JUST AN ORDINARY JOE?
Misha Schubert
The Age
-ordinary-joe-20091009-gpjm.html
October 9, 2009 – 12:16PM
With Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership in decline, the Liberal Party may
look to Joe Hockey. But does the affable shadow treasurer have what
it takes to lead?
THE story of how Brendan Nelson came to live in Joe Hockey’s garage
says a lot about the big man. It was mid-1997, Nelson’s marriage had
fallen apart and he was broke paying child support. He asked Hockey
if he could move from the room he rented in the house to the shed to
save cash.
Hockey not only agreed — he began to take an active interest in
Nelson’s welfare. Calls were made to Nelson’s old mates asking them
to keep an eye on him.
When Hockey went overseas, he brought back new running shoes for Nelson
to give to his own children, and refused payment for them. And the next
year — when Hockey was promoted by John Howard and Nelson wasn’t —
Hockey asked his dad to go around and check that his mate was OK.
"He was in tears because his son had been promoted and I hadn’t —
that’s the kind of person, the kind of family they are," Nelson
reflected yesterday. "Joe is decent, fair, generous, kind and
thoughtful. He can also be tough and he can be a thorough bastard if
he has to be."
High praise, especially given that Hockey voted for Malcolm Turnbull
as he deposed Nelson for the leadership in August last year.
There are a mountain of such stories about Joe Hockey. Acts of
kindness, big and small, often unbidden and many unheralded. The car
he offered to deposed Liberal MP Ross Cameron as his marriage broke
up. The refuge he provided at his farm outside Cairns for a young
Aboriginal girl who had been raped at Aurukun. The call he made to
public servant Godwin Grech at the peak of the OzCar crisis to check
if he was OK. And on and on it goes.
That he has a big heart is without question. Whether his intellect and
work ethic are equally colossal is a topic of greater dispute. His
friends and former ch in Sydney yesterday, the former head of the
Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Max Moore-Wilton, was heard
to describe Hockey as a "half-wit". Clearly not everyone is a fan.
There are two persistent criticisms of Joe Hockey. One is that he
speaks before he thinks. The other is that he is not across the
detail. On the first charge, his backers concede the point — but
argue it works for him.
"It goes hand in hand with being a passionate person," his former
chief of staff Matt Hingerty observes. "Joe wants to be honest. He
wears his heart on his sleeve and the more Machiavellian practitioners
of the political arts would say that’s a weakness; I’d say that is
a strength, it’s why the punters like him. He’s passionate and prone
to saying what he thinks."
The command of detail is more hotly contested between friend and
foe. His supporters note his ministerial career was full of challenges
requiring a grasp of technicalities: driving a major overhaul of the
tourism industry with his white paper; conquering obscure points of
industrial relations law to craft the Fairness Test backdown when
he was workplace minister; understanding the complexities of merging
six agencies into one as human services minister.
Critics beg to differ. They concede he is good at the punchy political
line — but accuse him of not having a clear and consistent political
philosophy. "He can come across as quite compelling and articulate
but you reflect on what he said afterwards and there’s not a lot to
hang on to," says one. "He tends to string together these great lines,
but when you look at the totality of it — what does he really stand
for? — and it doesn’t seem like much."
If opinions part on such matters, they converge again on the question
of Hockey’s considerable charm. He has an easy knack with people. He
is enormously likeable. And he is famous for his friendships across
the political aisle.
First there was all that television camaraderie with Kevin Rudd
on Sunrise — until Liberal strategists felt it was giving t abor
headkicker Anthony Albanese. Then there is his fondness for Bob Hawke,
who quipped when he learnt that Hockey was to become a father for
the third time: "Time to put the cue back in the rack, son."
To get a sense of Joe Hockey, look at the family tree. It is
a merging of two cultures. There is the mercantile tale of his
Armenian-Palestinian father Richard, who arrived in Australia in 1948
with nothing and built a career in real estate from scratch. His mother
is North Shore, cashmere and pearls, a big-hearted former model who
defied her own mother to date the "wog" behind the deli counter.
Like Rudd, Hockey has acquired wealth through the business aptitude
of his wife. A former Sydney Swans physio, Melissa Babbage is head of
foreign exchange and global finance at Deutsche Bank. They have two
children, Xavier and Adelaide, and a third due on October 19. They
mean the world to Hockey, and he is an attentive father and husband.
As Hockey’s political star has risen, so has the intensity of Labor’s
attacks on him. They’ve branded him "Sloppy Joe" — a slur aimed
not just at his size (a technique the Coalition used on Kim Beazley,
incidentally) but on his reputation for toil and detail.
A few weeks ago the ALP put about research suggesting voters were
dubious about his work ethic and eye for detail. He insists such
slings don’t wound him personally, but he understands they will only
intensify if he gains more traction politically.
Hockey is a sharper politician than the man he hopes to succeed in
time — but not just yet. Unlike Malcolm Turnbull, who is smart and
terrifyingly well-read but can get bogged down in the detail, Hockey
can deliver a cut-through line.
But to date he has shown no sign of the mongrel instinct when it
comes to leadership.
Last year some backers urged him to move to state politics, where
he would become premier in a canter at the 2012 election. Hockey
was said to be open to the draft, but refused to move against Barry
O’Farrell. State MPs didn’t want blood on the floor, and the ide .
Hockey has made it clear to those urging him to replace Turnbull
that he doesn’t want bloodshed at a federal level either. He won’t
challenge, but he would be prepared to accept the job if the post
became vacant. Turnbull, of course, shows no sign of willingly
giving way.
How the issue will resolve itself still has a long way to run. But
his fans have no doubt that he has the pull to make it happen one day.
"There are leaders who have the ability to build momentum and those
who don’t," observes Cameron. "One of the magical factors is the
ability to make other people want to be on their team — I think Joe
has that in spades."
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