The art of DIPLOMACY
Joe Hockey was Australia’s ambassador to the United States during the Obama and Trump presidencies and on the eve of the release of his new book, he reveals the inner workings of Canberra and White House politics and his view of the upcoming election
Joe Hockey thought he was going to play a round of golf with Donald Trump. But seconds after the doors of the golf club dining room swung open and the President of the United States strode in to applause from the ageing acolytes chowing down at the breakfast buffet, it became clear Trump was going to whack Hockey around for a bit first.
“Oh, we have the Australian ambassador here,” the one-time reality show host bellowed to his audience, dismissing Hockey’s attempt at a greeting. “What have I done to Australia, Joe? Why?”
The crowd leaned in closer, and Trump raged on. And on. Australia’s Ambassador to the US sat like a kangaroo caught in the headlights as his tormentor in a red MAGA cap proceeded to give him a public shellacking.
It was Easter 2019 and the Mueller report into the Trump campaign’s knowledge of Russian interference in the 2016 US elections had been handed down. It found the Trump team expected to benefit from Russia’s social media and hacking campaign aimed at derailing Democrat Hillary Clinton’s run for president and that some of Trump’s people – including son Donald Jnr and son-in-law Jared Kushner – had met with Russian officials.
But former FBI director, Robert Mueller, found there was no evidence to bring conspiracy charges against Trump or associates. Trump was claiming it exonerated him. It did not.
“You know, the whole thing started with Australia,” Trump told his increasingly irate supporters gathered in the tropically themed gaudiness of the Trump International Golf Club at West Palm Beach. “The whole thing started with Downing in London.”
Hockey had tried previously to correct Trump, telling him Australia’s former High Commissioner to the UK was Alexander Downer, not Downing, but Trump wasn’t interested. What Trump cared about was that after Downer met with one of Trump’s people, George Papadopoulous, who told him of a Russian “dirt file” on Clinton, Downer wrote that in a diplomatic report. And that report was integral to the Mueller investigation that had threatened to end Trump’s presidency.
Trump’s fury built. “I exempt you from tariffs,” he said. “I’ve given you a great deal on the military. I even hosted your prime minister (Malcolm Turnbull in 2017). Why would you do that to me? What have I done to Australia?”
This cringe-worthy scene is recounted in Hockey’s book, Diplomatic, a 300-plus page tale co-written with lobbyist and former Canberra journalist, Leo Shanahan, about life as a diplomat in America in the febrile time of the Trump presidency. “It wasn’t much fun,” says Hockey of those humiliating minutes, during a phone interview from Washington DC, where he now runs a business.
Hockey recalls that he did retort, “That’s not true” at one point but that just riled Trump more. As the tirade went on, Hockey pondered: Would a public slanging match with the US President be a good thing for Australia? No, he reasoned. So, he shut up.
“Normally I’d respond but … my unimaginable diplomatic skills kicked in,” jokes Hockey.
Hockey had never been keen on a diplomatic role, he says. Small talk, cocktail circuits, hanging around airports to greet visiting ministers – “especially the ones I just didn’t like” – did not appeal. But having been shunted out of his role as Australia’s treasurer after a 2015 Liberal leadership tussle, he’d accepted the offer from the new prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to be the 25th Ambassador of Australia to the US.
Hockey arrived in Washington in January 2016, the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency. Clinton was expected to win the November election. But Hockey says his political radar told him an upset was on the cards. He cultivated contacts in Trump’s camp.
And so it was: Trump became president and Hockey made sure his people were aware the new ambassador had been alerted to Trump’s appeal. It served Australia well, Hockey says. Mostly. But Trump was mercurial, and on that day in Florida, with what Trump saw as a win up his sleeve and a score to settle, there was no reasoning with him.
Hockey decided it was diplomatic not to play golf with Trump that day, electing to play in the group behind him. Even that was risky: Hockey hooked a ball, spearing it towards Trump. It hit the president’s golf cart, attracting glares from Secret Service agents.
“Diplomacy, like golf,” writes Hockey about his first, more successful, game of golf with Trump in 2016, “has its rules and traditions, and you can never predict exactly what will come at you next. The only thing that was clear (in dealing with Trump and his administration) was that there was no playbook for this game. In that sense, the times suited me.”
As the RAAF plane landed in Washington in
September 2019, and Hockey waited to welcome Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, the dreams he’d lost and the pain of his past political life revisited him.
That upgraded plane, the one Morrison had dubbed Shark One after his league team, had been provided for in the 2014 budget, which Hockey helmed. The austere, “end of the age of entitlement” budget that led to his downfall.
Along with that cigar. Hockey still rejects criticism of him and the then finance minister, Mathias Cormann, smoking a fat cigar in the days leading up to a tough budget that cut welfare, health and education spending. He declares the let-them-eat-cake optics “trivial”.
He had bigger, internal problems at the time. Hockey writes that there were “various ministers” who weren’t prepared to defend the budget, some even lobbying independent senators against it. “Within our government, there were too many who were more focused on polls than on policy. The sickness of populism afflicts the weak. That didn’t stop them from engaging in duplicity and deceit.”
Hockey doesn’t name names. “I’m not going to let bitterness eat me away like a cancer,” he says. “I want to be more Gillard-like than some of the others. (The former Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard) is not consumed by bitterness and yet she may well have a lot of justification for it.”
But he does say that after the 2015 leadership spill that saw Tony Abbott dumped as prime minister and Hockey a dead-treasurer-walking, he was told by the victor, Malcolm Turnbull, that he’d promised Morrison the role of treasurer if he backed Turnbull in the spill.
But didn’t Morrison make his ballot paper visible to some in the party room, and he’d voted for Abbott? Replies Hockey: “But his people voted for Turnbull.” Was that sneaky? “I’ll leave that,” he says.
I’m not going to let bitterness eat me away like a cancer. I want to be more Gillard-like than some of the others
So now, here was Morrison, walking down the steps as prime minister after yet another Liberal leadership tussle that saw Turnbull ousted in 2018. “It seemed ironic,” Hockey writes, “given the pain I went through with that budget, that I was standing here and watching Morrison as prime minister emerge from one of the upgraded planes.”
In fact, I suggest, it must have felt like a kick in the guts. “You know, I’ve always been determined to try and move forward in life rather than looking in the rearview mirror,” Hockey says. “There have been some major disappointments in my life and people have let me down, and maybe I’ve let people down, but I’ve got no regrets about what’s happened.”
Perhaps there’s one niggle. He never made it to prime minister, a dream, he says, that had been reinforced by others since he was 14. He tells of sitting in his North Sydney electorate office on October 23, 2015, boxes packed, room bare, holding his pen over his resignation letter. It took him 10 minutes to sign his political career away. “My lifetime ambition to lead my country is over,” he writes. “I confess it was heart-wrenching. After a lot of reflection and a few tears, I sign the letter, put the pen down and quietly sigh.”
He baulks when asked what Australia would look like with Labor’s Anthony Albanese as prime minister. “I’m not going there,” he says. But they are friends. “Oh, I like him, I like him. I’ve always been friends with him and I’ve always found him to be an honourable man.”
Hockey spends a bit of time in the book detailing his friendship with Albanese, who he writes is a “very decent human being”. But he gives no character reference of Morrison, no personal reflections. It’s often said that the art of diplomacy is as much about what is not said as what is said.
But, Hockey says, he’s a Liberal, he wants a Liberal government and supports Morrison as prime minister. He says he thinks Morrison can win this election. “It’s a two-horse race, surely we’ve learned the lesson that you can’t write off either horse.”
Hockey writes that on arrival in Washington, the briefings he received from Australian embassy staff were that Trump “would be toast when things got serious”. His instincts told him differently. He instructed the staff to get out of Washington and head to the Midwest and beyond. He went to Florida, North Carolina and Arizona. All returned, he says, with a different take on what was happening outside the capital cities. So, he invited Clovis and Miller to White Oaks, the Australian ambassador’s residence. He tried to get them to commit to the TransPacific Partnership (they wouldn’t) and an Indo-Pacific strategy (they’d see about that).
But when talk turned to Australia’s tough immigration policies, “Miller’s eyes lit up and he started asking questions”. Hockey agreed to send the Trump campaign “publicly available information” about the policies. His head of congressional liaison, Peter Heyward, sent a note detailing the meeting, and that undertaking, to Canberra. “Well, Canberra went nuts,” writes Hockey. Emails bounced from department to department, with one deputy secretary writing that “if I wasn’t smart enough to work out that it was bad for Australia to engage with the Trump campaign, perhaps I shouldn’t even be in Washington”. What’s more, Turnbull and then foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, were “anxious” about the outreach. Hockey says he was never told not to get close to the Trump camp but the Liberal leaders would have preferred him to remain at arm’s length. He writes that he took the autonomy of the ambassador’s office seriously.
“I’d been treasurer of Australia, I wasn’t about to get my marching orders from a middleranking public servant, or even a high-ranking public servant. I worked with the prime minister, of course, because at the end of the day I was appointed by the prime minister, I was respectful but I was always going to put my country first.”
Hockey writes that despite his “run-ins (to put it mildly)” with Turnbull, he’d moved on and worked well with him when ambassador. He recalls talking with a shocked Turnbull as the red wave of Trump votes washed through the US in the November 2016 election.
Three months later he received another call from Turnbull just after he had spoken with the newly inaugurated president. “His voice was quivering and he was clearly upset,” Hockey writes. “The phone call had gone badly.” In the call, Trump took umbrage at the refugee-swap agreement Turnbull brokered with Obama in which the US would resettle up to 1250 refugees from Australia’s offshore detention regime, while Australia would increase its overall refugee intake. Trump was abrasive, saying the call was the most unpleasant he’d had all day and ending it abruptly.
A few days later, Hockey was at an official dinner when his phone started beeping about 10pm. The Washington Post was running a story about the disastrous phone call.
Hockey returned to White Oaks and hit the phones. Trump’s people suggested Australia leaked the story. Hockey was indignant. “Are you so distrustful of your closest ally that you would think we’d want to blow up the relationship for the next four years?” he told them. And when Turnbull asked him if he’d leaked the phone call, Hockey was angry.
“I don’t even have the transcript,” he retorted. Hockey says the White House leaked like a sieve at the time and most believed it had come from there.
By the morning, the story was everywhere and even Republicans were incensed by Trump’s tone in the conversation and its unprecedented leaking. Hockey took a call from (the late) Republican senator John McCain who was appalled by the way Trump dealt with Turnbull, and even released a statement – with input from Hockey – to that effect.
Hockey phoned the president’s chief-of-staff, Reince Priebus, and secured a meeting with him that afternoon. He arrived at the White House with his deputy, Caroline Millar, while Priebus had Kushner and Trump’s key strategist, Steve Bannon, in the room. There was argy-bargy about who leaked the story before Hockey pulled out his trump card. “I reached out to your campaign and engaged with you before anyone else had the guts to do so,” he said. “I copped it in Australia for doing so.” Hockey says the pitch made a mark on Bannon.
In the end, Bannon gave an undertaking to talk with the president about organising a public kiss-and-make-up meeting between the leaders and Hockey left feeling confident the immigration deal would be upheld. It was.
Anecdotes are scattered throughout the book,
giving an insight into some of the more left-field events in his time as ambassador. But the overall theme is that by engaging with the Trump campaign early, Hockey was instrumental in getting Australia access and economic and political deals, with the US in an unwieldy time. A big win was Australia’s exemption from hefty tariffs on steel and aluminium, a result of Hockey’s lobbying of the administration and Turnbull’s work on Trump.
Hockey admits much of his role was marketing. “You’ve got to be yourself,” Hockey says. “When people realise you’re not a threat, that you’re not playing duplicitous games, that you are authentic and they like you, then they’ll help you …”
He says a slogan he coined – 100 Years of Mateship – became “a strong basis for much of the contact with the Trump administration as well as Congress”. The military-inspired catchphrase was used in embassy branding and at the rapprochement between Turnbull and Trump on board the USS Intrepid in New York in May 2017. Trump declared, “We have a fantastic relationship, I love Australia,” and Turnbull and Hockey breathed a sigh of relief.
And Hockey? Does he admire Trump? The former diplomat falters, searching for words.
“I wouldn’t put it … you know, I don’t know, I’ll let the book speak for itself. Personally, he can be very engaging.”
What Hockey is clear about is that Trump deserved to lose the 2020 election. His pigheadedness during the Covid outbreak and the Black Lives Matter protests showed a lack of understanding that his nation was crying out for sympathy and empathy. “His reaction to the January 6 invasion of the Capitol building is unforgivable,” Hockey says. “His denial of the outcome of the election is outrageous.”
Hockey witnessed Trump’s hatred of losing up close. It was Hockey’s first golf day with Trump in 2016. The game was close. It came down to Hockey and a 12m putt. The ambassador gave it his best shot. The ball went in. A triumphant Hockey wanted to keep the scorecard. Trump wouldn’t let him. Writes Hockey: “It could remind others of his loss.”
Hockey admits he doesn’t like losing, either. But he says, despite his dream of becoming PM dashed, he’s not bitter or out for revenge in writing the book. The fact it is being released two years after he left White Oaks and at the start of Morrison’s bid to continue as prime minister is a reflection of his tight schedule, nothing more, he says. He’s been busy building his 30-employee strong strategic and financial advisory company Bondi Partners, splitting his time between Washington DC and Sydney.
“Was it the best result for the country?” he asks rhetorically about his exit from federal parliament. “Well, we’ll never know … I have no regrets about politics and I have no regrets about diplomacy. You do your best and if it’s not good enough, move on.”
When people realise you’re not a threat … you’re authentic and they like you, then they’ll help you