Author: Arthur Chesterfield-Evans

I was in NSW Parliament and an old school friend wanted to meet for old times, so we went down to the coffee shop at Sydney Hospital.  As we went in Grahame Richardson and Eddie Obeid were talking together. As we walked past Richo was facing me, Eddie had his back to us. I nodded at Richo and went past.  My friend and I had rather a long chat, but as we came back, Richo and Eddie were still there.  I nodded at Eddie.  Richo, (who is a very sociable guy whatever else he may be) said, ‘Hello Arthur’.  I was a bit surprised he even knew my name, but he is good at that sort of thing. I stopped, turned round and replied, ‘Hi Richo’.  Then a sense of devilment took me and I added, ‘What are you going to do about Beasley?’  Beasley was ALP leader at that time and was not doing very well in the polls, and some people wondered when he would be replaced.

‘We are going to replace him’ said Richo.

‘And who with? I asked.  (No harm in asking).

‘Rudd’, said Richo.

‘He’s not much chop is he? Bit of a Bible botherer?’ I replied.

‘Best we’ve got at the moment’, said Richo.

‘That may be,’ I said and toddled off.

Seven months later Rudd replaced Beasley, and the rest is history.

Richo is not a man to stab you in the back- he stabs in the front, presumably smiling and telling you it needs to be done.  Eddie was the NSW numbers man, which is why no one moved against him.  Carr and Egan kept him out of the ministry, but when Carr went, he came in. Things went bad, and eventually when things were very bad, compromise Premier Nathan Rees tried to clean up the NSW Labor party, and drop Tripodi, a mate of Eddie’s. He failed and was then thrown out.  Kristina Keneally became Premier, just before the election with a good new female image, but of course NSW Labor was not fixable or saleable by then, and Barry O’Farrell won in a landslide, only to lose office due to forgetting that he received a bottle of Penfold’s Grange Hermitage from the property developer today said to have called on Eddie.

When I first got into Parliament in 1998 Eddie offered me a lift to Parliament.  I accepted. It seemed harmless enough. He had a car with a driver and lived not far from me.  Then he offered to give me some advice about how to get on in Parliament. 

I said, ‘Fine, Go ahead’. There was no harm in listening.

He said, ‘Arthur you are in a very little party, but if you vote with the (then Labor) government, we will give you a little win just before the election and you will be re-elected’.

I said, ‘Well, Eddie, you might think we are a little party, but we have a lot of policies that are important and if you help those policies, I will vote for you and if you don’t I will vote against you. That is my job”. 

He said, ‘No Arthur, you do not understand, we are the government’. 

I said, ‘That does not really impress me, my job is to change the government’. 

He gave me a lift the next 2 times and we had virtually the same conversation. He would say, ‘Arthur, you are not really understanding,’ (meaning I was not voting the way he wanted).  ‘You are a very small party and we are the government and if you vote with us, just before the election we will give you a little win etc’..   So  on the 3rd recitation of this I wondered what a ‘little win’ might be. I had got into politics campaigning against tobacco and I knew that what was needed to save a lot of lives was smoke-free air everywhere, especially in the pubs and clubs that were the bastions of smoking, and a big health campaign against tobacco. ‘So I said, ‘Well, what I came onto parliament for was to fix the tobacco problem, you could fix that at no cost. It is just a ban, and the health campaign would pay for itself in hospital costs almost immediately.  That could be the ‘little win’ you talked about’. 

He said, ‘That is a very big thing. We could never do that’. I said, ‘Well I guess its no deal then’. He turned up the radio and we sat without talking as Ray Hadley rabbited on. 

I did not get a lift in the mornings, but I kept getting a lift with him for some time in the evenings when we finished late.  He was quite friendly and I used to meet him in his office. But one day he said to me, ‘Arthur I give you a lift home and you do not vote for us.’  There was no answer to this.  Could anyone think that a lift home should change a vote in Parliament?  Eddie obviously did.  I figured there were some people who did nothing for nothing.  After that I took a taxi voucher.  The taxpayer had to cop the extra price of an independent mind in Parliament.