Kingmaker, Labor warrior and no stranger to scandal: Graham Richardson dies at 76

There is no modern Australian politician whose name is as synonymous with a certain way of doing politics as that of Graham Richardson, who has died at 76 after a long battle with cancer.

Whatever it Takes was the apt title of Richardson’s 1994 memoir, a book that achieved a notoriety because of its author’s defence of lying.

That notoriety typified some of the hypocrisy that has marked commentary on Richardson’s career as the ultimate Labor powerbroker. Everyone knows that politicians lie. And, as an account of his controversial career, there were more holes in Richardson’s book than a slice of Swiss cheese. Nonetheless, it had a certain rough-and-tumble frankness that gained him attention and readers.

One paradox of Richardson’s public life is that he was very good at getting attention even while much of his most consequential political activity happened far from the prying eyes of the public. In the proverbial, and often literal, smoke-filled back rooms, plots were hatched, deals done, and plans made to elevate someone or other, or do them over – all of it laid down with a careful precision belied by the apparently easy-going gregariousness of the man.

Born on September 27 1949, Richardson was the son of Fred, who would become state secretary of the Amalgamated Postal Workers’ Union. His mother, Peggy, worked as his father’s office manager for a time and reputedly had fine political judgement.

Graham was educated at Sydney Catholic schools and joined the Labor Party at 17. A brief stint studying law at the University of Sydney came to naught: as one of a group of ambitious young men on the Labor Party Right that included Paul Keating and Kerry Sibraa, he was made for an early plunge into politics.

The rise was swift. He was working in the New South Wales Labor Party office by 1971 and in 1976, became state secretary. Neville Wran’s landslide win in the 1978 NSW state election – the first of two “Wranslides”, as they were called, both while Richardson was in charge of the party machine – did much to focus attention on his skills. His name became synonymous with deals done around the lazy Susan in Chinese restaurants.

Unfortunately for Richardson, his name also became synonymous with a state party whose affairs descended into criminality and violence as Left and Right stacked branches relentlessly in their struggle for political control of the inner-city.

Historian Craig Wilcox has rather euphemistically described Richardson as having “loosely umpired” this bitter contest. In reality, he was up to his eyeballs in it and acquired some deeply unpleasant allies along the way.

It is unlikely Richardson had the capacity to control the worst of them, and that would culminate in one of the most notorious instances of violence in Australian political history: the bashing of Left activist Peter Baldwin in July 1980, in connection with a struggle for control of the Enmore branch. Images of Baldwin’s horrifically battered face on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers were not going to lived down any time soon by a party official who had been flaunting his ability to make things happen.

By then, Richardson was already a kingmaker and breaker. As NSW factional warlord, he played a key role in the demise of Bill Hayden’s federal leadership in 1982 and his replacement by Bob Hawke in early 1983.

In 1991, with Richardson now a senior cabinet minister and still the man wielding the Right’s numbers in his home state, it was Hawke’s turn to be dethroned. Later, during a low point for the government following the 1993 election, Richardson was apparently manoeuvring against Keating. But by then, his clout had seriously declined.

He had entered the Senate in 1983 and was a key figure in shaping the national faction system within the Labor Party that has prevailed ever since. Alongside Robert Ray who led the Victorian Right, Richardson was able to play a formidably influential role in both matters of policy and the division of ministerial and other spoils.

Richardson’s dodgy associations continued to dog him as he rose to positions of greater power in the Hawke government. There was the “Love Boat” scandal, in which Australians were invited to picture a naked Richardson, along with other Sydney identities, frolicking with a prostitute on Sydney Harbour. The woman concerned later recanted the story, but the incident had again exposed Richardson’s tendency to become embroiled in scandal. The Enmore affair, as the Baldwin bashing was called, continued to dog him.

But another side to Richardson emerged in 1986: the man who had seen the light and converted to environmentalism. He credited an unlikely trip to Tasmania with Bob Brown to look at the forests for this surprising outcome.

But it wasn’t really such a surprise: the electoral potency of conservation was becoming too obvious for this famously astute operator to ignore. Following Labor’s victory at the 1987 election, Richardson became minister for the environment and the arts, entering the full Cabinet six months later with sport, tourism and territories added to his responsibilities.

Decisions to save forests in Queensland and Tasmania, and the protection from mining of Kakadu National Park, owed much to his growing influence.

Richardson must be considered instrumental in the longevity of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments, through the electoral deals with the Greens that these decisions facilitated, and his ability to extract large sums of money from the rich.

The latter, however, raised questions about the integrity of the government as well as its relationship to dodgy entrepreneurs. But the money was critical to the 1987 win and the Greens preferences to the slim 1990 victory, won on the back of a primary vote of less than 40%. Richardson played a central part in each case, but was furious after the 1990 election when Hawke tried to shunt him off to London as high commissioner. Instead, he took on the thankless social security portfolio.

The last years of Richardson’s career were mired in scandal. There was the Marshall Islands affair, when he was alleged to have sought to exercise influence on behalf of a businessman and friend who was also a cousin by marriage.

That led to his 1992 resignation as communications minister, the job Keating had given him on his elevation to the prime ministership. After time on the backbench, he was back as health minister following Keating’s surprise 1993 election win, but he retired from politics the following year.

Richardson subsequently had a lucrative career as a lobbyist and in the media. He was also a member of the Organising Committee for the Sydney Olympic Games.

He suffered declining health following a cancer diagnosis in 1999 but continued his work as a media commentator with fortitude. He had a son and daughter by his first marriage, to Cheryl, in 1973, and a son by a subsequent marriage to Amanda.

His chequered, contested career will loom large in any assessment of what the Australian Labor Party, and even Australian society, became in the final decades of the 20th century.