Hockey: Not Your Average Joe (15 page)

Even a Centrelink check of staff snooping on other people’s private records could have risked the access card’s success after hundreds of staff were found to have taken a peep at someone’s private information – from celebrities, to neighbours, to someone they had fallen out with. Some were sacked; others demoted, creating the potential for a media frenzy. The investigation had begun before the access card discussion took off, but any revelations of how widespread the snooping had become threatened to create another factor able to topple the card’s shaky acceptance.

Privacy concerns blocked the public’s acceptance, and the government heard that each day when they tuned into talkback. That led to the appointment of Professor Allan Fels, whom Joe had worked with as head of the ACCC, to lead a consumer and privacy taskforce. Joe named the taskforce himself; wanting to ensure the focus was on the ‘consumer’, not just the ‘privacy’, and later, the government moved to accept 22 of its 26 recommendations. History shows the support for the card, but the following year, with the election of a new Rudd government, it would be dumped. Joe’s support for one is undiminished.

It wasn’t the only thing that Joe would try and fail to get up. At one time, his passion for the South Sydney Rabbitohs led to another idea. He decided he could build an aspirational connection between the struggling football team and those who were unemployed. Joe had been talking to actor Russell Crowe and businessman Peter Holmes
à
Court who had taken over the club in the wake of dismal performances. The parallels between the fight for the Rabbitohs, from the hard-working suburb of Redfern, and those Australians out of work, were perfect in Joe’s mind. ‘I think we ought to sponsor [the Rabbitohs] and have them play in Centrelink sponsored jumpers,’ he told staff. Joe explained it as an exercise in showing leadership, providing inspiration, even encouraging Indigenous Australians.

Some of his senior staff didn’t see it the same way. ‘I thought, Jesus bloody Christ,’ one said. He says Joe’s idea, and heart, was in the right place but he imagined the story played out in the nation’s newspapers in an entirely different way: MINISTER GIVES HIS MILLIONAIRE MATES A LEG-UP or RABBITS LAY A GOLDEN TAXPAYER EGG.

‘I managed to give him 40 reasons why it would bring us all undone,’ one staffer says. Rod Whithear wasn’t so sure. ‘It was risky, no doubt,’ he says now, but millions of pamphlets were printed, at taxpayers’ expense, and few people read them. This could have led to a big punch of publicity, and the controversy might have been worth it. The nay-sayers won out in the end, and the plan was canned. Instead, former league star Artie Beetson was hired as an Indigenous ambassador and sent to small towns with bags full of footballs to talk about aspiration and Indigenous leadership. The program was later extended to include famous Indigenous Aussie Rules star Michael Long.

The birth of his first child in 2005 also pulled Joe back to his Armenian roots, clearly illustrated during a trip that year to Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia. There, at 3 a.m, Whithear remembers his phone ringing – and knew immediately what the subject of the call would be. Patricia Scott, in another room but on the same overseas trip with her minister Joe Hockey, had just received a similar call. The pair had flown into Zvartnots, 12 kilometres west of Yerevan, just before midnight, to be met by representatives of both the Australian Embassy and the Armenian government. An official from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade advised Joe that the ‘g’ word should not be raised. According to one of those present, that advice was like a red rag to a bull. Joe raised his eyebrows, turned to the Armenian foreign minister and asked: ‘When can we go to the genocide museum?’

Three hours later, Whithear and Scott were fielding calls from bureaucrats in Australia, lecturing them about the diplomatic risk that lay in Joe’s comments. Up to 1.5 million Armenians are thought to have been killed at the hands of the Turks during World War 1, and Australia’s Armenian community, which numbers 50,000, is well represented in Joe’s North Sydney electorate. The next morning, to mark the 90th anniversary of the massacre, Joe visited Tsitsernakaberd, the Armenian genocide memorial, to lay a wreath, and his electorate newsletter later carried photographs of their local MP being led by ceremonial guards from the Armenian Army and a group including the director of the genocide museum.

Almost a decade later, Australia’s Armenian community continues to hope Joe will drive a formal recognition of the genocide. Vache Kahramanian, from the Armenian National Committee of Australia, says Joe’s visit to Armenia rocked established views, and showed the now-treasurer was onside. ‘Joe has been a long-time advocate of recognition of the Armenian genocide,’ he says. ‘It’s now a matter of the Australian government passing a motion to formally put on record its recognition of the events of 1915 and clearly and accurately describing it as a genocide.’

Joe supports their argument, and says he has lobbied the foreign minister, but translating it to formal recognition, in the face of both Gallipoli and the G20, makes it a tall order. Vache Kahramanian doesn’t flinch. ‘It’s as difficult as they want it to be. The community has very high hopes and very high expectations that Joe, now as treasurer of Australia and the third-highest ranking member in Cabinet, will actually deliver on his promise.’

There is no doubt that the human services portfolio saw Joe return to favour, especially in the eyes of John Howard. It could have been a poisoned chalice. In fact, a colleague early on told Whithear that some of the Party’s conservative MPs had seen Joe’s performance here as a win-win. If he’d done a good job, there would have been good money savings and the government would benefit. If he’d failed, and some hoped he did, it would take out a leading moderate in NSW. And that wouldn’t have been a bad thing, according to them, either.

Ironically, it was during Joe’s stint as human services minister that he turned away from blatant factionalism. That was partly influenced by Whithear, who worked hard on the conservative side of the Party to offset the image of the ‘wet Palestinian’. It was also helped by Joe’s ambition. Foot soldiers for the NSW moderates still spoke to him regularly, but now Joe wanted to embrace the whole Party, be a decision-maker for the whole team. But if Joe’s handling of HIH had led to the stint he hadn’t wanted in tourism, the human services gig cemented in people’s minds where his abilities lay.

Peter Shergold was impressed. He was aware of the moniker ‘Sloppy Joe’. ‘Some ministers are good at the higher level but don’t get to understand the detail,’ he says now. ‘Joe was one of those ministers who understood how to do this job – yes he had a department to do it – but he had to understand the detail.’

Shergold, who is widely respected on both sides of politics, believed Joe had another talent that would allow him to climb higher. ‘I really liked the way, having got on top of the detail, he could put complex things into an easy-to-understand narrative. That’s a real skill,’ he says.

The same skill had stood out at university, and in understanding a legal brief. But Shergold was aware that also meant some people thought the simple narrative was all that Joe had to offer, and he didn’t doubt what a big logistical task his department represented. But at its centre was the need for someone who loved dealing with people. Many politicians don’t really like people; some do and Joe sat firmly in that camp.

In fact, it was Joe’s genuine liking for people and his passion for history that led him in April 2006 to join a ten-day trek along the Kokoda Track to Isurava for the Anzac Day ceremony. His initial enthusiasm for the trip, however, was sorely tested when on day three he found himself on the side of Mount Bellamy, exhausted and covered in mud, the physical strain taking a toll.

Pathos enveloped his mood and his 135-kilogram frame was reeling from fatigue; his shoes were swallowed by mud, hiding the first signs of the foot rot that had taken hold. Tired and hungry, his mind kept turning to the young men who had lost their lives on the same journey to this damp, dark and unfriendly battleground. He was angry with himself that he couldn’t even acknowledge their heroics by making it all the way to Isurava, the site of a planned Anzac Day ceremony in a few days’ time. His wide leather hat hid tears, as well as the lyrics of ‘Danny Boy’, the song one young soldier sang through the night to his brother on this same track, as he lay dying in his arms. He had it typed out and it was stuck, with a picture of his only child, Xavier, into the lining of his hat.

Brian Freeman, a super-fit 50-year-old whose company Centori runs regular Kokoda walks, looked over his shoulder to see one of his charges give up. He knew from the outset this was an unusual group by any standard. Joe Hockey was a Howard government minister, Kevin Rudd was a Labor leadership aspirant and David Koch starred on
Sunrise
, where the two politicians slugged it out each week. A film crew added to the celebrity status, as the group of 22, along with 15 porters and two medics, snaked their way along the track. The 96-kilometre trail was like climbing Everest from sea level. They would need to scramble up 10,000 cumulative metres to reach Isurava. It was a great leveller. The 30-degree heat and 95 per cent humidity didn’t favour seniority or celebrity. Here, everyone had to put one foot in front of the other for up to 12 hours a day, crawling through mud, water and dense scrub. At the end of each day they would take off their wet clothes and towel-dry their scratched bodies, before feeding on dehydrated dinner packs of lamb and vegetables or spaghetti and meatballs. They’d gulp them down, pretending it tasted fine, before crawling into a dry mosquito-proof tent and falling asleep.

The first day had been slow, especially crossing the Goldie River. Freeman had taken hundreds of people along the track, but that week’s trail was one of the wettest he had experienced. Rivers rose quickly and the trail soon became slippery, muddy and slow. In fact, it had taken the group the whole first day to get from Owers Corner, 50 kilometres east of Port Moresby, to just past the Goldie River, a route that, if looked upon favourably by climate and condition, could take as little as one hour.

Day two wasn’t any easier. Joe made the ten-hour trek to the small village of Iroibaiwa, although a sense of achievement filled the bravado and talk at the campsite when Joe insisted on people learning a verse of the words of ‘Danny Boy’:

But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying

If I am dead, as dead I well may be,

You’ll come and find the place where I am lying,

And kneel and say an Ave there for me.

Joe had done his homework before flying into Port Moresby, and it was the story of Stan and Butch Bisset that had made carrying each foot in front of the other possible. Stan, a Wallaby, and his big brother, Butch, were part of the 2/14th Battalion, who found themselves defending Australia against the Japanese on the Kokoda Track. They were helping another battalion hold off the Japanese at Isurava when Butch was badly wounded and died in Stan’s arms. To Joe, who had enjoyed a prosperous childhood, it was heartbreaking and he found he had to hold himself in check each time his mind wondered onto the Bisset brothers. That was why he carried the words to ‘Danny Boy’ in his hat on the trek, to give him strength when he wanted to give up, and to remind him of what others had lost to grant such freedoms. Joe was also on a personal journey. He owed so much to his father, who had been forced to live some of his formative years in an orphanage, before joining the army at the tender age of 15, and arriving in Australia as a 21-year-old. Joe knew how hard his father had worked to ensure he grew up believing he could do anything or be anyone. He knew he owed his father more than he could ever repay, just as he owed Stan and Butch Bisset a lot more than he was now giving.

‘It was very emotional,’ Joe says. ‘How unworthy am I? I’m not carrying a gun, I’m not being shot at and I can’t even get up this bloody hill. I was really angry with myself but I couldn’t take one step. My body wouldn’t move.’

Freeman already liked Joe. He had been referred to him by John Singleton, and he was expecting someone who might have had a slightly bigger ego. He was used to that. Celebrities or big wigs making the trek, talking constantly about themselves, some of them wanting the star treatment. He looked at the big bulk in front of him. Joe wasn’t like that. He didn’t care if he was talking to Kevin Rudd or David Koch or Trekker No. 21. He reminded Freeman of Singleton, or Singo as they all called him, in that way. Both of them could charm anyone, from the porters, to the villagers they came across along the way. They were both genuinely interested in everyone, too. And fiercely patriotic.

Freeman also knew, while the television cameras were along to film the Anzac Day ceremony for Channel 7’s
Sunrise
program, that Joe was doing this climb for all the right reasons. Looking at him now, he wasn’t too perturbed. Day three on the Kokoda Track was always the hardest. Few walkers could acclimatise in 72 hours. Reality was hitting home, too. There was almost another week of putting their feet, one in front of the other, up the mountain. Joe wasn’t helping himself either, Freeman thought. He knew he wasn’t taking his advice to eat small amounts regularly. Now he saw the self-loathing in Joe’s hunched figure. He was thinking that he was too fat and too lazy to make the climb young men, carrying their life in a knapsack, had made in 1942. The stakes were also higher with this group, Freeman knew. ‘If Joe didn’t finish Kokoda, he’d be on the front page of every paper in Australia,’ Freeman says. ‘There’s no doubt that weighed on him. And then the fear of failure creates anxiety, no matter who you are.’

Freeman, having done this trek with so many different personalities, knew all Joe needed was a sugar hit. He handed him lolly snakes, one after the other, almost pushing the first one into his mouth. The sugar hit would get him up, and then it would be back to one foot after the other, for hours until they reached their next camp, which had been named after Captain Sam Templeton of the 39th Battalion, who lost his life near Oivi on 26 July 1942. The next stop, for Freeman’s group, was Templeton’s Crossing.