Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s offer of a state funeral for the late Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson is an error of judgment that rewards chicanery, corruption and thuggery and devalues honouring people of national significance.
Late Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson.Credit: Sasha Woolley
Richardson, a former NSW ALP general secretary and NSW senator, and leader of the NSW Right and replete numbers man, was instrumental in Neville Wran’s second term and installed Bob Hawke as federal leader, and then dumped him in favour of his “mate” Paul Keating. He was a prodigiously able administrator, a spectacularly successful political fundraiser and a surprisingly wily and competent minister, but his penchant for wheeling and dealing eventually revealed him as a spiv, bagman and artful dodger clearly unworthy of high office, let alone a high funeral.
The Herald’s chief investigative reporter, Kate McClymont, laid out Richardson’s sins in her remarkable journalistic recollection of his peripatetic career over more than two decades. “There were the bribes paid to him by way of prostitutes, Offset Alpine, Swiss bank accounts, taking a cut of the political donations he collected, accepting a hefty payment from Eddie Obeid in return for getting Obeid into parliament, having a major property developer build the extension on his home, being on the payroll of developers, and so much more,” McClymont recalled.
Richardson’s winner-takes-all persona unleashed a branch stacking free-for-all in NSW, including the unprecedented 1980 bashing of Left faction MLC Peter Baldwin, which proved so successful that it helped turned Labor’s default position from reform to pragmatism. His main achievement, recognised since his death last weekend at 76, was the protections for native forests and world heritage status for the Daintree and Kakadu National Park while environment minister. But Richardson’s motivation was not all that Green: he wanted to attract young voters to Hawke in the 1987 election.
Richardson had a good nine-year run in Canberra, but the wheels fell of his political credibility when he was caught trying to use his position to bail out a relative arrested for forging government documents, followed by murky accusations concerning the use of prostitutes supplied by businessmen seeking defence contracts. Nothing was proven and Richardson walked away from public life to work for the increasingly anti-Labor media proprietors Packer and Murdoch, and continued doing so until his last days.
Such disloyalty to Labor is passing strange, given Richardson’s frequent public utterances that loyalty was the only virtue. But it was a point of view from the vantage point of having the numbers.
Albanese, long kicked around by the NSW Right during his younger Sussex Street days as the Left’s assistant general secretary, generously put past factional animosities behind and came to praise Richardson. Now he wants to bury him with pomp and circumstance.
Prime ministers do not speak ill of the dead. It is very human quality to remember someone for good deeds and positive impacts on our lives.
But a state funeral is another matter. Richardson was more bad deeds than good and should not be so honoured.
