Free Hockey: Not Your Average Joe by Madonna King Page A

joke ran that wets and drys in the Party didn’t exist, just ‘drys and arids’. David Stevens was standing from Victoria. He too was a conservative candidate but his backers didn’t want Sandra Mutch, and the West Australian crew were not keen on David Stevens. It soon became clear that Joe would win, in a similar way to how he had taken the SRC presidency; he’d run straight up the centre to victory. A moderate, Joe was seen as too left-wing for the conservative states, and as John Hewson continued to prosecute Fightback – a conservative economic plan to reshape Australia – they believed he could undermine it and damage the Party’s position in the lead-up to the election.
    Delegates from WA, Victoria and the ACT held a meeting. The way the voting worked ran like this. Each division had six delegates to the federal council, plus the two federal office bearers. That meant 44 council members were eligible to vote. But a couple in the West Australian camp were so hell-bent on keeping David Stevens out that they were going to back Joe Hockey. The Victorians were threatening to do the same to shut Sandra Mutch out. On the numbers, it looked like Joe would win 24 to 20, or 25 to 19. It was 2 a.m. on the day of the ballot when it became clear a circuit breaker was needed. ‘Everyone looked at me, and said, “we’ll back him”,’ Forshaw says. It was a palatable compromise, but meant the numbers looked locked at 22–22. Stephen gave his best shot at his speech to decision-makers, knowing he was up against Joe’s oratory. He talked about the need for the Party to be rock solid in the lead-up to the 1993 election, the size of the task, and how the Young Liberals needed to be a broad and inclusive organisation. He hit the right buttons, because someone changed their vote, giving Forshaw an unlikely victory over Hockey, 23 votes to 21. ‘We still to this day have no idea who that was,’ Forshaw says.
    Joe was devastated, and demoralised, and he found it hard to hide his feelings. Indeed, Forshaw says he was not gracious in defeat. ‘I think he didn’t speak to me for the entire rest of the convention. Joe was clearly very hurt that he had lost and it really was down to the fact that this had been laid out for him; the path had been laid for a long time for him to be heir apparent to the job.’ Forshaw, who later became friends with Joe, says people shouldn’t underestimate his competitiveness or his ability to ‘adapt’ to an argument. ‘Joe is a take-no-prisoners sort of guy and I would never describe Joe as that soft cuddly affable type of guy. He is ruthlessly competitive and hates losing.’ But history had shown he could also change his views. ‘I’ve seen Joe move from being someone who was very much hard Left in the Young Liberal days to someone who argued against same-sex marriages. I was almost taken aback. That’s not the Joe, whom, in 1992, I ran against.’
    Joe’s relegation to the loser’s spot in the race to become the 1992 Young Liberals federal president was the first time his ascendancy had been slowed, and he found it difficult. He had failed, and he wasn’t used to doing that. But he’d learnt a lesson. Count the numbers. Once. Twice. Three times, because numbers won out over personality every time. It’s a lesson he would have to learn again, much later. Returning to work, at Corrs, he found it hard to focus – the taste of politics was coursing through his veins. He loved the hurly-burly, the intrigue, the ability to make a difference, and he wanted to do it again.
    As the months went by he continued to wrestle with work at Corrs. Edward Cowpe was Joe’s supervising partner and, even though Joe was young, Cowpe found him efficient and engaged. Joe had taken the reins of a fairly large mortgage settlement program where he had to liaise with banks, brokers and agents to allow settlements to occur. It was also the early days of the very first credit card securitisation programs