Read Hockey: Not Your Average Joe for Free Online Page A

same sense of chumminess on St John’s College senior debating team, racing through the year, with team-mates Phillip Kelly and Peter Jones, undefeated and winning the championship with the proposition: ‘That we would always prefer power to glory’.
    ‘Joe Hockey, the Russell Hinze of student politics, rose to the occasion,’ St John’s College magazine, The Johnsonian , recorded. ‘Despite his ignorance of the difference between the respective sexual functions of Bulls and Cows, he spoke well. Victory was ours, but few doubted the invincibility of the team.’
    Joe lived the life thousands of college students across Australia continue to do each day. Allowed to escape adulthood for a few extra years, life lacked real responsibility, and sometimes motivation. Money usually served as the main brake on too many good times, but Joe worked hard earning cash – scalping tickets (including to Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA tour), working at the annual Sydney Royal Easter Show, and doing odd jobs for money. He spent it as fast as he earned it, on skiing holidays, roadtrips to South Australia and a boys’ trip to Fiji. Joe’s parents had a holiday house in the Blue Mountains, with the Jamison Valley as a backdrop, and his girlfriend Paula Jones’s parents had one at Blueys Beach on the mid north coast.
    With a big and loud group of friends, he played hard and worked hard enough. Despite, as a young child, telling everyone who would listen that he wanted to be prime minister one day, by the time Joe was in third-year university he hadn’t mentioned a political career to anyone for quite some time. That’s why there is an irony in the five-minute decision that determined he would run for president of the University of Sydney’s Students’ Representative Council (SRC), the post that would eventually propel him into federal politics. Back then, it was simply a movie pass that Joe was seeking. He’d popped down to the SRC, where the woman at the front counter had dismissed his query. He thought she was rude. She probably thought he was an upstart, but Joe was furious. His fees went to paying her salary and that meant she was in his service. ‘I would have liked her to be nice to me,’ Joe says, ‘so I thought I should give politics a go.’
    Of course, that simplifies things. Joe’s schooling showed he had always been interested in politics, or what it could achieve. He’d learnt that as a kid, by having the local cricket nets fixed. He saw politics as a way of changing the status quo. But it offered much more: he loved public speaking, peddling influence and being at the centre of things, and it played to his competitive streak. And it was that single interaction with the SRC over movie tickets that prompted him to return to his room at St John’s College, sit down and outline a plan to run as a candidate for president. He didn’t know whether his beliefs sat squarely with the Liberal Party, but he had a hunch they might, so he ventured down to a meeting of Liberal students to ask about the process of running for a position on the SRC. ‘They said I’d have to wait three years for a turn. I said but my degree is only three years and they said well bad luck, we have a hierarchy here,’ Joe says. He went away still unclear whether the Liberal Party was his natural home, but determined he would set up a Party of his own anyway.
    It was the next step along the student politics path that provided the impetus for Joe’s on-campus political win. College students stick together, sharing the same social lives, often dating each other and holding a privileged position on campus. Their interests, broadly, lie in studying and socialising, rarely campus politics. Joe thought it offered the political equivalent of low-hanging fruit, and he could capitalise on that. He went to the college heads and explained to them how he wanted to form a political party. Soon after, he set up the Varsity Club to build a membership