Losing it: a conversation with Joe Hockey.

JOE HOCKEY, a thirty-year-old lawyer and club fast bowler of burly rather than fashionable beanpole build, was elected to federal parliament as the Liberal member for North Sydney in 1996, when the Coalition won its first election in thirteen years. Until his party's loss last year, being in parliament meant for Hockey being in government and, for a considerable part of the time, being a cabinet minister.

A 2007 election night commentator on Channel Seven, Hockey had to be brave in public for almost four hours as his party's prospects slipped steadily away. He retained his own seat but wasn't sure about even that until the end of his television stint. His electorate staff reported sparsely on progress in North Sydney during the evening so as not to disturb Hockey's on-screen sangfroid. When, for instance, Hockey suffered a swing against him in a neighbourhood in whose community activities his family had been deeply involved for many years, his wife and staff conspired not to tell him.

A month after the election, Hockey's manner in discussing his change of status was rueful--a rather stylish choice from options available.

"They won't let me keep this," he said, dispassionately, glancing around the conference room of a spacious, though not maharajic, office suite in a respectable part of North Sydney, which he occupied as a minister. "We'll have to look around for new digs."

Describing his resolve to go boldly into the darkish night of opposition, Hockey made several references to his maiden speech, which he delivered to parliament in September 1996. All maiden speeches pay tribute to the member's electorate, but twelve years after its delivery, Hockey's portrait of North Sydney reads almost like an anthem. Housing Australia's "third largest business district". Energised by more than 25,000 small businesses, as well as some very big businesses occupying North Sydney's harbour-view office towers. Highest proportion among federal electorates of working women and of people with professional and trade qualifications.

Victor Trumper's home town.

Hockey's own family has been prominent in the real estate business in North Sydney for a generation. You sense that if God had allowed him to design a perfect electorate, Hockey would have come up with North Sydney. This may make being in parliament but out of office more easily endurable for Hockey than for many.

Following is an edited transcript of his reflections on I being on a losing side.

Frank Devine: You have never experienced Opposition. Was it a shock when you suddenly found yourself there?

Joe Hockey: Well, I had my general views about how things were going for twelve months before the election, in particular during the period when I was Minister for Workplace Relations.

I was in the thick of the battle from early on ... you know, hitting the media at 6 a.m. most days. I really did work hard and part of the hard work was preparing myself to deal with defeat, especially from the APEC meeting [held in Sydney in September 2007]. We got no kick along in the opinion polls from that, nor from the Budget. Onward from there, I felt it would be very difficult for us to win. I had a feeling voters had got over John Howard. But in politics we all hunt for silver linings. With the polls looking terrible, we'd say: well, taking sixteen seats away from us is near impossible. You'd hear that polling was bad in Queensland and think: Well, they can't win the election without New South Wales. You keep trying to find something that will continue to give you hope.

Were you more confident about the way the campaign was going when you first got elected, in 1996?

No, I wasn't, actually. I'd seen, as an outsider, how badly burned the party got in 1993. I was sure we were going to win that time. So much so that when I went to a John Hewson [Liberal Opposition leader] rally down at Circular Quay and saw people throwing eggs and tomatoes at him, all I thought was, "Gee, that's robust politics." I still thought we'd win, and I was devastated when we lost.

In 1996 I was pretty confident I could win North Sydney but I was never quite sure about the election generally. I knew the mood in North Sydney because I hardly moved out of it during the campaign. But what about the rest of Australia? Our win in 1996 was a great relief, because I really wanted to go into government.

Then I was sweating it out again in 1998.

Oh, yes, the election you didn't actually win.

Yeah, we scraped by on two-party preferred. It was the GST election. We were campaigning for a new tax and I couldn't even convince the butcher in Cammeray that Australia would be better off with a GST.

Is he a fan of yours?

Well, I thought he would be a supporter. He's a good business man. I must have spent an hour and a half trying to convince him that the GST would be good for him and his business, He wouldn't buy it. The best I could get out of him was: "I think the whole thing's a dog. But, okay, even if you and your mob are goners, I'll vote for you." And I thought: Great. One down and only 25,000 businesses to go.

Did you get to all of them?

As a matter of fact, I stopped campaigning, literally, five days out from polling day because I felt that the more I talked about the GST the more votes I was losing.

This is quite an important question then: When you thought your party would lose in 1998 were you tempted to think that it didn't matter much--might almost be a good career move--if you lost your own seat?

Sorry. You misunderstand me. I had considerable responsibility for pushing the GST in 1998 and stopped talking about it in my own electorate because it wasn't going down well. But I didn't come to the conclusion that we would lose the election until election night, when it looked for a while as if we had. I didn't give up hope. If I hadn't been able to say with conviction that we would win, I couldn't have faked it. It would have shown through, and voters run away from candidates who act like losers.

At the same time, I needed to mentally prepare for defeat and work out how I would handle it. There's no contradiction in this, just contingency planning. It was the same in 2007.

How did you handle it, your first experience of defeat?

I believe my first thoughts were of what I had left. My wife, my two young children. And, of course, my seat in parliament. On the night, my wife took it harder then me, I think. I was trying to be strong. Later on, I got some satisfaction and comfort from thinking about having been a minister in what I really believe was a good government. We'd made mistakes but we'd tried our best to do good things for Australia and the future. Also I got some consolation from that useful cliche: all good things come to an end.

What did you do on election night? To put it delicately, was your pillow spinning or was it steady when you went to bed?

Steady. I was on TV until 11 p.m. and I had a great sense of relief about, you know, going private. Also finding out for sure I'd won North Sydney.

Exhaustion had got me by the end of the night. There was a huge media scrum outside the Channel Seven tent. When my wife and I stepped outside it felt like, you know, David Beckham and Posh Spice. They were looking for the TV grab. The killer grab. I reckoned it would be best to hold back and be boring, in case something I said was misconstrued.

As whingeing?

Or bleating. Or a lack of graciousness. So I just said I was proud to have served in government and I respected the choice of the Australian people.

I thought everybody behaved well this time.

So do I. It was democracy with dignity. After Beckham and Posh, my wife and I went to the Hyatt Hotel and had a drink with some of my staff and supporters. Everybody had advice. Then we went home and when I put my head on the pillow, I had this great sense of relaxation after the months of hard campaign work and stress. Next morning, as soon as I woke up, I started texting everybody on my contact list, thanking them for their support. It was then I made the decision, having talked it over with my wife, that I was going to hang around.

Americans, being polite people, describe a party that's lost an election as being out of office. Here it's out of power. Do you consider yourself out of office or out of power?

I think we are out of power for a period, because power is more than office. We have to respect the mandate the Labor Party received. In specific areas, where they have quite detailed policy, they have the backing of greater power than we can exercise, even on the floor of the parliament. But the mandate starts to wear thin once they have implemented their policies. The power game starts again.

What's the nature of power in Opposition?

Apart from votes in the Senate, when you've got a majority there, it's the capacity to stimulate public debate on particular issues, picking and choosing the ones you want to give prominence to.

In that case, I guess you need to get the media to pay attention.

Yeah. That's where picking and choosing the issues comes in. And there are advantages to having a leaner team.

There's no ambiguity about the Labor Party brand, which they've assiduously protected over the years, but the Liberal Party has a confused brand. We've had far too many members of parliament who acted as de facto independents. We pre-selected too many candidates without any history of involvement with the party. They took pride in their strong local recognition and support but did little or nothing to nourish and nurture the Liberal brand in their electorates. Some of them put themselves forward as fighting for the locals against those buggers in Canberra. We lost a lot of those kind of seats because the Liberal brand got blurred.

I guess it must have, because I need to ask you what the Liberal Party's brand is.

Traditionally we have been the party of free enterprise and economic strength. We focus on individualism, on modern liberalism and on some elements of conservatism. Now the Labor Party, with Kevin Rudd, has reached out to some of these more conservative values. We can't let the Labor Party lay claim to ownership of our principles while happily holding on to socialism and its various components.

How do you stop them?

As a party of individuals, the Liberals don't have--and don't want--the tight structure Labor gets from the union movement and its hard-line factions. But political orthodoxy was turned on its head in 2007: an incumbent government losing sixteen seats in non-crisis times.

You look at political history and you'd say it's highly unlikely a government would lose after one term. But Kevin Rudd has made some rather heroic pledges and we will keep reminding the voters about them. Labor government in all states is unprecedented, and an area of vulnerability as well as of power. There's been epic mismanagement in some Labor states--in New South Wales, for instance.

How has the Coalition's losing affected you personally? You're harder up, I guess.

Yeah. As a minister, I earned between $190,000 and $200,000 a year. As an Opposition Shadow I get a bit over $100,000. A deputy parliamentary committee chairman is paid more. Living in North Sydney on $100,000, it's no breeze just paying the mortgage. I'm lucky to have a successful wife [a banking lawyer].

The worst thing is that I have had to retrench twenty staff. In this business, it's not an employer--employee relationship in a traditional sense. You a share a mission. There are emotional attachments. So it's pretty brutal.

Anything more for schadenfreude addicts?

In Canberra, I got three days to pack and get out of my ministerial office and go to a smaller one. Department officials come around to your house and take away computers and any other equipment that belongs to your former department. They cut off phone connections you had as a minister. In Sydney, I've lost all my previous travel entitlements. I can't even charge a taxi fare.

Well, I suppose it's my money and I have no further need for you to spend it on my behalf.

Yeah, if that's the way you feel. As a Shadow Minister [for Health and Ageing] and manager of Opposition business in the House I get two more staff than a back bencher. I'm trying to persuade a member of my former staff to take a pay cut and stay on. A small staff like this makes it tough to keep up with the research you need to do when you're shadowing a minister. You're way back on media monitoring, for instance. You have to take on more of the donkey work yourself. I've been working on my physical fitness to get ready for Opposition.

I suppose you could spare a kilo or two, but you look pretty fit already.

I'm reasonable. I did the Kokoda walk with Kevin Rudd not too long ago.

Who was breathing heavier?

We were both stuffed. It's torturous. I lost probably seven kilos. I'm doing gym work now, a great deal of walking, sometimes carrying a backpack with three bricks in it. Play touch football three times a week.

I'm also working on mental fitness--you know, taking stock of nine years as a minister. What did I do right and what did I do wrong? How close did I hold to the principles I enunciated in my maiden speech? I'm reading a fair bit, mainly biographies and autobiographies, I've just finished the memoirs of John Daly, the golfer, and I got quite a bit angry. Here's a talented guy boasting about eating fourteen chocolate muffins during eighteen holes of golf and drinking oceans of booze afterwards.

And never making the cut.

Right. Never making the cut.