I was sorry to read about Graham Richardson’s illness and I hope he and his doctors prevail in his battle with cancer, which no longer is an automatic death sentence. Richo was the ALP’s quintessential boy in the smoke-filled back room, recalling in his memoir a session in his room at the Wrest Point Casino in an atmosphere of beer, whisky, smoke and bad breath.
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We saw events from opposite sides of the political divide, but he was always amusing. He could turn a phrase. He graduated from party official to the Senate and finally, in the Hawke government, to the ministry.
He worked hard for his party, rather than for any notion of the national interest. As an environment minister he seemed more concerned with Green Party preferences on polling day than with hugging trees. When our paths occasionally crossed he was both interesting in his views and amusing in his style. I quite liked him, until I had occasion the other day to consult his memoirs, published in 1994.
After the ALP’s 1990 win in the polls a journalist wrote that it was now not just a Bob Hawke and Treasurer Paul Keating government, but a Hawke-Keating-Richardson government, because of Richo’s election-winning ways.
Hawke, Richo’s great and good friend, was suddenly cool. Then there was the chopping and changing as Hawke selected his ministry. Richo was to lose the Environment. He wanted Transport and Communications, but it was promised to Kim Beasley. He was offered Social Security, but this was changed to Defence, then when Robert Ray refused the swap, back to Social Security, with during the negotiations, an offer of High Commissioner in London, which Richo wouldn’t take.
He ended up furious. “I’ll get the bastard,” he told Keating. “All I could think of was revenge,” he wrote in his memoirs, and set about using his skills of persuasion and manipulation to bring down Hawke as prime minister.
And so he did. The line was that Keating was more likely than Hawke to lead the ALP to victory next time. It was universally accepted, either as a sound judgement, or as a legitimate view. Hawke was overthrown. Keating did lead the ALP to a win, but eventually lost to John Howard in a landslide.
Keating wasn’t a good prime minister. After he had been in the job for a while, Howard came to the conclusion that Hawke was.
So what is the moral of this story? It is that the boys in the smoke-filled back room are quite likely to get it wrong. Further, it is the job of those elected to parliament to serve the country, not a cause. Parties are vital, but only because they provide the electorate with a choice.
