Former Labor party powerbroker Graham ‘Richo’ Richardson dies at 76 | Labor party

Former New South Wales senator and Labor power broker Graham “Richo” Richardson has died aged 76.

His death was announced Saturday morning.

The former political power broker, who was a NSW senator from 1983 to 1994, had been struggling with worsening health problems for several years. He was first diagnosed with cancer more than a quarter of a century ago.

Richardson became general secretary of the NSW Labor Party aged just 27, at a time marked by violence within the party.

Richardson was just 33 when he was elected as a NSW senator in the 1983 election that brought Bob Hawke to power. He was promoted to environment minister after the 1987 elections and later held cabinet positions, including the sports and social security portfolios.

Richardson was seen as the key architect of Hawke’s ouster as prime minister in favor of Paul Keating in 1991.

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Throughout his career, Richardson was seen as a ruthless power broker on the Labor Party’s right wing. He was informally known as the “minister in charge of the kneecaps”, such was his reputation as a party room enforcer.

Former health minister Neal Blewett described him as the “Antipodean Machivaelli” and “chief defender of vested interests”. Former foreign secretary Gareth Evans said Richardson’s “willingness to do whatever it takes… is not always a recipe for good, principled government”.

Richardson’s autobiography, published when he resigned from the Senate in 1994, was titled Whatever It Takes.

Although Richardson has been involved in numerous scandals throughout his career, he has never been found guilty of any wrongdoing.

He appeared before two royal commissions: into party donations; and responding to allegations by a prostitute (who later recanted) that he had sex on a boat in Sydney harbour. The Marshall Islands Affair of 1991, in which Richardson allegedly used his ministerial position to help his cousin, eventually forced him to resign from the cabinet. He spent the remainder of his parliamentary career on the back benches.

Richardson was linked to a prostitution ring in 1994 and settled with the tax office in 2008 over an undisclosed Swiss bank account.

Richardson served as a board member of the Sydney Olympic Games Organizing Committee, including as mayor of the athletes’ village during the 2000 Games.

He later gained a reputation as an unapologetically fiery media commentator.

Journalist Marian Wilkinson wrote a book about Richardson called The Fixer in 1996.

He wrote: “He was not a politician who believed in the hard lines of black and white; he moved between those lines. He would say: If it wasn’t going to put him in jail, it wasn’t wrong. It was this attitude that gave Richardson the edge. But it also brought his political career to the brink of disaster more than once.”

Richardson became an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2020.

He was married twice, first to Cheryl Gardner, with whom he had two children. He had another son with his second wife, Amanda, whom he married in 2007.

More details coming soon…