Joe Hockey has climbed Africa’s highest peak, Mt Kilimanjaro, and once rescued Kevin Rudd from a fast-flowing river while trekking the Kokoda Track.
But he never got to climb to the very top of Australian politics and when, finally, he got caught in the torrent that swept away Tony Abbott, he couldn’t save himself.
Now, aged 50, he is simply another body floating down the relentless river of political disappointment.
It is a long way from the days of his youth when – according to his biographer, Madonna King – he told classmates and neighbours he wanted to be prime minister.
He reached, of course, the job leadership hopefuls always see as the last-but-one rung on the way to the top – treasurer.
But a disastrous inability to explain or sell his first budget almost 18 months ago, combined with a central role in a serially dysfunctional government, has finally left his political career in ashes.
Unwilling to take another ministerial portfolio or even serve in a Malcolm Turnbull government, he won’t, however, be entirely cast aside from the affairs of state.
He is to be given the most senior of all Australia’s diplomatic missions: Ambassador to Washington.
It has become the landfall for Australian politicians washing down that river: Andrew Peacock, the Liberal leader who never made it to prime minister; Kim Beazley, current ambassador and former Labor leader who never became prime minister; now Joe Hockey, who tried to become Liberal leader and wanted to be prime minister but fell short.
One of Hockey’s jobs in Washington will contain an echo of his time as treasurer. Last year, visiting Washington, he was asked by Beazley to find some money to renovate the embassy, which is in such a decrepit state it has been cloaked in scaffolding and heavy drapes to prevent injury to pedestrians from falling debris.
Treasurer Hockey found $237 million in this year’s budget to rebuild the place. As ambassador, the project might take his mind off unhappier recent memories.
Avuncular Joe, we used to call him. Jolly Joe.
He was, in late 2009, Australia’s most popular Liberal politician – ahead of Malcolm Turnbull, way ahead of Tony Abbott. Smokin’ Joe.
That was then. When it came to capitalising on his popularity, with the Liberal leadership seemingly within his grasp, he suffered an attack of indecisiveness.
It was December 1, 2009.
Political careers are made of “what ifs” and “mights”. Joe Hockey might – just might – have become prime minister if he hadn’t shilly-shallied back then.
Malcolm Turnbull’s first period of leadership was terminal in late 2009. He supported an emissions trading scheme.
Joe Hockey was known as a moderate, and also supported such a scheme. He didn’t particularly want to bring down Turnbull under those circumstances because he’d be seen to be taking power with the support of tough right-wingers.
He tweeted, asking followers what he should do; he suggested a conscience vote on an emissions trading scheme, and he locked himself away in his office saying nothing publicly as number counters and deal makers went to work.
At the last minute, when the leadership spilled, Joe put up his hand. To Hockey’s great surprise, so did Turnbull. He thought he had a deal with Turnbull and reportedly never trusted him afterwards, though Turnbull, in fact, had said publicly he would stand.
The hard men had done their work. Hockey was eliminated in the first ballot and Abbott went on to defeat Turnbull by a single vote.
What if Hockey had grasped the moment, got the numbers men activated?
He’ll never know. Not now. It’s a “what if”, about as useful as asking what if Hockey hadn’t put out his hand to save Rudd from being swept away by that raging stream on the Kokoda Track in 2006, a year before Rudd became prime minister.
In the end, anyway, Hockey won’t be remembered for that brief, lost tilt at leadership, though plenty of ABC viewers may forever have burned into their memories the shining moment when, during a 2012 episode of Kitchen Cabinet, he showed Annabell Crabb his Canberra bedroom, revealing a Bart Simpson pillow slip. He was still Jovial Joe.
His political gravestone was chiselled less than two years later around his first budget: May, 2014.
New treasurers try to get the tough business of cutting costs and raising revenue out of the way in their first budgets. There is a customary howling from various constituencies, but it usually dies away in a few weeks and the country and the government moves on.
But Hockey’s first budget, which came after he declared the end of “the age of entitlement”, was considered so punishing to so many that it settled as a never-ending millstone around the Abbott government’s neck. Among the less palatable offerings considered bad news for pensioners, the disabled and the ill, the young unemployed were to be denied unemployment benefits for six months.
Hockey was reported to have been seen dancing in his office to the song “Best Day of My Life” just before delivering the budget, in which he declared Australians ought to be lifters, not leaners (he protested he was just having a reunion with his young son).
A couple of months later, he went on radio to defend petrol excise as a “progressive tax” and uttered a phrase that will dog him forever:
“The poorest people either don’t have cars or actually don’t drive very far in many cases.” It took him days to begin climbing down. He seemed politically tone deaf.
With the budget stinking and the government on the ropes, his authorised biography was released, revealing he’d wanted an even tougher budget. Just to top things off, Hockey took his family off to Fiji on holiday just as the government was trying to come to grips with a difficult new Senate.
“People criticised Joe for going on holidays to Fiji. Now some of us are sorry he came back,” political veteran journalist Laurie Oakes reported a disgruntled Liberal as saying.
The biography injected poison into the turbulent Coalition soup: it quoted Abbott’s chief of staff and fierce gatekeeper, Peta Credlin, on the matter of who was Abbott’s most likely successor.
“Joe’s absolutely a contender,” Credlin said. “And he’s probably got his head above every other contender, but I think we’re a long way from saying he’s an heir apparent – and he’d say that, too.”
It was a red rag to a bull for those like Turnbull and Julie Bishop, who saw themselves as contenders at least as worthy as Hockey. He’d allowed himself, for a multitude of reasons, to become a marked man, and Credlin had sealed it.
The Abbott government’s problems, of course, proved wider than those created by and around Joe Hockey – Abbott himself created damaging story after damaging story as 2014 turned into 2015 and staggered along.
But Jovial Joe never properly reappeared.
He was so infuriated by a headline (Treasurer for Sale) and story in Fairfax newspapers, that he sued for defamation. In the end, the story was not found defamatory, but the headline – if seen without the story – and a two tweets were found to be so. Hockey was awarded $200,000 in damages, but Fairfax was ordered to pay just 15 per cent of his costs. The case is likely to have cost him several hundreds of thousands of dollars, and some of his colleagues thought it a long distraction when he didn’t need it.
Hockey came to be considered Sulky Joe and Sloppy Joe, though his second budget received a much improved reception with its immediate 100 per cent tax deduction on anything purchased for up to $20,000 for more than two million small businesses.
In fact, the Sloppy Joe tag came many years previously, when he was human services minister. It was 2004, and Hockey wanted to introduce an Access Card that all Australians would need to carry, and which would have a photograph, signature and unique identification number.
He had clearly failed to study the uproar surrounding the Hawke government’s doomed attempt to introduce the Australia Card in the 1980s.
He called for tenders for two Access Card projects each worth hundreds of millions of dollars ahead of submitting the legislation to Parliament and spent $3 million advertising the proposed card.
His department, which had 18 people working full-time on the plan, hired a public relations consultant and a “branding consultant” to promote it. All before the legislation approving the card had been passed by the Senate, and before all of the legislation had even been written.
Private firms wasted millions preparing tenders.
In the end, it came to nothing – a Liberal-dominated committee, recognising that the cart had been put well before the horse, recommended that it all go back to the drawing board.
Hockey was, of course, a young politician then, still learning the ropes, on his way up. But some of those around him looked askance, draped him with the “Sloppy Joe” tag, and wondered later whether it was a sign about his judgment.
Hockey came to Parliament with a back-story that served him well: the son of a Palestinian-Armenian immigrant born in Bethlehem and an Australian-born mother, the family starting out together in a little delicatessen. Joseph Benedict Hockey got his second name in honour of Labor prime minister Ben Chifley, whose immigration policies had brought Hockey’s father to Australia.
Young Hockey became an activisit President of the Sydney University Students’ Representative Council, was invited to join the Labor Party, but decided he was a Liberal.
He played rugby at university with Tony Abbott, and got a hard lesson: he got knocked cold by the future prime minister when he dropped his knees into Abbott’s kidneys.
Nevertheless, Hockey went on to hitch his political fortunes to Abbott who, according to the new Treasurer, Scott Morrison, was prepared to throw Hockey “under a bus” at the last minute of their shared saga.
Abbott, Morrison said on radio, had tried to save himself by offering Morrison the deputy’s position, meaning he could ask for – and get – Hockey’s job as treasurer.
It was all too late. Abbott and Hockey were swept away together, down the ever-flowing river of political disappointment.
Source:smh.com.au
STUDIO 3 NEWCASTLE AUSTRALIA 