Once powerful and influential, the reputations of three prominent Australians are now in tatters
Comeuppance: Graham Richardson, John Laws and Alan Jones purported to be on the side of the less powerful, the meek and the marginalised but the truth was far at odds with that. Photos / Getty Images
Three entitled men had an outsized influence over Australia across the 1980s and 90s. Two, Alan Jones and John Laws, were Sydney radio hosts to whom many politicians prostrated themselves. The third, Graham Richardson, was a member of the Australian Senate and behind-the-scenes fix-it man for Bob Hawke’s Labor government.
Their lives intertwined at the nexus of power, politics and privilege on the air waves, at high-end restaurants when they wished to be seen and, when not, deep within political and business backrooms. All claimed to be on the side of the less powerful, the meek and the marginalised.
Each profited enormously.
In early November, both Richardson, 76, and Laws, 90, died. Jones is now a diminished figure who, in August 2026, will face a Sydney court to answer 27 sexual offence charges that include indecent touching of younger men. He denies wrongdoing.
With their demise ends a Sydney era when Zegna-suited, tassle-shoed politicians mixed profit, pleasure and politics alongside shock jocks who dripped wealth and spouted compassion.
“Richo” Richardson was one of the former. While the dead Labor grandee’s family mulled the New South Wales (Labor) government’s offer of a state funeral in the days after his death, The Sydney Morning Herald splashed across two pages one of the most excoriating accounts of a political career it has ever published.
The paper’s veteran investigative journalist Kate McClymont, who spent years chronicling Richo’s deceits, didn’t just speak ill of the dead, she threw up over the corpse. Richardson, she wrote, accepted bribes paid to him by way of prostitutes, took a cut of the political donations he collected and was on the payroll of property developers.
Recounting a 2011 scene at Sydney’s Machiavelli restaurant – then the hangout of politicians and hangers-on – McClymont recalled the woman who marched over to Richo’s table hurling a kangaroo scrotum purse at him, saying, “If we were in the jungle, I’d have cut your balls off and worn them round my neck.”
Laws, among the most influential and richest men in Australian radio, pioneered talkback and became known as “the golden tonsils”. He had a vast following, prompting former prime minister Paul Keating to once remark, “Educate John Laws and you educate Australia.”
Laws was fabulously wealthy; his audience lived far tougher lives, many across outer Sydney’s “fibro” suburbs from where they saw him as their buffer against government, banks and criminals.