Hockey: Not Your Average Joe (16 page)

Everyone handles Kokoda differently, and Freeman was watching this group closely. On some of these trips, tempers could flare. At other times the enormity of the trek could be overwhelming and a walker would need time, by him-or herself, to gather their thoughts. Freeman referred to them as ‘moments’, and they were common. A trek like this gave everyone a big shot of perspective. With this group, so far, it was more physical ailments he, the medic and doctor were watching out for. Kevin Rudd had foot rot set in early. The pain it brought could be excruciating, with each nerve ending screaming for attention. The television crews were slowing the climb down, but the fact that Rudd, Hockey and Koch got on so well also made the going easier. That had been obvious earlier on day three when they’d made their way across Brown River. Rudd had lost his footing and fallen over, and Joe had reached out to grab him. It was in a small tributary that ran into Brown River, just after lunch, that it happened. The whole group was mucking around, smiles brought on by their first dose of sunshine. In the water, some were having a swim, trying to dislodge the mud that caked to their bodies. Cameras were filming. Joe and Kevin were talking and laughing, when Kevin dropped the soap. He went to grab it, underestimating how quickly the water was flowing. ‘He stumbled on some rocks and lost his footing,’ Freeman, who was watching from the bank, says. ‘Joe grabbed him, and that became the story of Joe saving Kevin.’

At the halfway point, at a little village called Efogi, the group dragged their feet into camp at about 5 p.m. one afternoon. Local villagers came out to see them, and Joe, as always, was mucking around. One of them gave him a cigarette, which he quickly enjoyed. Inhaling deeply, Joe started to feel slightly better. David Koch looked over, realising immediately that Joe was enjoying a marijuana joint. ‘Do you know what you’re smoking?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ Joe quipped back, ‘but it’s pretty good.’ Freeman had no idea what the banter was about, but he knew his group, despite being exhausted, was only a couple of days away from Isurava, and the Anzac Day ceremony that was the crux of the whole walk. There, two days later, more than 100 trekkers paid their respects to those Australians who lost their lives in 1942. Joe was 8 kilograms lighter.

It was at Con’s Rock, just before Isurava, that the magnitude of the trek hit almost all of the walkers. The rock is small and flat, and in 1942 it became a field operating table in a desperate bid to stem the loss of lives of young Australian men. It was here, also, that Butch Bisset took his last breath, in the arms of his brother. Joe took out the words of ‘Danny Boy’, but no-one needed them by that stage. They’d learnt them each night. It was just a small tribute, hardly anything really, but they sang every word of it, their voices ringing out in the silence, and breaking as they reached the last verse.

And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,

And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,

For you will bend and tell me that you love me,

And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me!

Joe’s fists were clenched. He felt privileged, and overwhelmed. He thought he also understood a little more about what his father went through as a young man, seeing friends killed, living the pain of war, hoping for something better. But here, on Anzac Day 2006, Joe felt tiny. The sacrifices that these young Australians had made in 1942 were incomprehensible. He took his hat off, and cried. Tears washed down the cheeks of dozens of grown men and women dwarfed by the magnitude of what had happened in the jungle in 1942. Back in Canberra, the preparations were underway to announce the access card he had championed. Joe looked down at the trench foot that had torn the skin from his feet. His was no worse than those who stood next to him. Kokoda had taught Joe that you set your own limits, and now he was going to reach higher.

THIRTEEN

Jamie Briggs popped
around to Joe Hockey’s office in the ministerial wing of Parliament House. Joe had just been made assistant workplace minister, in addition to his human services portfolio, and Briggs, John Howard’s industrial relations advisor, wanted to provide him with a good brief. To be honest, he didn’t rate Joe Hockey too highly. Many of his friends were from the Right of the Party in NSW and they weren’t singing Hockey’s praises. ‘My sort of impression going to see the guy was he’s a lightweight, that he won’t know what he’s talking about,’ Briggs says. It didn’t sit too well with the young policy advisor who had a background in industrial relations, and who had worked both in campaign headquarters and the prime minister’s office. ‘What’s the boss thinking?’ he wondered as he swung through the front door of Joe’s office.

Howard was thinking that his industrial relations plans were floundering. It was mid-2006 and while Kevin Andrews, as employment and workplace minister, had been doing a solid job of developing the laws, he wasn’t starring in communicating it. The Party had embraced the changes six months earlier in a Party room meeting, which was characterised more by the level of excitement it created, than any understanding of the new laws. Most MPs considered it part of the government’s reform agenda, and didn’t think too much about how it might play out in their electorate. Joe was one of them.

Now, six months later, a ruthless and well-heeled campaign by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) had wrong-footed the government. MPs knew it was hurting the Party, as well as their individual re-election chances, and there seemed no way of combatting the polished campaign, blaring out each morning on TV and radio with damaging examples of how the WorkChoices reform agenda would destroy families. Talkback hosts were swallowing those examples, and finding some of their own.

Howard believed Joe had the knack of explaining difficult concepts to people. He’d heard him regularly on Network Seven’s
Sunrise
, and seen the response. Most people were suspicious of politicians, and Howard knew that wasn’t the case with Joe.
Sunrise
had pushed Joe into lounge rooms across Australia, and voters seemed to engage with him easily. That was behind Howard’s decision to make him assistant workplace relations minister, helping Kevin Andrews deliver the message to voters, while a new parliamentary taskforce, chaired by Victorian MP Phil Barresi, would provide campaign ideas and advice.

Until the 1980s, Australian industrial relations had largely been built around orthodoxies set out in the Federation period Harvester Judgment, which centralised wage control and based it on living costs and an ability to bargain, rather than on productivity. Employers fought about the quantum of wage increases and complained about the influence of trade unions in their workplaces. But rarely did they consider tackling the system that delivered certainty to them and their employees. In a world where Australia’s competitiveness was based on commodity prices, and the performance of manufacturing was protected by tariff walls, productivity was a second-rung issue. But the balance began to change through the 1970s and early 1980s as unions flexed their muscles more and showed greater willingness to bring the country to its knees through assaults on key industries, such as fuel, electricity and telecommunications. More and more employers began to query the orthodoxy but received little joy from the Fraser government, and were lulled into security by the election of the Hawke government and its consensus approach to industrial relations.

Conservative politics in the 1980s was buoyed by watching what was happening elsewhere in the world, particularly the UK, where the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher took on and defeated the unions that were stifling her country. A consistent voice for reform through this period was John Howard who, from Opposition, took a lead in changing the orthodoxies. Economic decisions of the Hawke government made changes to labour laws inevitable. The floating of the dollar, banking deregulation and lowering of tariff walls meant that labour could no longer be insulated from the forces of competition that demanded more from every business input.

While Howard argued the case (as a fairly lonely voice) from the political wing of conservative Australia, some employer ‘mavericks’ took a lead in using civil law to break union power. They included future Howard government ministers Peter Costello (in a case called Dollar Sweets in Victoria) and Ian McLachlan (then of the National Farmers Federation in the Mudginberri Abattoir dispute in the Northern Territory). There’s little doubt that the Prices and Incomes Accord in 1983 delivered productivity gains but they were not enough to make Australian businesses as competitive as they had been against emerging economies where labour costs were much lower.

The 1990s saw that orthodoxy shift and conservative politics was unanimous in agreeing that individual workers should have the right to write individual contracts with their employers. The Hawke, then Keating, government had only gone as far as legislating for groups of workers to form enterprise agreements with their employers. The Howard government, once elected, introduced Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) – effectively individual contracts that included clauses guaranteeing their signatories could not be disadvantaged against union employees. But, importantly, this began to erode the power of unions, particularly in smaller workplaces where they had little visibility other than to collect fees. Come 2000, Australia was heading into a boom and while the Howard government had made strides in industrial relations, there was no great appetite to take giant leaps. Instead, there was a belief that AWAs would continue to erode union agreements delivering incremental productivity gains.

Then came the surprise of the 2004 election when the Coalition won a majority in both houses of parliament, giving it control of the upper house and the opportunity to govern unshackled. Not surprisingly, industrial relations came straight onto the agenda, fuelled by the findings of the Cole Royal Commission, which exposed the thuggery of the building unions but also the ardour of Howard, Costello and the then industrial relations minister Kevin Andrews. Their legislative package, WorkChoices, went further in depleting union power, promising individual contracts and delivering productivity gains that had stalled for the previous five years. The unions understood this was to be the fight of their lives and they treated WorkChoices as an ideological assault on their power.

Jamie Briggs knew industrial relations inside out; he was about to walk into the office of Joseph Benedict Hockey – someone he suspected knew near-nothing. He understood that Howard must hold Joe in high regard; he wouldn’t have put him anywhere near this portfolio otherwise. ‘This was the most important policy reform Howard ever embarked upon. The GST was very significant to him but workplace relations is, in a sense, his being,’ Briggs says. Briggs sat down in Joe Hockey’s office. ‘Joe had absolutely no idea,’ he says. As he arrived in Joe’s office he was greeted by other advisors, who were peppered around the room.

‘He wasn’t alone,’ advisor Wendy Black says. ‘Not many people around the Cabinet table really appreciated the extent to which WorkChoices had changed some of the fundamentals of the workplace relations system.’ But now it was Joe’s job to understand it, and then sell it. Big lists, made from scraps of butcher’s paper, had been plastered across Joe’s office walls. Joe, with the enthusiasm of a child on his first day at school, was explaining how he was going to lock himself in his office until he understood the minutiae of WorkChoices. He had a plan. His staff, including chief-of-staff Rod Whithear, would quiz him. But first, he needed everyone in the room to give him the knowledge he needed to understand every cranny of WorkChoices.

Everyone remained silent, mostly floored by the upfront admission by a minister that he had to grapple with his new portfolio. Most ministers would wing it, wanting to stamp their authority immediately, and not admit a weakness. ‘Come on,’ Joe was saying, ‘the knowledge doesn’t come through the air conditioners here. Give me a break – I have to get my head around this.’ Briggs looked around the room. Oh, my God, he thought.

Joe, like other MPs, knew WorkChoices was hurting the government, and he’d heard the loud community unrest. He also knew that Howard, who had told him he’d lose ‘a bit of bark’ selling the new laws, was spot on. The polls were proof of that. But Joe only understood the depth of voters’ resentment over the new laws once he took his sales pitch, as Howard had requested, on the road. When he and Whithear landed in a city, they’d immediately gauge the level of antagonism by the number of posters plastered to poles on the drive into town. They saw the Labor state government utility trucks dressing up the telegraph polls with Your Rights At Work posters, and knew they were selling an impossible message. The oxygen had been pumped out of the debate. Unions 1. The government 0.

Inside government, senior politicians clashed over how to deal with the WorkChoices conundrum: some were telling Joe to get off the planes and stop talking about it because he was adding fuel to the fire; others reminded him that he had been appointed exclusively to sell it. But within weeks of starting in the new gig, Joe knew the law would require changes if the Party had any hope of staying in Government. He sought out Briggs. ‘This is impossible,’ he told him. ‘They’ve made up their minds and we don’t have a chance to win them over.’

Briggs’s response was quick. ‘There is no way the boss is going to back down on this,’ he said. A bigger political picture was being painted around WorkChoices, too. Kim Beazley was being rolled by Kevin Rudd, and most conservative MPs thought they were heading for victory. Rudd might have been a difficult opponent for Costello, but certainly not Howard.

The final weeks of 2006 stumbled by, and as parliament headed into 2007 with a fresh Opposition leader, the focus within the Liberal camp was a fifth consecutive term. In January, Joe took a call from Howard while he was changing his six-week-old daughter Adelaide’s nappy.

‘John Howard here,’ Joe recalls him saying. ‘What are you doing?’

Joe explained he was changing his newborn baby’s nappy. ‘And he said, “Well this will prepare you well for your new job.” I said, what’s that?’

Joe didn’t really have to ask the question. He knew the answer: he was being promoted from assisting the employment and workplace relations minister, to taking his job. He finally had a seat at the Cabinet table.

Joe knew the brunt of criticism of the government’s industrial relations laws centred on two issues – penalty rates and unfair dismissals. They were stopping him making inroads to explain the rest of the policy. With Howard still on the phone, he decided not to let the opportunity pass. Would the prime minister countenance any change to penalty rates? he asked. ‘I remember him saying emphatically, like Margaret Thatcher says, “This man’s not for turning.” I’m not for turning on this.’

Howard says he chose Joe for the job because the government needed ‘a more combative public presenter’. ‘I thought Joe was a marginally better debater than Kevin,’ he says. Joe could not be more different from Kevin Andrews, whose political salesmanship had certainly not helped the campaign. Seeing he was being outwitted, Howard’s decision to appoint Joe was intended to capitalise again on his popularity and profile, largely built through
Sunrise
. He admitted as much at the press conference to announce the ministerial musical chairs. Joe Hockey, the man who would sell the changes, was an ‘avuncular sort of bloke’, ‘a good media performer’, and a ‘big bear of a man’.

Joe remembers every word of it. It stuck in his craw then, and it would again later, as he went through a personal purgatory to decide whether to have radical stomach surgery. ‘Okay,’ Joe thought, smiling through gritted teeth to the assembled media: ‘we’re getting the Demtel man in to sell steak knives.’ But it didn’t diminish his determination to do it. He had a seat at the Cabinet table. He felt Andrews’s frosty response. He didn’t care. It was a challenge. And he knew his appointment would momentarily floor the union movement.

Richard Clancy went to work with Joe in January 2007. He had been a senior advisor on workplace relations to Andrews, having arrived there via the Victorian bar. He, like Briggs, understood the nuances that industrial relations boasted. For those who live it, it’s addictive, the quirks and complexities the stuff of long conversations. Joe needed to understand that detail, and then translate or synthesise it into soundbites that people would understand, and support.

Along with Whithear, Briggs and senior advisor Minna Knight, Clancy tried to focus on the recurring themes that kept coming up in the unions’ Your Rights At Work campaign. They didn’t have the luxury of time; the prime minister’s order was to sell it. Joe knew that now, as employment and workplace relations minister, he would not be spared questions in parliament. He set out to learn what Clancy describes as Industrial Relations 101: ‘I think the seminal moment came when he fully appreciated the fact that under the legislation – aside from satisfying the safety conditions, of which there were five – anything else was open for negotiation.’

With parliament due to sit for the first time in 2007, and Kevin Rudd installed as the new Opposition leader, his advisors knew Joe would be targeted. ‘The first priority was to get him through the first sitting fortnight,’ Clancy says.

In an early sign of the internal chaos that would later drain Labor of support, Joe was spared. Labor had changed shadow ministers, and Joe was now pitted against Julia Gillard, whose understanding of industrial relations suggested she might carry it in her DNA. But even then, Rudd had a propensity to hog the limelight, taking the attention away from industrial relations and heaping it on himself. Joe’s office was grateful; they knew that Gillard could have made Joe’s life very uncomfortable by drilling down to issues like Notional Agreements Preserving State Awards, and other issues that would have escaped Joe’s attention. In fact, if Labor had been more on top of its game, it could have caught Joe out at several junctures during the campaign.