Hockey: Not Your Average Joe by Madonna King Read Free Book Online Page B

tipped off that Laws loved cars, and kept bringing the conversation back to that. ‘I said not many students had money but we wanted to work hard; we wanted one day to have a car collection like he had. The conversation ended with him saying I sounded like a good young man but he didn’t know what was occupying my head,’ Joe says. But Joe didn’t win everyone over with the take-no- prisoners approach on tertiary fees – which also included his call for supporters to vote Democrat in the Senate in the next election. Some thought he should have gone in harder, led from the front and been arrested like other students.
    Posters soon appeared around university, labelling him as ‘Judas Hockey’. Most of the police had given the students the chance to leave the building, before being arrested, and Joe was not prepared to pay the fines of those who now faced trespass charges. ‘We won’t pay the fines because it was their choice to be arrested and I don’t think every student should pay the fine for one student who had the choice to leave,’ he told students through the pages of Honi Soit , the university’s student newspaper.
    Not everyone saw it that way. ‘Joe Hockey was quite prepared to lead people to occupy the education department offices, but where was he when the police started dragging people away by the hair and arresting them?’ student Mike Brown asked in a letter to Honi Soit . ‘Why wasn’t he prepared to take the consequences of an action he started? Nice one Joe – we know you didn’t want to be late for dinner, and besides, what would the Solicitors and Barristers Admission Board think?’
    It wasn’t long before Susan Ryan agreed to meet Joe, and a small group of students, in her Canberra office. When they arrived the following month they ran into prime minister Bob Hawke. He immediately singled Joe out. ‘You leave my bloody education minister alone,’ he spat, before walking off. But it was in fact finance minister Peter Walsh who had been scheduled to meet the students that day. He sat in his chair, the sun streaming over his shoulder directly into the students’ eyes. He looked and acted uninterested. Thirty minutes passed and then he turned on them, asking Joe why he should pay the fees for an old woman to go back to university to study Arts. Soon after, they were kicked out.
    ‘That was his view – that it was a basket weaver in her 60s going back to university,’ Joe says. Outside Walsh’s office, political reporter Mungo MacCallum took Joe and his colleagues for a beer in the Parliament House bar. Before an hour or two had passed, word began to filter through: Bob Hawke had called an election, to be held in July 1987.
    Susan Ryan says she was not popular around the ministerial decision-making table by siding with the students over their opposition to the tertiary charge. ‘I was totally of the Whitlam view that you invest in the population in this way and the economic cost of that is repaid many times over. However, I was on the losing side in this because the concept of user pays and so forth had taken hold in our government. Every budget I’d fight it and every budget I’d get bashed up,’ she says. She liked the student activism, a spirit of being heard. ‘But I wasn’t well disposed towards Joe when this episode [the sit-in] happened.’ Ryan was in the old Parliament House, deep in budget preparation. The education portfolio enveloped universities, colleges of advanced education, TAFE, schools and the ACT schools authority. She also held the status-of-women portfolio. ‘I was pretty busy,’ she says, ‘and I remember one of my advisors ran in and said the students had occupied my office in Goulburn Street … and that they weren’t going to leave until I talked to them.’
    Ryan didn’t entertain Joe’s request to join her on a nationally televised telephone call. It was a stunt. ‘Not only were they asking to speak to me – I think their original demand was