Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to pay tribute to a former minister, former senator and dear friend who we've recently lost, Graham Frederick Richardson. I use his full name because Frederick was the name of his dad, and the experience of his father and the battles that happened within the postal workers union formed a very significant part of Graham forming a view of the importance of winning on the notion of how personal political fights can be and, effectively, a big part of his formation and decision to be involved in the Labor Party.

People would know that Graham had been ill for some time, but his death was still unexpected when it came. Some years ago, he had some very major operations, but that was not the beginning of the challenges with his health. At the age of 16, there was a very serious car accident, and Graham had last rites twice. Both his parents died relatively young. Graham was always in a rush and always had a sense that he might not always be around.

On my political formation, a big part of it—some of it happened through my paper run and some of it happened through my concern about a series of environmental issues. But of those environmental issues the one that I was most passionate about was the Daintree Rainforest. I had posters of the Daintree in my bedroom. I was writing to the then prime minister, Bob Hawke, as a kid still at school. And, eventually, when I joined the Labor Party, at my first branch meeting, the person who followed me up the street after I left thinking, 'I might never go back to that again,' was someone with a mullet, in jeans and a black T-shirt, by the name of Morris Iemma, who had just started working as a speechwriter for Graham Richardson.

I saw a series of issues I'd been passionate about being delivered by Graham—the Daintree Rainforest and wet tropics. We all talk about the Daintree, but the world heritage listing went across the whole wet tropics. Don Henry from the Conservation Foundation used to refer to the meeting with Graham where the environmental groups were explaining that they really wanted to save the Daintree and maybe add some of these other forests to it as well, and it was Graham who leant back and said, 'It's an easier campaign just to do the lot at the start.'

It was a controversial campaign. While the Daintree had its incredible significance of being that spot where rainforest and reef meet, you had some communities who were very angry of it. It's sort of a lesson in the culture of protest that in that legendary visit—Graham was always willing to confront people he disagreed with and give them his view; he would often, in speeches, acknowledge that not everybody in the room voted Labor, but he believed they had a right to be wrong, and he would defend that right—when he turned up at Ravenshoe, it looked to the TV cameras like an absolute riot against him. There were people shouting. It had that apprehension of the possibility of violence. Graham, rather than being intimidated by it, the moment he got into the car to leave, with the shouting and what most people would have thought had been a disaster, he turned—I think it was to David Tierney who was the one in the car with him—and said, 'Well, we've just won that debate in the public', knowing exactly how it would look on the TV screens.

It wasn't just the Daintree but the lemonthyme forest in Tasmania, the southern forests and the work with Kakadu with respect to Coronation Hill. These are all legacies that will outlive Graham, are still there now and, as he would say, would even outlive his memory. These are conservation decisions that are around forever.

But of course while that was the issue that in many ways had got me active when I first joined the Labor Party—and Graham was such a champion of it—the speeches at the New South Wales state conference were something different. Most people have never been to a New South Wales Labor conference. It is a gathering of more than a thousand people in the Sydney Town Hall. To give a sense of it: the seats are not facing the stage; they're facing each other. It is a conference designed for conflict. There would be the champion of the Left. Speeches would be given by John Faulkner, and he would say some terrible things about the group that I was part of. In fact, from time to time John Faulkner would conclude his speech by saying: 'And the next thing that will happen in this debate will be that Graham Richardson will follow me. I haven't seen the speaking list, but every time I've spoken in the last 10 years Graham Richardson has followed me.' And he would.

We even had conferences that would get boring. When the conference got particularly boring, Graham and John would manufacture a fight just to keep the delegates interested and engaged. He had a way of expressing himself with absolute confidence and a way of asserting authority and power that he'd learnt from John Ducker and always attributed to John Ducker. It gave Richo a capacity to really be able to carry a majority. His description of what he expected of the delegates was always, 'You know who your friends are when they vote for you even when you are wrong.' There were a couple of occasions, including some resolutions—one in particular—that were fairly directly designed to stop someone from ever getting into the federal parliament. That fact that that's wrong is shown by the fact that that person is now Prime Minister of Australia.

When Graham came back to the ministry in 1993 after the Keating victory he became health minister, and I had the privilege of being the most junior member of his staff. In working for Graham I saw that capacity to engage with everybody, whether you agreed or disagreed, and to find a way of getting your agenda through. Prior to 1993 and in terms of engagement with different organisations—and this is something that sounds difficult to believe—the then Labor government had got to the point where the health minister and the head of the Australian Medical Association, the AMA, didn't talk and hadn't talked for years. There was no communication at all. The Australian Medical Association would run ads against Medicare and against the government at every election campaign. In response, the approach of the then ministers was to simply say, 'Well, we don't need to talk to you; there's no point.'

Richo decided that that wasn't the way to get things done and that if you wanted to have serious reform you needed to engage. But he had a technique. Every time a speech was being prepared for him—and Brett Gale, the speechwriter, and before him Morris Iemma, just had to put up with this—Graham would insist that every word of a speech be written out. The fully written speech would be there, and he would have approved the speech. He'd then wait until he got there and say to the audience: 'Well, I've been given a speech. You are not all good people, but you do not deserve this speech.' He'd bag the speech, put it to one side and then go.

The AMA one was a little bit different. Every time Brett Gale wrote a version of the speech, Graham said to him: 'Not tough enough'—they were the biggest donor to the Liberal campaign—'You need to go harder.' It went through four or five revisions until it was a blistering attack—that he was there as the first Labor minister to turn up to their conference in years. Graham then, having distributed the speech to the media, embargoed against delivery, said his usual thing about how he wasn't going to use the speech. But, instead of bagging it, he said: 'There's a speech that I've prepared. You've got copies of it. You deserve it. But at some point we need to start working together. One of us has to take the first step, and I'm taking that now.' That method of engagement—of just owning exactly where he disagreed with people, being crystal clear about it, of not taking a backward step but also saying, 'If we care about Australia, we have to find a way to work together'—was something that was a real shift. I have to say in an extraordinary way I really learnt from Graham.

I was devastated the day it was announced that he was resigning. For ministerial staff and electorate staff, as well, there is a real sense of 'what happens to me next?' on the day that the person you work for decides that they're leaving. Graham hit the phones and made sure that every single member of his staff was still going to be employed. He didn't have to do it but continued to do it. Some people on staff wanted books signed—one person asked for Machiavelli's The Prince to be signed—and I asked for a reference.

Graham wrote me a reference. It said: 'Reference for Anthony Stephen Burke. Tony is a mate. Graham Richardson.' He assured me it was all I would ever need. After politics, Graham kept in touch with his staff. There were annual gatherings for some time. Once I got into parliament, on the toughest days, the phone would ring and it would be Graham. It'd be Graham taking you through the different challenges and how he thought you might be able to find a way forward. Of course, the other time Graham would always be on the phone—and sometimes you'd get him more than once a day—was whenever there was leadership instability, because Graham always had a view on what he thought the future of the party should be, and he was not backward in giving his views on that.

Of course, he ended up post-politics with a wide variety of friendships, including on the other side of politics as well. Because of his work in recent years, I know that it's not just the Labor Party family that's grieving the loss of Graham. It's also people around the chamber and in the press gallery—in particular, his friends at Sky News.

Graham had a knack of getting different groups of people together for lunches. Every group probably thought they were the inner circle because once he'd settled on a group, that would be the group that would meet for the regular lunches. And he'd always be there. He'd choose the restaurant, he'd order the wine and he'd hold court and then listen and try to get his best sense as to where people were up to and where they were at. His dear friends Leo McLeay and Peter Baron were the inner circle, and it would have meant the world to Graham that, at the moment that he passed, two of the people in the room there with him were Leo McLeay and Peter Baron.

I've known Graham's family for almost as long as I knew Graham. You all knew when my birthday was because I announced it to parliament. When it was my birthday, I got a message that night from Richo, saying, 'We need to have lunch again.' And the next day he said who he was going to invite to the lunch, and, of course, it was the same group of us, where he pretended that we were the only lunch group that would get together. My birthday was on the Tuesday, the message about having lunch was on the Wednesday, and on the Saturday my phone lit up with 'Graham Richardson'. But it wasn't Graham on the phone; it was Amanda. And Amanda—it was only hours after they'd lost Graham—explained how suddenly everything had come on. The day before, for the first time—even though Richo had had, as I said, last rites back when he was 16; he'd had some terrible moments of health—he'd acknowledged he was dying. He died in the very early hours of that morning. But Amanda said that Graham was committed. No matter how much pain he was in—he wasn't living comfortably—he was determined to stay alive to see D'Arcy finish school. D'Arcy finished his final exam the day before, and Graham was able to deliver on that commitment. The friendships of the people who were around the table at Graham's lunches will all continue. My personal friendship with Amanda, and, I hope, her growing friendship with D'arcy, is something that I hope to carry for all of my life.

The advice and the understanding of what can be achieved in this place was often achieved with Graham always wanting to maintain the facade of the tough, no-compromises politician, with the title of his book Whatever It Takes. But I've got to say that's not the person I saw. I saw the moments of deep disappointment. I saw the moments of frailty and working issues through. I also saw the moments where he knew but wasn't telling us that he was going to leave, and he decided the best thing he could do as health minister—while he still had the authority and all his colleagues and the expenditure review people putting the budget together thought he was staying—was to use all his political capital to try to get the best possible outcome for Indigenous health. And he did that. He waited for it to get through and, once the cabinet decision had been made on that, decided it was time to tap the mat.

Australia is a better place because Graham Richardson decided to engage in politics, and the Labor Party has had a mentor who we have deeply valued and who was a strong character, a tough character and at times an uncompromising character. Graham would be the first to acknowledge he wasn't perfect, but I'm so glad we had him and I'm so glad that his family were willing to share him with Australia. God bless Richo. We miss you. All the best.

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