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Of course there had to be an unpaid restaurant bill. Among the late Graham Richardson’s liabilities, published by this masthead on Thursday, was an $18,536.75 debt to Golden Century for “Wake expenses”. Plus $1932 for “Funeral expense” and half of a $1645 “Pension overpayment”.
Far be it from The Sydney Morning Herald to question the late fixer’s affairs and his commingling of public moneys with private business, but … wait, what? Golden Century, having gone into voluntary administration in 2021, reopened a few months before Richardson’s death in 2025. After a (fittingly) pricey wake from his favourite Chinese, Richo then did a posthumous runner, leaving the payment to be duked out between his widow, Amanda, and his daughter, Kate Ausden.
The main expense for the funeral itself, at St James’ Church in King Street, was borne by you and me, via a request for a Commonwealth state service granted by the prime minister. Richardson was raised Catholic but lapsed, and the funeral was shifted to the Anglican St James’ after reported “differences” between Richardson’s family and the Catholic St Mary’s Cathedral. Ah well, whatever it takes.
The range of speakers and guests was certainly catholic in its breadth. Anthony Albanese and Tony Abbott spoke at the pulpit. Tanya Plibersek and Tony Burke shared the pews with Alan Jones, Barnaby Joyce and Matt Canavan. In death, Richo brought the great and good together in the kind of power-clubbiness that made you think politics is just a show, and the real game is the one conducted by what Slate founding editor Jacob Weisberg recently called “history’s dark connectors”.
“Every society that sustains a sharp divide between its professed standards and its lived arrangements will produce people whose business is managing it,” Weisberg wrote, pointing to examples from Jeffrey Epstein and Roy Cohn to Grigori Rasputin and fiction’s great “dark connectors” such as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby and Littlefinger in Game of Thrones.
“The dark connector cultivates an aura of special access,” Weisberg wrote. “He thrives on impatience with process and on the perennial belief of the powerful that their problems are too singular to be handled by ordinary means.”
Dark connectors are ruthlessly discarded when they become a liability, but Richo managed to maintain his grip from the grave, be it through the pre-death dispersal of his assets (no “death taxes” to worry about there) or the successful request for a state funeral.
Albanese, in his tribute, called him “a man of multiple facets”, naming some of those facets, such as his role as federal environment minister, but not others (Offset Alpine, the Marshall Island affair, the “Love Boat” scandal). Those were not enough to deny him a state funeral, a decision described by Geoffrey Watson, the former counsel to ICAC and now a director of the Centre for Public Integrity, as “absolutely dreadful”. Revelations of many of Richardson’s less reputable facets in the Herald prompted a public outcry: what is it with these state funerals?
The question about state funerals is occasionally asked in parliaments by integrity campaigners. Back in 2006, then-federal shadow minister John Faulkner asked it of the Howard government. In October 2023, in the NSW parliament, Greens MP Jenny Leong asked how state funerals are granted, and who is eligible.
It turns out, for both the states and the Commonwealth, granting funerals is a droit du seigneur for the prime minister or premier. Some state funerals, for senior public officials, are automatic, but there is open-ended discretion for captain’s calls. The granting of a state funeral “should be made only where compelling arguments exist, considering the deceased’s achievements and contributions over a lifetime”, was the reply from Chris Minns, who, incidentally, did not attend the Richardson funeral but, a month later, spoke in tribute at the state service he had granted for John Laws.
Like everything, state funerals, both Commonwealth and in NSW, have been subject to inflation. They were once rare. The first was in 1839 for Colonel William Light, the founder of Adelaide, the first Commonwealth one was for Burke and Wills in 1863, and the first in NSW was for William Charles Wentworth in 1873. By the 1990s, NSW held three in the decade. In the next decade it held 10. In the next half-decade the number was 13.
Leong also asked for a breakdown by sex, and how many were for “people who had worked in science, technology, engineering and maths”. A list of 46 NSW state funerals from 1991 to 2023 shows 37 men and nine women. Discretionary male honourees were sportsmen, entertainers, activists and artists, while the women included aviator Nancy Bird Walton, activist Sylvia Scott, artist Margaret Olley, academic Leonie Kramer, runner Betty Cuthbert, cook Margaret Fulton and fashion designer Carla Zampatti. Victoria gave five state funerals in the 2024-25 year, all to men. STEM specialists, doctors or scientists? None. You’re better qualified for a state funeral in Sydney if you played rugby league.
Any prime minister or premier with an ability to read the room will have to stop this mission creep, but not just yet. Not for Richo. His state funeral did, however, set a precedent for the Richo Grievance, when a family of a deserving role model have their request for a state funeral rejected. You can’t give us a state funeral, but you gave one to the Minister for Kneecaps?
It’s tempting, as the unsavoury revelations continue to come out, to think of Richo as the last of his kind, a species of loveable rogue who wheeled between factions and cohorts with a freedom that is no longer possible. He was a charmer who turned “whatever it takes” from a dark art into a sales pitch in a way that might seem fixed in the amber of the 1980s and 1990s. His funeral might signal the end of an era when influence, charm and brazen disregard for probity could trump any character test.
But that guest list was pretty current. With the rise of populism, the public tolerance for all sorts of roguishness, indiscretion, malfeasance and plain nihilism seems not to be falling but rising. When any publicity is good publicity, as measured by clicks and eyeballs, a loose unit like Richo might not be a relic of the past so much as a template for the future. If we’re looking for current-day salesmen and deal-makers who parlay celebrity into political power, we don’t have to search far.
Richardson’s “multiple facets” seem so very 1980s, but he never went completely out of fashion or favour. History’s dark connectors are still wielding influence because the preconditions – “the perennial belief of the powerful that their problems are too singular to be handled by ordinary means” – are as present as they ever were. You just want to double-check who gets left with the bill.
Malcolm Knox is an author and regular columnist.
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Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.From our partners
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