matured through the ranks? ‘All of us learn as we grow older,’ Moore-Wilton says. ‘Joe has both ambition and determination – both attributes of a good minister.’ But then comes the rider. ‘It’s not always enough to be right or determined or ambitious. You really need judgment – what I call commonsense. I think John Howard had that in spades, which made him a great prime minister. We will see whether Joe Hockey is a great treasurer.’

  Inside the boardrooms, the view of Joe is more favourable, a point made by former staffer and now Australian Financial Review ‘Rear Window’ columnist Joe Aston. ‘Around the big banks and financial services industry, they love him,’ Aston says. ‘He’s really well liked around the top end of town – almost without exception.’

  As tourism minister, Joe found that despite opposition from some of his Cabinet peers to a big-spending tourism manifesto, a couple of senior colleagues stood up to support him. Trade minister Mark Vaile and John Howard headed the list, the latter in part because of the feedback he was receiving from the senior business community, the same people Joe was using both as advocates for the industry and for his own advancement. But on the day Joe’s plan was due back in Cabinet, Howard was away. ‘I knew if it was left to the room I was in trouble because no-one would back me,’ Joe says. That included treasurer Peter Costello, Nick Minchin and Ian Macfarlane, who had offered Joe a small amount of money to build his plan. ‘I told them to shove it,’ he says now.

  Joe wanted $250 million, and, despite being in the minority at the end of the deliberations, he had Howard on his side. If he had not been able to deliver it, a promise he had staked his ministerial post on, he would have had to step down. But he wouldn’t have been alone. Entsch, who was a parliamentary secretary, also went and saw the prime minister. ‘I said to him that he would not be losing one person from his ministry, he’d be losing two. I would also resign,’ Entsch says. While Joe is gregarious and friendly, and his friendship with Entsch was solid, he can carry the odd grudge, too, and his relationship with Ian Macfarlane is evidence of that. It was around this time, when Joe was Macfarlane’s junior minister, that their tense relationship was cemented, and it would resurface again in 2013, once Joe was in charge of the Treasury coffers and Ian Macfarlane, as industry minister, was fighting for the future of Holden.

  Joe saw his relationship with Howard grow stronger during this period, despite still butting up against him every now and again, but particularly when it was viewed that he was straying into another minister’s territory. At one point, as the minister for small business as well as tourism, he criticised plaintiff lawyers. His entire office later overheard the conversation between the prime minister and his young minister, helped by Joe holding the phone several centimetres from his ear. The prime minister’s anger was palpable, believing Joe had deliberately intruded into assistant treasurer Helen Coonan’s area. Small business needed a champion, too, Joe fired back, as well as someone to speak out about public liability issues. Those listening to the call were in agreement that Joe came off second best. To Joe, public liability issues were rife in a climate where people were quick to sue, and a few celebrated cases meant the tourism industry saw itself drowning in risk. New Zealand became a big competitor in the adventure market because a system operated there that provided a cap on payouts. In Australia, insurance costs continued to skyrocket, providing another obstacle for small tourism operators.

  While much of Joe’s focus was on tourism, small business issues also surfaced regularly. One of these was a home goal, after he agreed to a Sky television interview with his father, conducted by David Koch. It had the potential to be a great yarn. Joe’s father had arrived in Australia as a new immigrant, pulling himself up with hard work, to become a respected businessman. He had a strong work ethic and understood what you needed to do to get ahead. How did you set about doing that, David Koch asked?

  ‘Screw the government,’ Joe’s father, Richard, answered.

  Joe, with the camera rolling, was lost for words. He couldn’t believe what his father had just said. Didn’t he realise his son was the country’s small business minister? Koch couldn’t stop smiling.

  ‘Dad, you can’t say that,’ Joe said.

  ‘But it’s true,’ his father replied.

  ‘But Dad, I’m the minister for small business.’

  As the cameras rolled, Richard barely paused. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but you have to screw the government to get ahead.’ Richard went on to explain how earlier in his life he would take his ration entitlements and then game them on the black market. Joe just kept shaking his head.

  Just as Joe’s management of the GST controversy and HIH coloured his time as financial services minister, it was the parameters of his role as tourism minister that raised the ire of some. Joe saw his job as being in charge, and he didn’t baulk at crossing any lines. ‘He used to like to know the faces of those who wrote the briefs,’ Mazitelli says. That meant a public servant could turn around to find his minister looking over his shoulder. Mazitelli liked that, but some of his colleagues didn’t.

  Chris Brown tells a similar story, once being summonsed to Joe’s office. ‘He wanted to show me the advertisement he had produced,’ he says. ‘I’m thinking, let’s ignore the governance issues for a second here, how cool is this that the minister’s just designed an ad for us.’ Others are more circumspect, and several of them use the word ‘interference’ when describing how active Joe was during this period.

  ‘I would say that he was more involved than the textbooks would prescribe a minister to be,’ one senior tourism figure said. ‘Joe struggled with the boundaries of what a minister should do and what a public servant should do,’ another said, adding that Joe was also keen to grow the careers of people who worked with him.

  Joe couldn’t care less about that criticism, or the fact that he would frequently go around the boards running organisations to find what he needed to know. And in some ways, that modus operandi worked for him. ‘I’d never mark someone down for being enthusiastic,’ John Howard says. ‘Good public servants like enthusiastic ministers. Voters like Joe’s enthusiasm.’

  As the 2004 election neared, Joe was hopeful that the lessons he’d learnt as tourism and small business minister would hold him
in good stead for his next challenge. When John Howard handed out the jobs next time, he had his eyes on a Cabinet post.

  TWELVE

  JOE SAT DOWN to write himself a letter. As minister for human services, he wrote to every new parent, gifting them his government’s baby bonus. And now, in 2005, he had joined the parent club, filling out the required form himself. ‘Dear Joe …’ His staff looked on, laughing. Joe was enjoying it, too, but that didn’t last long. He turned the first page, and then the second. And then the third. ‘How many pages are here?’ he demanded to know, as staff slipped discreetly out of his office. He kept counting, until he got to 29; 29 pages of a form for a payment that wasn’t means-tested. Wendy Black, one of his advisors, was still in the room watching. She’d seen him do this with other forms, checking whether they were user-friendly, and he was leaving no doubt now that this one had failed the test. Why was the department gathering all this information? he demanded to know. Why was it needed?

  ‘I went bananas,’ Joe admits. His mood only worsened after learning that Centrelink held 275 kilometres’ worth of files, including photocopies of birth certificates, drivers licences and even electricity bills. A similar check at Medicare found that the area needed to store the forms ran to 3 square kilometres. Joe thought it was ridiculous and he told Jeff Whalan, head of Centrelink, exactly what he thought. How could one voter receive four different letters on the one day, from different agencies within his department?