Perhaps unfairly, the image most of us have of Joe Hockey comes from his time as federal Treasurer, when he was photographed smoking a cigar with then Finance Minister Mathias Cormann in the aftermath of the 2014 budget.
Hockey tells us that the cuts in that budget were justified, ignoring the inconvenient fact that it broke a number of promises made by Tony Abbott when he won the 2013 election.
Hockey believed he would succeed Abbott, but in an internal coup the party chose Malcolm Turnbull, who had promised the Treasury to Scott Morrison to shore up his support. As a consolation prize, Hockey was offered the embassy in Washington and resigned from Parliament. He served as ambassador from 2016 to 2020.
There are both advantages and disadvantages to appointing senior politicians to ambassadorial positions, but at least Australia has not yet emulated the American practice of rewarding major campaign donors with embassies.
Joe Hockey is the son of an Armenian born in Palestine, and was named after Labor prime minister Joseph Benedict Chifley, whom his father honoured for allowing him to migrate to Australia.
He was born in 1965 and grew up in a world dominated by the United States. As a child he travelled to both the US and China, and he writes well about his early experiences there.
As a parliamentarian, Hockey combined tough-minded economic rationalism with social progressivism, a position that few of his fellow Liberals seem to espouse today. Towards the end of his memoir Diplomatic, he describes himself as “a unique and successful politician”. Having waded through 300 pages before I came across this claim, I am not convinced that he deserves the accolade.
The Hockey magic?
Hockey proved to be a smart choice as ambassador during the Trump years, though he was, in fact, appointed in the last year of the Obama administration. He quickly recognised that one could not assume a Hillary Clinton victory was inevitable. His decision to build links with the Trump campaign appear to have discomforted Turnbull and the Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, both of whom were convinced Clinton would win.
Hockey is most interesting in his accounts of Trump, with whom he appears to have had considerably more contact than would be normal for the ambassador of a middle-sized power. He claims credit for improving the relationship, which began with the notorious phone conversation where Trump exploded in anger at Turnbull because of the Australian government’s deal to send asylum-seekers detained offshore to the United States.
Trump is, notoriously, a man of short memory and few lasting positions. In time, Hockey tells us, he came to like Turnbull, seeing him as a fellow successful businessman. When Turnbull was overthrown by his party and replaced by Morrison, Trump was disappointed.
“I was just getting to know Turnbull and now you guys have another one,” he complained to Hockey.
Mick Tsikas/AAP
Never fear, gentle reader: the Hockey magic went to work and Trump was sufficiently impressed by Morrison’s 2019 victory to award him one of the only two state dinners given by the Trump administration. This was a particular achievement as state dinners are meant to be reserved for heads of state, which the Australian prime minister is not.
Hockey was a strong supporter of a republic during the 1999 referendum, and he clearly relished the opportunity to break that particular tradition.
Managing the relationship with Trump
For Hockey, as for his predecessor Kim Beazley, the central aim of the Australian Ambassador is to emphasise Australia’s closeness to the US. Hockey is proud of his success in establishing the Friends of Australia Congressional Caucus and arranging the joint celebrations for the Battle of the Coral Sea, which brought Trump and Turnbull face to face.
There were substantive victories, particularly the exemption of Australia from new tariffs on steel and aluminium. As a believer in free trade, Hockey is very critical of Trump’s protectionist policies. He was outspoken in opposing them.
The most difficult issue in managing the relationship with Trump arose from the conversation between Alexander Downer, then High Commissioner in London, and George Papadopoulos, an advisor to the Trump team, which became the basis for allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 US elections.
For a period, Trump saw Australia, Britain and Ukraine as all involved in spreading fake news about him. Hosing down these rumours took up much of Hockey’s time. The ambassador, who had played golf with the President, now had to face being snubbed in public at Mar-a-Lago.
Hockey is probably correct in claiming allegations of Russian interference in the election of Donald Trump have been exaggerated, but he fails to explain the strange hold Putin appears to have had over the President. In light of the current war in Ukraine, we can only hope that association will undermine Trump’s control of the Republican Party.
Hockey was relieved when Joe Biden won the presidency and appalled by the attacks on the Capitol by Trump’s supporters. He fails to mention that, at the time of the 2020 election, he suggested that there may have been voter fraud, a claim he quietly retracted.
Unimaginative
As with many political memoirs, Diplomatic is interesting for the insights it provides into a world of deals and shifting alliances, but short on introspection. Hockey does reveal a certain amount of his own character, although without the ironic self-awareness that made Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister (2014) an entertaining read.
What emerges is a portrait of a highly ambitious and energetic man with great self-confidence and little real intellectual curiosity, though at times he displays a sensitivity to injustice that is lacking in most of his former colleagues.
Hockey is particularly interesting when writing about China. He clearly recognises the dangers of beating the drums of war, claiming that “Australia had an engagement with China that was deeper, broader and more sophisticated than that of the United States”.
While Hockey endorses current Australian policy towards China, one has the sense that he believes we could have better managed the deterioration in relations.
Beyond his discussion of China, Hockey reflects the unimaginative Anglospheric views of the Morrison government. There are frequent mentions of his good relations with the British, New Zealand and Canadian ambassadors, but those from neighbouring ASEAN countries go unremarked. Like his colleagues, Hockey concentrates on trade and submarines when envisioning Australian security.
Bianca Di Marchi/AAP
Hockey served in the US through the worst years of COVID and is very critical of the American response. He was certainly aware of the ravages of extreme weather and Trump’s refusal to recognise the dangers of climate change. But like Morrison and Minister for Defence Peter Dutton, Hockey seems unable to connect the threats of climate change and fast spreading epidemic diseases to notions of national security.
Yet the failure to think more broadly about global security is hampering Australia’s position in the Pacific, where governments have consistently asked us to do more to prevent global warming.
Mateship with the US is hardly a sufficient basis for a foreign policy in the contemporary world. The constant refrain about our shared values and support for the international rules-based system obscures the reality that the US acts in its own interests, whether or not they coincide with ours.
Joe Hockey is determined to appear non-partisan and largely avoids commenting on current Australian politics. He does, however, make a point of saying of Labor leader Anthony Albanese that “he’s a very decent human being”. Revealingly, he has nothing similar to say about the current Prime Minister.
