Richo’s racket masks the dysfunction of the NSW right

Graham Richardson

Labor identity … Graham Richardson .Picture: Cameron Richardson
Source: The Daily Telegraph





THERE are three emerging camps in the Labor caucus. Anyone but Gillard, Anyone but Rudd and Anyone but Gillard or Rudd.


Graham Richardson, the former Labor senator, NSW Labor fixer and numbers man, is obviously in the latter.

And that means you can assume many of his mates in the NSW right are as well.

Considering Richardson has tried to take credit for a role in Rudd’s downfall, it is not surprising that he would seek to play a role in ensuring he doesn’t return. But it’s easy to be dismissive of Richardson’s views of what is going on inside the Labor caucus at the moment.

As Rudd himself tried to say, in his own unique way, part of Richo’s motivation is to re-invent himself as the dominant Labor political commentator for which he gets paid a handsome sum.

But that would be to gloss over what is actually going on and not to give him credit he is due.

Richardson, while no longer a Labor fixer, plays an important role in the messaging from the dysfunctional faction that was once the mighty NSW right.

Richardson, through his merciless bagging of Julia Gillard, obviously believes that this government is so incompetent it needs to be got rid of.

He has savaged it on issues such as asylum seekers and gay marriage, where has sought to put a different position.

But what Richardson doesn’t do is suggest any of his mates in the NSW’s right have anything to do with the current malaise despite the fact they put Gillard in the job.

It is these men who are now looking after the modern day version of Richo’s NSW machine.

It is these ministers, who Richardson is close to, who unreservedly follow Gillard’s direction and are the ones propping her up, rather than fighting for more sensible policy outcomes.

And they are vehemently anti-Rudd. In fact they and the other right wing powerbrokers can be assumed to be to the ones quietly putting around the notion of Defence Minister Stephen Smith as a third possible candidate just to stop Rudd.

Which give a context to Richardson’s bizarre outing of two little known backbenchers, Alan Griffin, from Victoria, and Mark Bishop, from WA, last week as being the numbers men behind a return to Rudd in a bid to discredit any thought of a Rudd revival.

Richardson has also publicly spruiked the virtues of Smith in the knowledge the NSW right has no viable candidate of its own to run interference should Rudd challenge. Smith and Richardson are also close.

Then again, Richardson in the past has admitted himself that his public utterances on issues of leadership cannot be believed.

In his book, Whatever it Takes, published in 1996, Richardson revealed that in dark arts of leadership transition nothing is as it seems. On explaining his interview with Bob Hawke on the Labor-owned 2KY, in which he said that there was no second challenge underway for Keating, he said: “To achieve that goal successfully, I had to lie from time to time which I did”.

If Richardson was to provide an honest commentary of where the government’s problems stem from apart from the obvious, rather than doing its bidding, he would be looking at the NSW right’s own incompetence and its inability to articulate a position that doesn’t disadvantage its own long term interests.

 

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