Second Joyce: what does Michael McCormack stand for?
His cautious style couldn’t be further from Barnaby’s. But beneath the niceties, Nats leader Michael McCormack is a divisive figure.
“We are absolutely good enough to beat these blokes and make the finals,” the coach says. “But the cold reality is we can talk about bein’ good enough all day, but until we all turn up to f..king training and practise properly — not just gettin’ there and rootin’ around — we’ll get nowhere.” It’s full time at the Mangoplah Sports Ground and the Goannas have gone down by three goals to Collingullie Glenfield Park and the coach is not happy. He’s identified the problem as a lack of commitment. “Do you reckon we are good enough to beat these blokes?” he shouts.
The presence in the sheds of the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, Michael McCormack, hasn’t dampened the banter. The DPM — clipped silver hairdo, slacks, pressed checked shirt, immaculately knotted tie and zippered jumper, like a real estate agent on auction day — is sitting on a bench next to his 20-year-old son, Nicholas, a muscular defender. Nick is glowering from the loss and ripping lengths of Elastoplast from his ankles, screwing them into a ball. The father chats reassuringly with his son beneath a sign that reads: “A champion team will always beat a team of champions.”
We leave the wounded Goannas in the sheds and wander over to the clubhouse, a delightful old bush school that was moved on a truck to Mangoplah, a tiny settlement 40km south of Wagga Wagga. The club is at the heart of this community and it’s comforting to be in this warm embrace as old friends meet for a yarn and a beer.
McCormack and his wife Catherine huddle around an iron stove outside. “It’s so bloody cold it’d make Bill Shorten put his hands in his own pockets,” he says to a fellow hand-warmer; the well-thumbed joke draws a laugh. But high office hasn’t bestowed great magnetism on the DPM. People come up and say “G’day” and have a chat, but they don’t seem to be drawn to his orbit. Catherine sips on a wine while he fiddles with the plastic lid of a water bottle. He’s never been a drinker. “It’s great,” she says. “I’ve always got a designated driver.” The DPM tells me his own football career was inglorious — he played rugby league in his youth and took up Aussie rules at the age of 46 to play in a team with his sons, with whom he also plays grade cricket. “I played two games; two kicks, one mark, one handball, two broken ribs.”
He introduces me to a couple of old acquaintances yarning nearby; Phil Davis and Phil Cohalan are here to celebrate 20 years since they won the flag. “He’s got a grip on reality and what it means to be a normal person,” Davis says of McCormack. “He’s got two boys who play footy, one’s an apprentice, one’s an accountant and a daughter who’s a teacher; if you could write a job description for what you want in your local member, he’s it. I like him, but more than that I respect him.”
McCormack has been a steady and reliable local member since he was elected to the federal seat of Riverina in 2010. But he’s in the big league now, captain-coach of the Nationals and Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. He was thrust into the position in February when Barnaby Joyce was stretchered from the park, babbling incoherently after belting himself in the head one too many times. McCormack got the call-up; the competition was thin.
The two men could not be more different. While McCormack is neat and contained, Joyce is not. He was crash-or-crash-through. He enjoys a fight as much as a feed; he’d have gladly taken a pick handle to Johnny Depp’s terriers, Pistol and Boo. Joyce was a hard dog to keep on the porch. But for all his faults he gave the Nationals an identity that was distinct from the Liberals. “Barnaby Joyce is probably the best communicator and political salesman in Australia,” party elder Ron Boswell tells me. “It is going to be a hard act to follow.”
Michael McCormack, 54, is not your typical Nationals leader. He grew up on a farm but he’s not a farmer and he’s certainly not from the squattocracy who have lorded over the party for much of its history. Joyce was fond of saying he represented the punters in the “weatherboard ’n’ iron” in regional towns, but he was schooled within the sandstone walls of St Ignatius’ College Riverview, Sydney. The Nats’ leadership has generally come from similar backgrounds, wealthy farmers who sent their kids far from their vast spreads to be educated in the grand private schools of Melbourne and Sydney. Doug Anthony and John Anderson boarded at The King’s School, Sydney, Tim Fischer at Xavier College, Melbourne; Ian Sinclair was schooled at Knox Grammar, Sydney.
McCormack went to St Michael’s and Trinity Catholic schools in Wagga Wagga. He was the third kid in a batch of five, with two older sisters and a younger sister and brother. They were raised on a modest cropping and grazing block; he describes it as a “very happy” childhood. “I loved school and I loved homework; I know, it sounds a bit sad,” he tells me as we sit in his lounge room, adorned with original paintings of racehorses, including one of Phar Lap. The home is a large brick house with a pool on a big block on the outskirts of Wagga. “I got into books at school … I liked writing and was drawn to journalism. I just didn’t want to be a farmer.” Besides, the 400ha family plot was hardly large enough to support both his family and his parents.
McCormack went from school into a cadetship on The Daily Advertiser in town. His former editor, Graham Gorrel, remembers him as “a very good learner and a very quick learner”, adding: “He was a good public speaker and he could write.” He had an incredible memory for detail, too. Gorrel was so impressed with his young protégé that a few years later, when the general manager went off on sick leave and Gorrel stepped up, he appointed McCormack acting editor and then, a year later in 1992, editor. “I told the board there was only one bloke for the job and that was McCormack,” says Gorrel. McCormack was just 27, the youngest editor of a daily newspaper in Australia.
“It was a pretty heady time in newspapers,” McCormack says. “I was very much out there as a community advocate and I treated the job like I treat politics. I turned up to every community event. I was the face of the newspaper, which was one of the largest businesses in the town. I didn’t hold back … I look back and there are probably things that I wrote that I shouldn’t have. It might have been passable then but unacceptable now …” He’s shifting in his chair, knowing we are approaching a subject he can’t avoid. In 1993, early in his editorship, he penned an editorial under the headline “Sordid homosexuality — it’s becoming more entrenched”. In that column he wrote: A week never goes by that homosexuals and their sordid behaviour don’t become further entrenched in society. Unfortunately gays are here and, if the disease their unnatural acts helped spread doesn’t wipe out humanity, they’re here to stay.
“I took a stance on it,” he tells me. “I was concerned there was too much emphasis on the gay community in … well, making their presence felt in schools and normalising this, particularly in context of the HIV epidemic and perhaps … no not perhaps, I went too far. I apologised at the time and have apologised any number of times since.”
“I have grown and learnt not only to tolerate, but to accept all people regardless of their sexual orientation,” McCormack said in 2017, when he was small business minister with responsibility for the ABS, which was conducting the same-sex marriage postal vote. (He also held the portfolio during the bungled 2016 Census.) What caused him to change such staunch views? “Probably having more dealings with people who are gay; indeed, I have a cousin who is gay,” he says, telling me he’s offered his services to her as an MC should she tie the knot. “Look, I was in my late 20s and your views change as you get older.” He voted for marriage equality in Parliament. “I think the Parliament and the people have moved on, and, I have to say, last Christmas was a happier time for it.”
And then, in 2002, after a decade at the helm and with a big career in journalism seemingly ahead of him, he was sacked. The new general manager, Wayne Geale, was looking to cut costs. “My job was to initiate great transition,” Geale says. “I was not happy with the direction of the paper and our circulation results. I had asked for changes many times, nothing happened.” The staff sided with McCormack and went out on strike. He would go on to settle an unfair dismissal case in his favour against the company.
Catherine says this was a difficult time for the family. They had three young kids, Georgina (now 27), Alexander (23) and Nicholas (20) and a mortgage. McCormack had had job offers from other papers but didn’t want to leave Wagga. “That was probably the lowest, when he lost his job,” Catherine says. “But don’t get the idea he was wallowing in self-pity because that doesn’t happen in this house, never has. You get up and you move on.”
She went back to work — she now manages a construction company that builds and sells 50 houses a year — and her husband took on the primary caring role while he set up his own business, a media company. “He took over the child-rearing,” she says. “He coached the kids’ sports teams, he did the reading groups … he was terrific.” It was during this period that he became involved in politics as the campaign manager for local member Kay Hull at the 2004 and 2007 elections.
No matter where he is or what he is doing, McCormack phones his three children and his wife every day. He met Catherine on Christmas night, 1982: she was 16 and still at school and he was 18 and had just started on the paper. They were married four years later. She now snatches time with her husband on weekend drives to various functions around his vast electorate.
Their daughter Georgina, a schoolteacher in Melbourne, jokes that sometimes she has to cut him off on the daily call because she’s “a bit busy”. In 2016, during the holidays, she helped out for 10 days on the campaign trail, driving for hours with him and his staff. “Between phone calls, we’d crank up Spotify and play car karaoke — everything from Meatloaf and U2 to Savage Garden and The Corrs, and we’d all be singing at the top of our lungs,” she says.
McCormack has an incredible memory for dates and names and details. His large study is overflowing with books on military history and horses. One day as we are driving through his electorate, he rattles off the names of all of the Victoria Cross recipients from the Riverina, the battles they fought in and the dates they died. He has a fascination with horse racing, too, although he rarely bets, and can recall arcane details about which horse won which race and the date of the race. He’s collected a copy of every turf register, recording every winner from every racetrack around Australia, going back to 1865.
But there is one date that is more painful than others and it’s not that long ago. He is telling me about his sisters, whom he is close to, and mentions that his brother died. What happened? “Mark … Mark had … had a problem with drugs. I didn’t even know he was on drugs … he was a bit of a rebel but I didn’t think he was using heroin … I think it was the 22nd of February 2008, I can get you the date.” Mark was a qualified mechanic and living in Sydney, managing a company that built fencing around construction sites. There’d been a heroin shortage when an unusually pure batch hit the streets. “There were a number of young men who died in Sydney, in Darlinghurst, that particular evening,” McCormack says. Mark died and someone stole his wallet. He was in the morgue for a number of days, a John Doe, before being identified by his sister, who’d been trying to contact him. He was 30.
“It broke Mum and Dad’s hearts, obviously … it broke all our hearts. Dad died six months later. It just shattered Dad.” McCormack says he is conscious of the need for governments to work hard to help people out of that “cycle of despair”. He tells me he greatly admires people who can get themselves clean and then go on to lead productive lives. “But it comes down to personal responsibility and our own actions.” And then he adds: “You know, I’ve never spoken about that to anyone. No one has ever asked.” Life, it seems, has softened his views since he was a firebrand young editor calling for corporal punishment in schools, a return of the death penalty, and condemning homosexuality.
McCormack tells me that when he got the leadership gig he rang John Howard and former National Party leaders Warren Truss, Tim Fischer, John Anderson and Mark Vaile for guidance. But he also got advice from across the divide. He inherited the infrastructure portfolio from Barnaby Joyce and his opposite number, Anthony Albanese, rang him up and offered a briefing. He accepted. “We sat down and had quite a long chat about the challenges in the portfolio as I saw it,” Albanese tells me. “He listened and said he was prepared to work constructively. I think that shows a level of maturity that isn’t always present in the current political climate.”
McCormack also sought the advice of Julia Gillard. “I didn’t go much on her politics but I admired her for her toughness and her resilience,” he says. They spoke for 20 minutes. “She was fantastic,” he recalls. She told him to be himself and that he had a very important job in representing regional Australia. She said while she wanted Labor to win the next election, she’d be quietly cheering for him. “She said that she was a little surprised that I’d called, but impressed that I had.”
Former NSW education minister Adrian Piccoli, who’s known McCormack for years, says that if the Nationals are to survive they need people like McCormack who can straddle the farming/urban divide of regional Australia and not be just a voice for farmers. Piccoli, who now heads an institute for education at UNSW, says he met recently with federal National MPs to talk about the problems in rural education and “in their minds, the biggest problem in rural education was subsidising farmers to send their kids to university”. Piccoli was “disappointed” that they could be so far out of touch with the actual problems in the underfunded and understaffed demountable classrooms in the public schools in their own electorates.
Piccoli argues the National Party needs to appeal to people in Armidale, Wangaratta, Port Lincoln and Geraldton, to the teachers, welders and nurses who live there, and not just farmers. Right across Australia, small farms have been gobbled up by larger operators and corporations. That and mechanisation have seen a dramatic fall in the number of farmers and farm workers. The population is shifting from small towns to large regional centres. “Barnaby had this fixed mindset about what life was about and you couldn’t shift him on anything, with either logic or additional information,” Piccoli says, adding that his “bluster and bravado” found a lot of support in the farming sector but it also put off a lot of people in regional towns. McCormack, Piccoli says, is in touch with life in the regions and will appeal to a wider range of bush constituents. “I really like Michael because he is a pragmatist and he’ll get things done, he’s not a hardcore idealist.” But he has his work cut out, particularly unifying his own party.
“I don’t think he has ever stood for anything,” says one of his parliamentary colleagues. “I just don’t think he’s got the mettle to do it.” This colleague tells me that when McCormack was parliamentary secretary to the finance minister, he was tasked with renovating The Lodge. “He was shithouse. It was his one job and it was three years late and three times over budget.” One of McCormack’s former staffers tells me he is not across his brief, can’t keep up with his correspondence, and that if he goes head to head with Albanese in the infrastructure portfolio, “Albo will wipe the floor … He is just not across any detail. Michael doesn’t want to do the work. Michael wants to swan around to State of Origin and AFL football matches and not actually do the work. The reality is you have to do the work.”
There’s a perception, too, from the Barnaby Joyce camp that McCormack had long been plotting with colleagues Darren Chester and Keith Pitt to overthrow the leader. McCormack had twice stood for leadership positions but these claims seem unlikely; before the revelations about Joyce’s affair with former staffer Vikki Campion he was an unassailable leader. But still, there’s bad blood in the Nats camp. “[McCormack] was always ambitious for the top job and in the background he was playing funny little games where he was co-ordinating people to try and destabilise,” one of his parliamentary colleagues tells me. “He’s up against some pretty hard heads with Turnbull, Scott Morrison and Mathias Cormann; they’ll eat him alive.”
The dogs are barking. When I started making calls about McCormack a number of his political opponents, in Wagga and in Canberra and all from the right, made serious and vicious allegations about his past. I investigated them and couldn’t find any supporting evidence.
We’re in the car on the way to Parkes, to announce funding for a new bandstand and street upgrade to showcase the town’s annual Elvis Festival, when I put the claims of disloyalty to him; not long before, he’d given a car karaoke rendition of Suspicious Minds. “No one was more supportive of Barnaby than I,” he says frostily. “I never ever plotted against Barnaby.”
He says there were rumours around parliament about Joyce. “I never once rang a journalist and said, ‘By the way, did you know…?’” Canberra insiders, however, told The Weekend Australian Magazine that McCormack had been making and receiving calls canvassing life after Joyce when rumours of the affair surfaced. “To say he was a passive observer is just not true,” one said.
Would it be better for the party if Joyce announced his retirement before the next election? “That is a matter for Barnaby and Barnaby alone to make.” Did the voters of New England deserve to know he’d left his wife before the by-election? “That again is a matter for Barnaby — we all make our decisions and we live by our actions. That wasn’t my call to make at the time.”
As to the claims about McCormack’s competence, it depends on whom you ask. Peter Strong, CEO of the Council of Small Business, says he was impressed with McCormack when he handled the small business portfolio. “He was across his brief, he’d run a small business, he’d employed people and dealt with suppliers — he got it,” Strong says. “He’s got a gentleman style about him. He can disagree quite strongly with you, but you don’t leave feeling offended.”
Party stalwart Ron Boswell tells me “it is a huge jump” from junior minister to DPM. “He has got to bring this coal and energy debate home,” Boswell says. “He’s got to be strong and resolute and listen to the party room and go out there and represent them — if he wants inspiration just look at the back wall of the party room to the photos of Truss, Anthony, Anderson and McEwen.”
The jury is still out regarding McCormack’s performance and he doesn’t have long to prove himself, with an election to be held by May. “If he loses any ground,” says one insider, “particularly in Queensland, it’s hard to see him holding on.”
The “coal and energy debate” is at the heart of the tricky path McCormack has to tread. Along with the National Farmers’ Federation he endorses the National Energy Guarantee while also pushing a pro-coal line.
“There are clearly some very different views in the party around issues like climate change,” says NFF president Fiona Simson, “and it’s a challenge for Michael to lead what is a very broad church.” McCormack treads a careful line on this subject. “When you go out to farms and the rain records they’ve been keeping for 130 years show that their climate is getting drier, then there’s a responsibility on government to do something about it in policy areas like emissions and infrastructure provision,’’ he says. “But I don’t subscribe to some of the theories put forward by, say, the Wentworth Group of Scientists or those types of people who quite frankly want our river systems to be shut down and all of the water in the Murray Darling Basin to flow out the mouth of the Murray rather than being used to help sustain farming communities and regional towns.’’
As for his leadership, Simson says he’s a “genuine, nice guy. He’s still very electorate focused.” It’s hardly a ringing endorsement from Australia’s peak farming body for a leader of the old farmers’ party. “He will be judged not on what he says but what he does,” says one of his federal colleagues more bluntly. Unless he can win battles for the Nationals in Cabinet he will be judged a failure. “He is in trouble if he can’t pull off some big wins for the party faithful … and I’m not sure he’s that much of a fighter.”
On the road to Parkes, I ask the DPM what he wants to achieve. “I want to leave a legacy whereby the Nationals are very well respected, not just regionally but nationally,” he says. He rattles off his priorities as water infrastructure, the inland rail, “a 1700km corridor of commerce”, getting businesses and people to move west of the Great Divide, advocating for the regions and getting help to drought-affected farmers who need it. What does he get out of the job? “I think, like every politician, probably, there’s an element that they like to be out there,” he says. “They like to be noticed for the good that they are doing. You like people acknowledging the fact that you’re their federal member and that makes [you] feel important and it makes you feel as though you are doing your job.”
We arrive in Parkes for a powwow with locals at the unveiling of plans for a $4.2 million upgrade of the main street and the Elvis concert park. He weaves a few Elvis gags into his speech and gets some polite laughs. A local journalist then asks him about Daryl Maguire, the state Liberal member for Wagga Wagga, who was caught on tape in an ICAC investigation seeking to trouser payments from a Chinese developer. Should Maguire resign, he’s asked. McCormack gives a cautious, tepid reply about awaiting outcomes and processes. The days of the wild ride that was Barnaby are dead.