There is a joke circulating among NSW Labor veterans about Graham Richardson’s state funeral: “It will be the only funeral where the pallbearers are lobbyists.” 

It is a good line. It gets a laugh. But it points to something darker than simple corruption.

Richardson did not just bend the rules for personal gain.  He helped formalise what Bernard Keane calls a “two-speed democracy”: one in which ordinary voters get to cast a ballot every three years, while those with money can purchase direct, ongoing influence over decision-makers, with Richardson taking his personal cut for arranging the meeting.

What makes Anthony Albanese’s decision to grant a state funeral so revealing is this: the Prime Minister knows all this. Not distantly, not academically, but personally.

As a young Labor Left activist in NSW, Albanese was one of Richardson’s bitter internal enemies. He knew chapter and verse of Richardson’s operations: the corrupt dealings, the organised crime connections, the systematic abuse of power. He watched Richardson use factional muscle to exclude and marginalise the Left. He saw, close up, how Richo monetised access and converted public office into private advantage.

Yet here he is, decades later, granting him a state funeral. Is it Stockholm Syndrome?

The question is not whether Albanese has forgotten. The question is whether this is his confession.

Richardson himself was disarmingly candid about the business model. He once wrote:

“The concept of paying for access is not new. I wore it as a badge of honour when I was raising serious money for Labor. For those who were prepared to kick in the big bucks, I had the standard phrase: you will be guaranteed access to the ministers who will make decisions that affect you, but you will never be guaranteed a favourable outcome.”

Direct. Unapologetic. Brazen.

And that, that precise ethic, is what Albanese is about to honour with a state funeral at St Mary’s Cathedral on 9 December.

Heritage, Ideology and the Rewriting of History

This matters far beyond the personal corruption of one dead man, or even the institutional capture of one political party.

When a major political movement honours someone who systematically trashed its stated principles, something deeper is at stake: the party’s sense of itself, its heritage, its ideological memory, the story it tells its members about who they are. What they stand for.

Labor was founded on a simple, radical premise: that organised workers could collectively resist the power of capital. That democracy was a tool for working people, not a commodity for sale. That the party existed to represent workers, fight to redress injustice, make reforms; not to extract wealth from an elite for the benefit of insiders and mates.

Richardson’s career represented the systematic inversion of the Labor premise. Access was no longer something earned by public mandate; it was something you bought. Policy was no longer something argued over at conference; it was something adjusted at lunch.

Now, by granting him a state funeral, the current Labor leadership is doing something more dangerous than merely forgiving the past. It is rewriting the party’s memory of itself.

George Orwell warned of this in Politics and the English Language. Control the past, he understood, and you control the present. Rewrite history, erase inconvenient truths, redefine words to mean their opposite: these are not just linguistic tricks. They are the tools of tyranny.

When a party begins to remake its own heritage so that corruption becomes “service”, transactionalism becomes “pragmatism” and the systematic abuse of power is recast as the legitimate exercise of influence, it is engaged in something deeply totalitarian.

Look at Trump.

A state funeral is not just an honour to a dead man. It is a way to instruct the living. To say to the rank and file: this is what we were always really about. This is what we really value.

Not solidarity, but access for a fee. Not workers’ power, but a two-speed democracy where real influence is for sale. The bigger the donor, the bigger the say.

The mythology around Richardson that Bob Hogg has toiled to correct, the false narrative that he “won” the 1990 election, that he was the kingmaker who delivered the Hawke and Keating governments, is part of this same project of historical revision.

Create a heroic narrative. Erase the messy bits. Redefine the past to suit the present.

The Eulogy Versus the Record

When Albanese released his tribute after Richardson’s death, he deployed the full language of statecraft:

• a Labor “giant”
• a “remarkable Australian”
• a life embodying “service, calling, art and craft”
• a “powerful blend of passion and pragmatism”
• a “lifetime of wisdom”

It is language designed to canonise, to distance a man’s public image from the details of how he actually lived. But to many who knew Richo, it reads like a parody.

Two decades of investigative journalism paint a different picture. A picture of Dorian Gray.

Kate McClymont has documented Richardson’s career with forensic precision:

• the Sheraton subpoena served as he left a hotel room with two sex workers
• the “Cheshire” account in Switzerland used to hide shareholdings in the Offset Alpine printing plant
• the 53 million dollar insurance payout on Christmas Eve 1993 for a plant worth a tenth of that amount
• a one million dollar transfer from his Swiss account to Beirut, apparently Eddie Obeid’s cut of the scam
• sex workers used as currency in political favour trading
• an 80 thousand dollar payment for facilitating Obeid’s path into parliament

These are not colourful anecdotes. They are the load-bearing pillars of Richo’s career.

McClymont’s line is worth dwelling on: “Richo’s lucky escapes were legendary.”

Of course, “luck” is ironic. Every transaction, the investigative journalist describes, was potentially prosecutable. Each was investigated. None resulted in conviction.

Luck? Try institutional capture: the machinery of power functioning exactly as designed, bending to accommodate its own while maintaining just enough deniability to survive.

Seen in that light, Albanese’s decision to grant a state funeral is not a sentimental gesture toward a flawed comrade. It is political theatre. The modern Labor Party no longer sees Richardson’s methods as aberrant. It sees them as heritage.

What State Funerals Are Supposed To Be For

Traditionally, state funerals recognise special achievement in public life. They honour service to democracy, not contempt for it. They celebrate those who strengthened democratic institutions and norms.

Richardson strengthened nothing of the kind. He eroded them. His contempt for democracy mirrored his contempt for the rule of law. He did not truly believe in either. What Richo believed in was the two-speed system he engineered. And in Richo. Whatever It Takes, he entitled a memoir.

Ordinary people voted. Real power was sold.

Access was for fossil fuel companies, property developers, gambling interests, banks, consultants, mining companies, anyone with money and a need. Under his model, the ALP became a broker of influence, taking a cut from every deal.

We are still living in that system. Labor continues to prosper from it, “soaking up millions in donations from fossil fuel companies, gambling companies, the hospitality lobby”, as Bernard Keane notes. No wonder factional apparatchiks and party hacks like Richard Marles hail Richardson as a “hero”. They are operating from his playbook.

Richardson’s first brush with political death came when he tried to interfere in the judicial processes of the Marshall Islands on behalf of relative Greg Symons. His second came with the prostitution scandals. But his real crime, the one that should have disqualified him from public life, was this: he proved you could systematically undermine democratic principles, corrupt the rule of law and escape meaningful accountability, provided you had enough money, enough lawyers and enough mates in politics and media.

That is the lesson Labor’s current leadership has clearly learned. And learned well.

The Myth That Calcified Into Orthodoxy

There is another layer here, one that Bob Hogg’s recent intervention exposes with uncomfortable clarity.

Hogg ran Labor’s 1990 election campaign, the victory that supposedly cemented Richardson’s reputation as a political genius. The myth goes like this: Richo’s brilliant deal making with the Greens rescued Hawke’s government and delivered a fourth term.

That is not what happened.

According to Hogg, Richardson nearly lost the election. Richo’s high profile bromance with Bob Brown and the Greens alienated traditional Labor voters so badly that Hogg had to confront Hawke and argue for a complete strategic pivot. Hogg then implemented a second preference strategy, which Richardson opposed, that actually saved the government.

Mid campaign, Richardson’s verdict was blunt:

“Mate, we are fucked, we cannot win this one.”

He was not being prophetic. He was giving up.

Labor’s primary vote in 1990 was 37.8 per cent, the lowest of its time in office. The election was won on preferences, on Hogg’s strategy, not Richardson’s brilliance.

And yet the mythology persists. Albanese invoked it. Journalists repeat it. The lie is alive and well. The fact that Hogg had to publicly correct it, had to remind current leaders that Richardson nearly lost the 1990 election, says something chilling about Labor’s institutional memory.

It remembers what flatters the current establishment, not what happened. This is the labour movement’s own myth making: the convenient lie that serves the power structure.

The Counterpoint: Where Brown’s Defence Matters, and Where It Does Not

To be fair, Richardson did sometimes wield his influence for environmental protection. Bob Brown credits him with helping to save the Franklin River in the 1980s. That intervention was real. It mattered. It showed that even a machine politician could, under enough pressure, bend towards principle.

The Franklin is worth acknowledging. It is also worth understanding as the exception that proves the rule.

For every river saved, there is a pattern. For every environmental victory, there is a career defined not by stewardship but by transactional calculus. Brown is right that Richardson brought up climate change in cabinet in 1988. He is also right that Richardson facilitated the rise of Eddie Obeid, whose mining interests warped NSW politics for decades.

Richardson provided cover for factional violence. In the 1980 bashing of Peter Baldwin, underworld figure Joe Meissner named Richardson as instigator. He built a NSW Labor machine that routinely prioritised developer and mining interests over environmental protection.

Brown’s defence is honest as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. One good act, or several, cannot atone the of a career spent converting public power into private advantage.

The Franklin River cannot wash away systemic corruption.

What matters about Brown’s intervention is that it is being offered at all. It suggests a need to defend Richardson’s legacy, to offer a redemptive frame. But redemption requires accountability first, and accountability is precisely what Richardson, in life and now in death, has never faced.

The Machine for Conversion

This is what the state funeral actually signals. Not sentimental tribute. Not recognition of a few environmental wins.

Something colder: an announcement that modern Labor has not just forgiven Richardson’s methods, but embraced them.

The party that once claimed to represent workers has become a machine for conversion.

• It converts public office into private gain.
• It converts solidarity into spin.
• It converts climate commitments into mining accommodations.
• It converts superannuation security into precarious labour markets.
• It converts the language of workers’ rights into corporate donation protocols.

A state funeral for a man whose career was built on these conversions is not an anomaly.

It is a confession.

The Media’s Role In Richardson’s Impunity

One final piece of the story demands attention: Richardson’s escape from accountability was not just the work of politics. It was enabled by the media.

As Charlie Lewis wrote in Crikey, Richardson lived “a life defined by euphemisms”.

• Powerbroker.
• Hard nosed realist.
• Numbers man.
• Fixer.

The language around him, and he received plenty of it, was carefully calibrated to elevate, not condemn. Even The Australian, in its memorial, could only bring itself to describe his role in the Marshall Islands passports affair as “a misplaced, misjudged attempt to help an old Labor friend”.

That is not just soft pedalling. That is euphemism as institutional practice.

A key part of Richardson’s strategy was cultivating media bosses, first Kerry Packer, then the Murdochs. Once installed in that world, he could pose as a commentator, serially predicting Labor’s imminent destruction, the very party from which he had made so much money. He kept peddling influence while drawing a salary as a pundit.

To their credit, the Nine newspapers ultimately told the truth. McClymont did the forensic work. The Sydney Morning Herald editorialised clearly about what kind of crook he was. The Financial Review dropped the euphemisms entirely.

Others did not. The Murdoch outlets that employed Richardson protected their asset. They gave him platforms and respectability. They laundered him.

No one can claim they did not know. Mark Latham, hardly a friend of the Left, shredded him on air in 2018, rattling off his record in painful detail.

Yet Richardson remained a figure of standing in much of the media. While that tolerance remains, while outlets keep giving platforms to the Richardsons and Obeids of politics, why should we expect anything better from today’s heirs of Richo?

The media created the space in which he could operate with impunity. And it is still creating that space for others.

The Art of Ambiguity: When Lobbying Is Just “Having a Yarn”

What many people do not grasp about Richardson is that he invented something new in Australian politics: the politician as permanent fixer.

He did not simply retire and become a lobbyist. He became a person who could glide seamlessly between “party business” and “client business” in ways that were deliberately impossible to disentangle.

He knew the pressure points, the gatekeepers, the timetables of government. More importantly, he taught others how to monetise that knowledge, how to turn the access acquired on the public payroll into private profit.

A single meeting could be framed as party strategy or as client lobbying, and often it was both. That deliberate ambiguity allowed plausible deniability for everyone involved.

He was a master of the unspoken deal: the old mate dropping in on a minister; the yarn about party tactics that, by sheer coincidence, advanced a client’s interests; the favour that could later be denied because no formal request was ever recorded.

NSW Labor has been playing this game for decades. Richardson perfected it.

The tragedy is that Labor never closed the gap he opened. It widened it. The same patterns persist today, now normalised.

The staffer who becomes an MP, then a consultant, then a lobbyist with platinum level access.
The minister who cannot quite say when a chat with an old comrade stops being friendship and starts being lobbying.

The ambiguity benefits everyone except the public.

The Keating Silence

One detail is instructive in its absence.

Paul Keating, whose career Richardson did so much to advance, helping him to the NSW Labor presidency, then orchestrating his ascent to the prime ministership, has been conspicuously silent since Richardson’s death.

Tributes have poured in from across politics: Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott, Josh Frydenberg, Richard Marles, even some of Richardson’s old enemies.

But not Keating.

That silence speaks more loudly than a dozen eulogies. It suggests that Keating, whatever debts he may owe Richardson, recognises something about this moment that the current Labor leadership does not: that this is not an honour you want your name attached to.

The state funeral is not simply a tribute. It is a confession. And some people at least know better than to stand too close to it.

The Reckoning That Will Not Come, But Should

The question that matters is not whether Richardson was corrupt. The record is clear to the point of embarrassment.

The question is why the party that produced him, documented his behaviour across two decades and watched him escape accountability at every turn now chooses to honour him as a “giant”.

The answer is simple and damning: because today’s Labor leadership recognises in Richardson not a cautionary tale, but a template, one they have already adopted.

On 9 December, at St Mary’s Cathedral, we will see that recognition performed publicly. We will hear eulogies designed to elevate, to consecrate, to distance a man’s actual life from the way he actually lived. We will see the full ceremony of state honours applied to a career built on the systematic corruption of democratic principles.

That ceremony will be the moment Labor stops pretending. The moment it admits, out loud and on camera, that Richardson’s methods are not an embarrassment to be repudiated but an inheritance to be celebrated.

But that is not what should happen.

A party with basic ethics and a genuine concern for democracy would not be lavishing a state funeral on a grub like Richardson. It would be working out how to ensure we never have to endure a Richo again.

That would mean:

• Ending the two-speed democracy by dumping cash for access politics. Ban political donations from non voters and foreign interests. If you cannot vote in a country, you should not be able to buy influence in its government.
• Enforcing parliamentary disclosure rules with real penalties. Richardson’s entire career relied on opacity. Make concealment illegal, not merely frowned upon.
• Linking parliamentary superannuation to integrity. If you are later found to have corrupted your office, even years after leaving parliament, you lose the pension. Make corruption hurt.
• Fixing the abuse of office laws at federal level. Right now they are effectively toothless. Give them teeth.
• Reforming defamation law. Richardson used litigation as a weapon to intimidate journalists like McClymont. Reform should make it easier and cheaper to report corruption in the public interest.

None of this will happen under Albanese. Instead, Labor will grant Richardson a state funeral and keep operating off his playbook. It will keep taking donations from fossil fuel and mining interests. It will keep pursuing policies that serve donors over workers. It will keep formalising the two-speed democracy Richardson pioneered.

Because the uncomfortable truth is this: Richardson’s career did not corrupt Labor. Labor became the kind of party that now sees his methods as ancestral.

The state funeral is simply the moment it finally says so out loud.

And here lies the deeper peril. Labor has always been vulnerable to accusations of governing for insiders and mates. In the modern era, that vulnerability has become acute.

Too many Labor MPs and ministers have spent their entire working lives inside the political bubble, as staffers, advisers, lobbyists, union officials. Many have never worked in an ordinary job or struggled to meet an ordinary mortgage. For them, politics is not a vocation but a career path: party organiser to safe seat to lobbying firm.

Albanese presents himself as a grassroots reformer, but he has spent his whole life inside the machine. He has no compelling voice now for Labor ideals, no real call to action, no discernible road map for the future. What he has is a record majority and complacency.

The biggest risk to Labor does not come from its enemies. It comes from itself: from the inertia, the corruption, the sense that the party is listening to insiders and lobbyists rather than ordinary voters. That is the culture Richardson created. That is the culture the state funeral will entrench.

And here is what Labor’s strategists seem not to grasp: by canonising Richardson, they have handed their enemies, the Murdoch press, the Coalition, the Advance machine with its corporate money and messaging apparatus, a perfect weapon.

Every scandal that touches Labor from now on, every allegation of insider dealing or corporate capture, every revelation about donations, access or favours for the powerful will be framed through Richardson’s legacy.

The opposition and the media will have the footage from St Mary’s, Albanese’s soaring eulogies about Richardson’s “service” and “wisdom”, and McClymont’s cold, factual catalogue of his corruption. They will have the contrast between Labor’s rhetoric on integrity and its decision to honour a man who embodied transactionalism. They will have a simple story: Labor has not changed, except to become more honest about its true nature.

Far from insulating Labor, the state funeral becomes a permanent advertisement for everything its critics say about it: that it is a machine for converting public office into private gain; that it prioritises insiders over workers; that it is indistinguishable from the corrupt systems it once claimed to oppose.

That footage will run in attack ads. It will be quoted in Coalition speeches, in The Australian, on Sky News.

Albanese has handed his opponents ammunition that will last beyond the next election. Every time Labor tries to claim the moral high ground on integrity or democratic standards, the images from St Mary’s will be there, a visual statement that the party does not, in practice, believe in those things.

It believes in Richardson. It believes in the two-speed democracy. It believes in access for donations.

That is the gift the Prime Minister has just given to the Coalition, the Murdoch press and everyone else who wants to prove that Labor has become exactly what Richardson always was.