You lookin’ for Joe?’ asked the road-worker, probably one of Joe’s constituents, as I parked and cast around for the venue of the launching of Madonna King’s Hockey. Not Your Average Joe. He pointed to the Molly Dive Stand at the North Sydney Oval. Inside the mood of Hockey’s celebrating friends, supporters, constituents and family was as good-humoured as the road-worker outside. Lisa Wilkinson of Channel Nine was MC. She welcomed the state ministers (Gladys Berejiklian and George Souris). She also welcomed former premiers Greiner and Fahey. (Hockey had once worked for them.) She couldn’t welcome any federal ministers because, to Hockey’s chagrin, none fronted. (There were two parliamentary secretaries, Malcolm Turnbull’s Paul Fletcher and Hockey’s Steven Ciobo.) Then she introduced the book-launcher, her husband Peter FitzSimons, on this occasion not wearing his red bandana. He is a Hockey family friend, former Wallaby lock, prolific author and sympathetic biographer of Kim Beazley. (His latest whopper is Ned Kelly.) ‘He’s written as many books as most of you have had hot breakfasts,’ said Wilkinson. ‘Thank you for your tepid welcome,’ Pete told the delighted audience. Joe, he said, is neither left nor right but above the factions. ‘Thanks mate,’ said Joe in response. ‘I can’t guess how Lisa votes but Pete has never voted for me in his life.’ The book, he explained, is about his ingrained values, both Liberal and Christian. When he finished speaking he kissed his wife Melissa. (She had advised him against co-operating with Madonna King.) Hockey’s mum and dad smiled benignly. A successful businessman of Palestinian/Armenian origins, Joe’s father left Palestine in 1948 uttering, according to Madonna King, a guttural Arabic curse and spitting on the soil. The book is dedicated to him ‘and all those who enrich Australia by calling it home’. Joe remains well aware of his Armenian roots.
The press reports of the launching were scornful. The Sydney Morning Herald found the book an ‘over-egged job application’. (King refers plainly to Hockey’s ‘goal of being prime minister of Australia one day’.) The Australian saw Hockey as an aloof cigar-chomping fat cat, too distant from everyday life to be able to ‘sell’ his tough budget. It warned him that ‘a solid record always beats a new book’. The wider media eagerly reported the complaint of Hockey’s parliamentary colleagues about the bad timing of the book: Hockey, they said, was offering himself as prime minister at the very time when Tony Abbott, falling badly in the post-budget polls, needed all the help he could get. (The fact that Abbott is now winning back public support because of his handling of the MH17 horror only made Hockey’s alleged disloyalty worse. In any case UQP settled the publication date long ago.)
Hockey. Not Your Average Joe also reignites, the knockers say, the embers of old tensions. It recalls the Abbott/Turnbull/Hockey leadership contest of December 2009 when Hockey believed Turnbull double-crossed him (and he consoled himself with the thought or hope that Abbott would not last long: ‘I’m next.’) It also revives memories of the earlier Howard/Costello contest. On a Sunday night in September 2007 he and Melissa talked through the Howard/Costello succession ‘across the kitchen table’ and he decided to ring Howard to urge him to step down. Howard responded: ‘I’m not handing over to Costello.’ In his memoirs Howard implies he did not take the phone call seriously. He thought Hockey had only made the call for the record — so that he could say he had made it.
The message of most critics is that Hockey is not the cuddly, portly, popular figure of legend. He is a media tart who will do anything for publicity, even dress in a tutu. In his lust for publicity he helped make Rudd prime minister by appearing with him weekly for five years on a television breakfast show. He is also presented as a cunning operator. The book tells the story how in his 1994 pre-selection contest for North Sydney the 29-year-old Hockey secretly arranged for a supporter to ask a question calling on him to attack the then faltering leader Alexander Downer. Hockey gave the pre-arranged reply that when a leader is in trouble we should all rally behind him. The pre-selectors cheered and voted for good old loyal Joe. (You may have trouble finding a political activist who does not relish such Machiavellian japes.)
The basic theme of the book is the emergence — after his humiliating defeat in the December 2009 leadership contest — of a new Hockey. No more the avuncular Armenian Santa Claus. No more Jolly Joe. The new thoughtful Hockey began delivering philosophic ‘headland speeches’ — on ‘the end of the age of entitlement’, on enterprise, freedom and youth. In December 2012 he underwent major weight-reducing surgery to remove 80 per cent of his stomach. (Still bleeding across his shirt he forced himself to attend a media conference to help Tony Abbott get stuck into the Labor party.) The high point of the new Hockey is his recent tough, unpopular budget.
The media knockers have hugely overdone their criticisms of Hockey and his biography for bad timing, bad judgment, indiscretion, disloyalty, too much candour. But the book will survive these attacks as a good read about an important contender who in the distant post-Abbott future will surely still be a contender along with Bishop, Turnbull, Pyne, Morrison and others. As Peta Credlin, Abbott’s chief of staff, once put it, Hockey is not the heir apparent but he has his head above his rivals. She added: ‘Probably.’
