It has to be said. Not for the first time in his life that scary uncle of ours, Graham Richardson, is absolutely right.
The former Labor powerbroker’s unblinking eye for human frailty gives him an extraordinary ability to tell uncomfortable political home truths.
He told Tasmanian ALP Premier David Bartlett such a truth after the state election.
When the inevitable happened and Bartlett lost his majority, Richardson said on ABC’s Q&A that he hoped Bartlett would re-think his flat opposition to working with the Greens. “I hope he gets together with some of his colleagues, has a couple of quiet drinks one day, and works out that that’s pretty dumb and moves forward.”
Next day Bartlett was ropeable. “Look, I read Graham Richardson’s autobiography,” Bartlett said. “What’s it called again? Whatever It Takes. It’s a litany of frankly, a man who would crawl over his dead grandmother to get to power. I am not that man. I don’t believe in the philosophy of whatever it takes.”
Maybe it did take a couple of drinks with colleagues. Or perhaps he did it all by himself. But Bartlett is now fulfilling Richardson’s advice.
Ditching election rhetoric and promises, Bartlett has clung to power. He began talks with the Greens leader, Nick McKim, on a very Gen-X mountain bike ride at the weekend.
This is the same Nick McKim who Bartlett a week earlier had called “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”, who had “seduced the media”, and of whom Bartlett had “no level of trust”.
It’s the same Greens that Labor mounted a scare campaign about in the final days of the election. In unattributed robotic phone calls to thousands of homes, Labor lied that the Greens wanted to legalise heroin.
And it’s the same premier who scrubbed a critical, but inconvenient line from his constitutional pledges so that Governor Peter Underwood would have no choice but to re-commission him.
