Hockey: Not Your Average Joe Read Online Free Page B

stable economy, democracy, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, but above all freedom itself.’ That speech saw him take home first place in the Art of Speech competition.
    ‘Once again,’ the judges noted, Joe had shown ‘what a real politician should sound like.’ He’d also won the speaking prize the year before, by channelling Sir Winston Churchill, as he would again later in life. ‘On entering parliament for the very first time as prime minister,’ Joe told the judges, ‘Churchill gave one of his greatest speeches, inspiring the world’s freedom fighters “to continue against the tremendous odds of the Nazi war machine”. Never before has one man had such an influence on world peace.’
    Joe represented St Aloysius’ in the Lawrence Campbell Oratory Competition in his second-final year, as well as taking out the Art of Speech prize for a third year. ‘Joseph Hockey of Year 11 took us away from war and brought us closer to home with his speech of what it means to be an Australian,’ the judges determined. So what did the 16-year-old son of an immigrant father see as being Australian?
    ‘I believe that real nationalism lies not in what we say but in what we do,’ Joe told a packed room. ‘The older members of the community have a task ahead of them. They must inspire the potentially talented youth, as well as offering opportunity and stability to the hard workers, who may not have that gift of talent but remain the backbone of this nation. United we stand, divided we fall! Where our nation is united it may throw down the gauntlet to the rest of the world and proudly declare that we are a young, buoyant and industrious Australia.’
    Joe, using history and borrowing heavily from the words of world leaders, took out the prize for public speaking almost every year he was eligible to compete, but in his final year he stepped back. His mother and father loved seeing their son perform and would attend every event. In Joe’s final year of school, his father, Richard, decided to donate a trophy and sponsor the Art of Speech competition, ruling out Joe’s participation. But his love of public speaking flowed into the debating team, where he took the prized third-speaker position and became team captain under coach Magar Etmekdjian. With debates held every Friday night for the first three terms, a spot on the team carried significant kudos. ‘In hindsight you could see an ability to speak in front of people and to engage his audience,’ Etmekdjian says. The use of famous political quotations was a hallmark of his debating speeches, too, sometimes irrespective of whether they added value. ‘Special mention must be made of Joe Hockey,’ the annual school magazine recorded, ‘who by his publicity drives managed to pull good crowds to our home debates and was always prepared to get fine details from an adjudicator about a decision.’
    Outside history, Joe wasn’t near the top of the class. But it was the regime that the Jesuits built around their boys that helped him to grow. Others withered under the strict rule, but it suited Joe. After school, his parents’ Northbridge home would become the meeting place for a stack of noisy teenagers, as French, English and Arabic banter flew back and forth. A grassy knoll sat in the middle of the street, home to a few sprawling trees, hiding natural cubby houses where adults seemed content not to visit. There, on weekends and on school holidays, the boys would talk for hours, taking to the street to play cricket or football, rarely interrupted by local traffic. Friday afternoon was touch footy in Northbridge, and local lads from different schools and of different ages would head down to Northbridge oval for the game.
    With Jeremy Melloy, Joe spent lazy afternoons mucking around in the bush near the golf course, too. Occasionally the pair would enjoy a free round of holes after sneaking on at the second and going for as long as they could before getting caught. Jeremy