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base that could provide the springboard for the Varsity Party. A student from each college was chosen to join Joe’s ticket, with Anthea Fawcett from Women’s College becoming Joe’s campaign manager.
    Joe manufactured to have SRC ballot boxes at the colleges, making them present at the big college parties. Driving an old Peugeot 504 and using a crackly aged megaphone, he would drive from college to college singing his own praises. It could have been a scene stolen from The Blues Brothers . Joe provided beer – big kegs that sat beside each of the ballot boxes, reminding students of the largesse offered by candidate Joe Hockey. He played to the students’ tune, offering any student who had signed up to the Varsity Club free beer. For those who hadn’t, entry cost $5. ‘So we turned every booth into a party, and built up my numbers,’ he says.
    Joe doesn’t pretend it was all legitimate. The law school appeared to be a problem booth for his candidature, so it was very convenient for Joe when a fire alarm sounded off at the time the ballot box was to be collected. No-one ever saw it again. Anthea Fawcett says Joe was both a marketeer and a showman, painting his Party as an apolitical student organisation that eschewed Party politics. The college votes were central to that.
    ‘I was the campaign manager, not that I had to manage much because Joe had a fairly strong idea of what he wanted to do. That included his posters of Happy Joe Hockey in his rugby jersey with hockey stick messages,’ Anthea says. Those posters showed off a crudely drawn picture of Joe holding a football and claiming he would be Independent – with the right policies and the right attitude. A cartoon was drawn on the bottom of the posters where one person was digging into a barrel marked ‘Creating a Man’. Someone stops by and says: ‘You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel now.’ To which the creator responds: ‘I think I’ve got just enough slime left to create the politicians.’ It targeted Party politicians in the same way that has, in more recent times, given voter support to Independents such as Clive Palmer and parties like One Nation. Back then, it suited Joe’s purpose to be seen as outside the big parties, because he wasn’t on the inside of any of them. ‘Joe didn’t get too lost on detail,’ Anthea says. ‘He was happy to play the rugger-bugger … that appealed to most college voters.’
    Greg Parker met Joe at a history tutorial in first-year university, and marvelled at his ability to encapsulate a sophisticated brief in minutes. Greg gave him notes for one subject, but saw that Joe ended up with a distinction, and he only scored a credit. He soon saw it was because Joe was better at sucking out the crucial information, and telling a story with it. This is central to how Joe still works. He can get across a brief quickly, but doesn’t see the same value in being able to parrot off specific numbers. He looks for the narrative, the story in the brief, and tells it wonderfully. The trouble is, this ability to communicate well can at times be a double-edged sword. When John Howard would later pull Joe into Cabinet and ask him to help sell a smelly industrial relations policy, his ability to skim a brief and use it to tell a bedtime story would feed the view that he had little depth. Invariably his supporters paint the first picture, his detractors the latter, but there is no doubt that Joe has always performed better in areas he loves.
    At university Joe received a couple of high distinctions, but failed one law subject and scraped through on a couple of others because they didn’t hold his interest. ‘He didn’t work very hard,’ one lecturer, who had Joe in his class, said. ‘Joe Hockey was not a very good student. He got away with a reasonable pass but he didn’t work very hard.’ Indeed, that lecturer said he warned his high-school-aged son that if he acted up in school, he might be the next Joe Hockey. He