Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

While I was preparing this speech for the Hon. Joe Hockey, I thought, 'Should I get stuck into him and make it a roast, or should I pay tribute to some of the things that he achieved for our country?' I would like to mix it up, but I don't want to miss! Not many people will read these speeches, but I know when Joe finds some time in the future he will sit and read these speeches. So I will open my comments by saying: Joe Hockey, you are a good man—and I will explain why.

I, like many Australians, first met Joe Hockey on Sunrise where he would take his bat out for his weekly political sparring session with none other than Kevin Rudd. I thought to myself, 'Who is this bloke?' I was new to politics and not a member then. I thought, 'He is going somewhere. This fella is going to go all right.' Rudd and Joe impressed me equally with their political wit and banter. When I came to parliament I had the opportunity to sit, talk, drink and smoke with Joe Hockey. I got to see a side of him that many other Australians probably have not seen as yet, and it is one of the reasons I can testify that he is a very good man.

He can be lazy on a touch football paddock, though, and he became quite relaxed when playing on the Senate ovals. Religiously, on a Tuesday morning early in the piece, Joe would come out for his weekly fitness bout and play touch football. But towards the end he thought that he was above the game. In the touch football world you have to lean over and actually ground the ball. But not only was Joe's politics taking him around the globe; he was also watching far too much gridiron football. When he ran across the try line, he would just throw the ball on the ground. Everyone on both sides knew that Joe was not going to accept that it was anything other than a try!

He was a great fundraiser for me and many of my colleagues in Queensland and, I am sure, right around the country. When I brought him to Queensland I never had a problem selling tickets at a high-end table in our CBD or filling a hall somewhere in the electorate. The reason Joe could fill a hall or a high-end table at a fundraiser was that he got it. He could empathise with the small business groups. He had a couple of acres up in North Queensland and he used to give an 'I am a pastoralist' type speech. But everyone saw through it. He was not very good in that space. But he was really good in the small business space. Joe often shared his frustrations with the returns on the farm block that he had and still has in North Queensland, that the money was just not there and how he was always perplexed as to how the industry survived. But it bought him credibility and empathy, irrespective of how pathetic his stories sometimes were.

He once told me a story in the chamber during a division. He had just come from a weekend function at Peter FitzSimons's place. For those of you that do not know, Peter is that red-bandanna-wearing, staunch socialist type bloke. My question to Joe was: 'What are you doing going to his party?' He said, 'We're good mates.' Joe had just attended Peter's 50th birthday and had given a speech about Peter at the function. This was at a time when Joe was fairly large. In his speech, Joe said, 'Many of you would be surprised that I'm here tonight. But when Peter dies I will more than likely be one of his six pallbearers. That is how close we are.' In response, when it was Peter's time to get up he said, 'Yes, that's right. He will be one of my six pallbearers. And when Joe dies I will more than likely be one of the 16 pallbearers that takes him!' I think their passion and commitment was more around the love of rugby and the challenging of minds, because both of them were extremely articulate.

I have spoken about his investments in Queensland and how loved and revered he was by the small business sector. I want to briefly speak about his 'age of entitlement' speech—one of his finer speeches, I would dare say. I am still perplexed today as to why he had to go to London to address the Institute of Economic Affairs to do it. I am sure it was choreographed, in a way. Some of the things he ran with included:

Entitlement is a concept that corrodes the very heart of the process of free enterprise that drives our economies.

He had spent considerable time preparing for this speech, and it was truly going to be a speech for which he needed to have an unencumbered audience. That tyranny of distance, I think, helped project him and put him on that international platform. One of the comments I picked up on after reading the speech a number of times, which would have been very difficult for him to say—or very easy for the media to pull apart—and which I thought was a really strong sentence was:

The problem arises, however, when there is a belief that one person has a right to a good or service that someone else will pay for. It is this sense of entitlement that afflicts not only individuals but also entire societies.

In saying that, he was not saying that we did not have to look after those who could not look after themselves. It was about an ideology that the age of entitlement was over. No longer, as a society, if we were going to grow and if we were going to have that economic opportunity into the future, could we have the ideology that somebody else was going to pay for our prosperity. It is truly one of his more defining speeches.

Occasionally, in the latter part of his serving in this parliament, we would have to have conversations that were awkward, but he was always gracious. We had a function to mark the end of his service in this parliament, and I was humbled to be invited with a very small handful of members of this House who went and spent that evening with him.

Joe used to always say to me, irrespective of the 'come to Jesus' chats that we had occasionally, 'Scotty, you're a good man.' I opened this speech by saying, 'Joe, you're a good man.' I will close this speech with: when you find time, when you are sitting somewhere in this world trawling through Hansard, know that you are truly a good man, Joe Hockey. I thank you for your contribution to this parliament and to our nation. Thanks, brother.

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