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The world feels like it is tilting on its axis as I duck out of Parliament House to meet Dennis Richardson for lunch. At that moment, Anthony Albanese is holding a press conference announcing he is slashing the fuel excise to rein in soaring fuel prices. After more than a month, the war in the Middle East seems to be spiralling out of control, with Trump’s end game a mirage. There’s no hint of this chaos in leafy, tranquil Manuka, a well-to-do Canberra suburb a 10-minute drive from parliament. It’s a sparkling early autumn afternoon and barely anyone is around.
A restaurant lunch on a busy news day feels like an indulgence for a foreign affairs reporter, but I’m meeting someone well-placed to help untangle the geopolitical questions swirling around in my mind like clothes in a washing machine. Richardson and I are meeting at Belluci’s, a mainstay for Canberra’s political class searching for good pasta and gossip. An advantage over its rivals: it’s open for lunch on Mondays.
Richardson, 78, arrives looking relaxed in a Canberra Raiders polo shirt. A rugby league obsessive, he has been a board member of the club for 15 years and its chair for four. I’m more interested in his status as an undisputed doyen of Australia’s national security and foreign policy community. Richardson served as secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Department of Defence. On top of that, he represented Australia in Washington during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama eras and led domestic spy agency ASIO for nine years. Even in retirement, he is regularly called upon to review troubled government agencies and recommend changes.
Most recently, Richardson dominated the headlines in March for quitting his role as special adviser to the antisemitism royal commission in rather spectacular fashion. He is happy to meet, but on one proviso: he doesn’t want to talk about his shock departure from the royal commission. After some hesitation, I decide to proceed, hopeful he’ll become less resistant once we start talking.
First, though, the big issues of the day. Assessing the war with Iran, Richardson says you’ve got to “carry a lot of different views in your head at one time, and they can be quite contradictory”. Yes, the Iranian regime is a menace with nuclear weapons ambitions. Yes, Trump seems to have launched the war with little forethought. Yet, now the war is raging, it is crucial that Iran does not emerge a strategic victor by controlling the passage of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz.
Richardson is no fan of Trump, lamenting his “contemptible” and “abusive” attitude to America’s traditional friends. “You can understand a lot of people globally questioning US credibility and reliability,” he says. “I can understand why a lot of Australians would feel dispirited in the America they see today.”
So is there a case for a bit more straight-talking from Australia when Trump disparages his allies and embarks on poorly considered military frolics? “No,” he says firmly. “The Australian government is not paid by the taxpayer to let fly and give them five seconds of warm inner glow by saying things that wreck the relationship with the US … The idea they should be calling Trump out is just rubbish.”
While Trump’s America may be increasingly erratic and self-interested, Richardson says China’s rise means we need to hug Washington as close as possible and keep it engaged in our region. The key, he says, is to “not allow emotion to get in the way of it”.
Richardson was born in Kempsey in northern NSW, but was raised mostly in Albury, near the Victorian border. His father was a railway shunter; his mother a railway barmaid and cleaner. He says his parents were unionists who went on strike occasionally, but weren’t overly political. Richardson was a current affairs addict from a young age, listening to ABC radio news religiously from the age of 12 and devouring news magazines. It was only when he moved to study at the University of Sydney on a teacher’s scholarship he realised he was from a working-class family.
When he realised he wasn’t passionate about teaching, his honours supervisor Neville Meaney, a historian of Australian foreign policy, suggested he seek a graduate job at what was then called the Department of External Affairs. He got it, leading to postings in Nairobi, Port Moresby and Jakarta. Travelling with Bob Hawke on overseas trips as a foreign policy adviser won him the prime minister’s trust and eventually the job of Hawke’s chief of staff. When John Howard came to office, he continued climbing up the bureaucratic ladder.
Andrew Taylor
When Howard appointed Richardson to the prestigious position of ambassador to the US, Meaney told Sydney University’s alumni magazine: “There is a kind of low-key ease about his style in which he listens to what you have to say and does so in the most amiable way … There’s nothing of pomposity or pretentiousness. There’s a certain simple kind of quality to his personality.”
This is evident in his approach to fashion – even as a top public servant Richardson eschewed ties, except when meeting the prime minister of the day – and food. Richardson has dined at oodles of fancy restaurants with wife Betty, a real estate agent, but says he is “not a foodie per se”.
“One of my favourite meals is simply a steak without any sauce and with french fries. Whenever we go to a good restaurant, a common question I ask is, ‘What are your french fries like?’ Invariably, you’ll get some restaurants who say, ‘Ours are not like McDonald’s.’ To which I always say, ‘But I like McDonald’s!’”
I kick myself that I didn’t know this beforehand. I’ve lost my chance to make history as the first journalist from this newspaper to conduct a “Lunch with” interview over a Big Mac, Coke and fries.
Our meals have already arrived: prawn linguine for Richardson, which he promptly slashes into small pieces, and a red sauce pancetta penne for me, which has a welcome kick of chilli. I’m glad he takes the initiative by suggesting we go old-school and order wine. Beholden to no boss, he tells photographer Alex Ellinghausen he is happy to be photographed with his glass of chardonnay.
Speaking to Richardson, I can see why he prospered under both sides of politics. He talks in direct, no-nonsense sentences, avoiding jargon and abstractions. But he makes his interventions carefully, strategically. You need dexterity, not dogmatism, to prosper as an apolitical public servant in Canberra. Explaining his approach to offering politicians advice, he says: “Being frank and fearless is not about walking in and getting something off your chest. Being frank and fearless is about influencing. If you want influence, you have got to seek to understand the government and what drives it. You’ve got to understand the personality of the prime minister and the minister you’re working with. You have got to pick your fights. You’re not going to win everything.”
I ask for an example of a time he strongly disagreed with a government decision but had to implement it. Richardson nominates the introduction of dual citizenship in Australia. A strong believer that citizens should only be loyal to one country, he helped fend off the change in the 1990s, but by 2002 he had lost the battle. He sucked it up, keeping his concerns private.
Richardson’s circumspection, however, vanished when he announced his resignation from the royal commission with almost shocking candour. In a blaze of media interviews he said he believed he was being overpaid at $5500 a day, felt like he was being treated as a glorified research officer and wasn’t sufficiently challenged by his work. More substantially, he expressed his fear that royal commissioner Virginia Bell would take too long to deliver any concrete recommendations about intelligence and policing agencies.
Richardson insists he has “no interest in becoming a bloody commentator about the royal commission. It is in our interest that the royal commission succeed”. But the topic is not off limits.
“After I resigned, I had someone come up to me on a plane and say, ‘Look, I really admired your integrity.’ I said to them, ‘It had nothing to do with integrity’,” he recalls. “It’s just that, if you don’t think you’re being listened to, or if you think you’re going to have minimal influence, then what the hell are you doing? It had less to do with integrity and more to do with job satisfaction.”
Albanese originally appointed Richardson to conduct a standalone review into intelligence and policing agencies after the Bondi attack. He says he had no qualms when his probe was folded into the royal commission, but the merger ultimately became untenable. In fact, it was more of a takeover.
To those who say public confidence in the royal commission would have been better served by him staying put and keeping shtum, he declares he had no regrets. “I am perfectly relaxed about it. I wasn’t prepared to essentially work as I did 40 years ago. I reached a view that, rightly or wrongly, my voice was not going to carry much weight at all.” While he respects Bell, a former High Court judge, he says their different styles proved incompatible. And she, as the royal commissioner, was the boss.
Despite stepping down, he remains passionate about the need to tackle antisemitism. He fears, because of the small size of the Jewish community, which numbers about 110,000 people, most Australians don’t care enough about the problem. It is a national disgrace, he argues, that Jewish schools and childcare centres require armed guards, while those a block away do not.
“I’ve argued with highly intelligent, well-meaning people who’ve said to me that every Jewish Australian carries moral responsibility for Gaza, and they do not see that as being antisemitic. I’ve spoken to a lot of Australians who’ve said to me, ‘Oh yeah, there were 15 people killed at Bondi, but look at all the people who’ve been killed in Gaza.’ Sorry, what are you saying? Are you saying it’s legitimate to kill 15 innocent people because of Gaza or because they’re Jewish then that’s somehow understandable?”
Suddenly, the laid-back tone that has dominated our conversation vanishes. Frustration, even anger, fills his voice.
Despite his professional differences with Bell, he says she was “dead right” to make clear the royal commission will focus on antisemitism rather than try to examine other forms of prejudice in detail. “The people who want it to be very broad are people who want it to address everything and nothing, and they want to pretend that antisemitism is no different to being a bit anti-Catholic, a bit anti-Muslim, a bit anti-Hindu. Bullshit! It is something very different, and the small percentile of Jewish Australians feel that.”
The royal commission, he believes, will ultimately arrive at the right destination. But he remains adamant any recommendations on law enforcement and intelligence agencies must be handed to the government soon after hearings are held on these topics. “They can’t leave them until the end of the year.”
As our post-lunch coffees arrive I ask him how he feels about the world he is handing over to his grandchildren. He refuses to submit to gloom, despite the upending of the global order we seem to be living through. He finds it amusing that some look back at the Cold War as a time of relative stability. He doesn’t remember it that way. “People didn’t know where the world was going to take them in Roman times, or when Napoleon was rolling across Europe,” he says, swirling foam into his cappuccino. “People didn’t know where the First World War was going to take them, or the Second World War. People don’t know where Iran is going to take us. I mean, the human condition is full of uncertainty and ambiguity, and unless you’re comfortable with that, you spend your life chasing shadows.”
I find this sweep of history, this ode to doubt, oddly comforting. The immensity of now feels a bit less claustrophobic. Paying the bill, my heart rate is lower than when I arrived.
Insisting he has plenty of spare time now he is untethered to the royal commission, Richardson gives me a lift back to Capital Hill. I steal a moment of stillness in the sunshine before re-entering the maelstrom of parliament. During the drive we have made a vow: for our next lunch, we are going to McDonald’s.
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