Missing out on the top spot in the Liberal party to Tony Abbott this week, Joe Hockey had been touted as a future Liberal leader and even PM. Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey has a demanding job, but, as he tells us, nothing compares to being a father.
Ignatius Theodore Babbage-Hockey. When Joe Hockey and wife Melissa Babbage named their third child, born on October 19, it was not on a whim. “Ignatius is for Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, and the creed of Ignatius was to be ‘a man for others’. That’s what we want our Ignatius to be, a man in the service of others,” explains Joe. “And his middle name is Theodore, meaning ‘gift from God’, and Ignatius is that because the doctors said Melissa, at 43, was too old to have another child.”
When Joe scaled Mount Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania in July to raise funds for children’s hospitals, he carried something more precious than water, energy bars and medical equipment. On reaching the summit, exhausted and elated, Joe fell to his knees, “and I buried Ignatius’ ultrasound X-ray.
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“The ultrasound was proof positive that the doctors were wrong and, besides, I think every child should start life from the top of the mountain,” he declares.
As crucial political issues go, the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is right up there. On Sunday, October 18, federal Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull summoned his frontbenchers to Canberra to endorse the Opposition’s amendments to the government’s ETS policy. Yet shadow Treasurer Hockey was facing an even more important issue – Melissa was due to give birth to the baby in the ultrasound, at the Mater Hospital in North Sydney.
“When Malcolm said I had to be at the meeting, I told him it was a big ask because Melissa was due any moment, but I flew down,” Joe says.
“I was there for the morning session, but by the afternoon, I was really nervous. Finally, I told Malcolm, ‘The wrath of my colleagues is nothing compared to the wrath of my wife if I miss this birth. See ya!’ ”
When Ignatius was born, at 12.07pm the next day, Joe was at Melissa’s side, as delighted as when Ignatius’ brother and sister, Xavier, now four, and Adelaide, two-and-a-half, were born. “First, I felt relief when the baby was born healthy. Then I went, ‘It’s a boy!’ Then it struck me that he was a normal-sized baby, not a huge baby like his sister and brother had been,” recalls the proud dad.
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Read more from this interview in the December issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly out now with Julie Goodwin on the cover.
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