Budget 2020: ‘Where did you find him?’ Mathias Cormann leaves a hole that’s impossible to fill
Mathias Cormann worked as a gardener when he moved to Australia 25 years ago. Today, he’s a key lieutenant for the PM.
By any measure, the biggest hole in next year’s budget will be the absence of Mathias Cormann.
No finance minister has served longer in the job. Arguably, none has been as instrumental, nor as influential. And none has had to contend with what is, for most Australians, the greatest economic challenge of their lifetime.
Today marks the seventh and final budget for the senator from Western Australia, who landed on Antipodean shores 25 years ago as a European migrant with English as his fourth language.
“Mathias is quite a remarkable story,” says Chris Ellison, the former justice minister under John Howard who was the first to give the young Jesuit-university-educated Belgian a job.
“He was working as a gardener when he came to see me,” he says, because Cormann’s European law degree was not recognised by the Australian legal fraternity.
“But I thought this guy is whip smart. I got him to do some work for me pro-bono. He helped me with a couple of Senate inquiries.
“And within two weeks, I had hired him.”
The head of Australian Customs, Lionel Woodward, would later ask the minister who this young bloke Cormann was, as he seemed to know more about the “dark arts of anti-dumping” trade rules than anyone outside his department.
“Where on earth did you find him?” Woodward asked Ellison.
It was as if this keen young man with a Schwarzenegger accent had simply turned up out of nowhere.
As an emerging figure within the staffer ranks of the federal government, Cormann’s baptism of fire came in his second stint in Ellison’s office in 2001 — shortly before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Cormann would later become instrumental in personally helping repatriate West Australian victims of the 2002 Bali bombing.
“He wasn’t just a staffer, what he did was quite phenomenal. The Bali bombing, things of Australian contemporary history, he was front and centre … and he was pivotal,” says Ellison.
“But the ‘remarkable’ story is just part of it.”
Cormann, who announced his retirement last month with the expectation that he is soon to nominate for the helm of the Paris-based OECD, has been the backbone of the Coalition government’s fiscal strategy since becoming Finance Minister in 2013.
He has served alongside three treasurers and under three prime ministers as a central figure in the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments.
For five days in early 2018, he became the first Liberal Senate leader in more than 50 years to become acting prime minister.
“He has been the right person for the right time,” Scott Morrison says of the man who helped guide him through three federal budgets as treasurer. “He will be remembered as one of the country’s great finance ministers.
“The finance minister’s role is to get the detail right and drive an enormously complex and cumbersome process.
“The consistent application he has made, year in and year out, has put us in the strongest possible position to go into this crisis.
“His role cannot be under estimated. He kept the budget honest, and that is the role of a good finance minister. He has defined the role, arguably more than any in a long time. He leaves a great personal legacy.”
This Christmas, Cormann will likely host the Ellisons at his house in suburban Perth and cook German sausages on the barbecue, as has become tradition.
“When he first arrived in Australia, he very quickly became Australian,” says Ellison.
“He immersed himself in Western Australian culture. He would go to the footy and go fishing up at Shark Bay with mates. And he’s actually quite a good cook.”
Former prime minister John Howard describes Cormann as having served as a “rock-like figure” for the Coalition government since 2013.
Howard describes him as a man of deep conviction.
“He is going … and there is nothing you can do about it,” Howard says.
“He has been in the job a long time and he has been a great success. He has been precisely what you need in that role. You need someone studious with the papers … someone with a keen mind and an eye for detail.
“He has been a rock-like figure for the Coalition ever since he came to parliament.”
Rather than a political hindrance, Howard says Cormann’s trademark Belgian accent has been a great advantage.
“Mathias has been very articulate … he brings a precision to his expression which has been very effective. And he’s obviously had a certain amount of influence.
“People will miss him. It is his steadiness and the fact he’s been willing to say things that others have not been willing to say.”
Cormann was born in the German-speaking part of Belgium in 1970 and migrated to Australia in 1996. He was 23 when he first learned English. His first job was tending the gardens at a girls’ school in Perth. He would quip: “I was just the junior assistant gardener.”
A decade later, in 2007, he had fulfilled an ambition after taking a casual Senate vacancy left by the resignation of former WA senator Ian Campbell.
By then he had already met his future wife, Hayley Ross, with whom he has two young daughters, Isabelle and Charlotte.
Cormann’s political values and belief system were founded in his observations of the brutal political divide between West Berlin and East Berlin.
He often refers back to his experience of seeing the outcomes of political choices on people’s living standards after 40 years on differing trajectories.
On the one side were policies supporting free enterprise and aspiration supported by a social safety net; on the other was socialism and a focus on equality of outcomes that made people poorer and governments increasingly autocratic and dictatorial.
That insight had a major influence on Cormann’s political development. Despite having been an economic and fiscal conservative throughout his life, having worked for his first six years in the Coalition government to help repair the budget, he didn’t flinch on letting the budget go into massive deficit and debt to cushion the blow on the economy from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on business and households.
Tony Abbott, who put him into cabinet in 2013, says Cormann has turned out to be one of the government’s most outstanding cabinet ministers.
“There are four things to say about Mathias. First, he is always across the brief. Second, he is always prepared to work with his colleagues.
“He is the only minister to have done the same job throughout the life of this government, which has been an abiding strength for this government.
“And he also has a strong set of convictions about government living within its means.”
Cormann’s heritage has also proved to be invaluable.
Travelling back to Europe for economic summits as Australia’s Finance Minister, he would often be spotted sitting down and speaking in the native tongues of the French President, Emanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Cormann’s contribution to government extends well beyond his role as the keeper of the books. As Senate leader, he has been critical to the functioning of the Senate itself. And his relationship with Labor’s leader in the Senate, Penny Wong, has become a hallmark of the upper house’s stability.
It has been said in the past that if either of these two were to go, chaos would descend once again on the house of review.
Wong said of Cormann when he announced his retirement last month: “Mathias Cormann is a formidable opponent and a trusted counterpart; a parliamentarian of the old school.
“There are few of his calibre left in Australian politics, and we are the poorer for it.
“Our politics differ, but we share a love of country, a belief in our institutions and a respect for one another.
“It says something about this country that two migrants hold the leadership positions we do.
“And it says something about our democracy that they can be personal friends.”
But Cormann hasn’t been without controversy. Still bruised by the leadership coup of August 2018, he maintains that he did the right thing by the government — and the country.
Even though he was subjected to blistering character assessments by Malcolm Turnbull, Cormann insists he acted to resolve the leadership crisis after telling Turnbull that he no longer enjoyed his support.
He said at the time that he knew his judgment call would be controversial but that he had a responsibility to make that judgment and had sought to do the right thing for the right reasons in the right and honourable way.
Former Liberal leader Brendan Nelson says one of his greatest regrets of not having served longer in parliament was not having spent more years with Cormann.
“I regard him as one of the giants of the Liberal Party, and with the passage of time I expect that many more will come to that view,” Nelson says.
“He has been an immense asset to Australia. Over more than a decade, he has been consistent, reliable, decent, principled, loyal and has been the foundation of the government’s economic plans and budgets through that period of time.
“He is a conservative man with very strong liberal principles.
“When I was director of the Australian War Memorial, more than any other person in the government he understood the importance of the memorial and why it was essential for the young generation of veterans to create the space there to tell their stories.
“He is widely respected in Germany, and the Belgians are immensely proud of him
“He is in the small minority of those who leave parliament on his own terms — and, consistent with his character, after ensuring the most important budget in your or my lifetime is delivered.
“The one regret I have is that I wasn’t in parliament longer to have kept working with him.”
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