Des Houghton: Meet enigmatic LNP Pine Rivers candidate Dean William Clements

He’s standing in a South East Queensland seat of more than 40,000 voters, but this enigmatic LNP candidate won’t say where he works, nor even what he does for a living, writes Des Houghton.

Dean William Clements is the LNP candidate for the seat of Pine Rivers.

Has there ever been a more enigmatic candidate running for State Parliament than Dean William Clements?

The 46-year-old son of a Parmalat sales rep will not say where he works. Nor will he say what he does for a living.

He won’t tell me and he won’t tell any of the 41,066 eligible voters in the sprawling electorate of Pine Rivers north of Brisbane he calls home.

Perhaps there is a clue from Clements’ past life as a combat intelligence officer in the Australian Army, with two tours of Afghanistan under his belt and a third deployment in East Timor.

Clements joined the Army at 17 and completed Year 12 as a soldier. He left the Army 21 years later.

It is known he received a commendation from the American defence force for his astute detective work using Afghan informants and drone images to identify five suicide bombers marching towards his base in Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold.

“It was close. They were coming for us,” he said. “I passed that on to the platoon commander and we made a decision to deter that threat.”

The jihadists were eliminated less than a kilometre from the base.

When he left the Army Clements worked as a civilian in the Department of Defence intelligence section. Later he worked for the Australian Crime Intelligence Commission doing goodness knows what.

“I was still trying to find my place in society,” he said.

So what are you doing now, I ask.

Clements joined the Army at 17.

“I won’t talk about that if you don’t mind.

“I work in a response team for national security.

“It’s probably a bit sensitive.’’

Clements, whose mother Josephine was migrant from Malta, is a commanding character with a quick wit who will no doubt bring a different set of real-life experiences to the Parliament if he wins his seat.

To do so he will need to oust Nikki Boyd, the Labor Minister for Fire and Disaster Recovery and Corrective Services, who is backed by the unions. In Parliament she has thanked the CFMEU and the ETU for their support. Boyd’s elevation to Cabinet last December has given her a bigger profile, although she struggles to gain media attention and has difficulty facing the cameras.

Clements says he was raised a staunch Catholic and says he has an appetite for community service that flows from his career in the military. And that revolves around his family life.

He and his wife Kristen have three children: Alexia, 14, Sophia, 11 and Billy, 4. He met his wife-to-be when she was still a university student in Toowoomba while working part time as a sales assistant.

“She sold me a pair of sunglasses,” he said. “It all went from there.”

Pine Rivers is a licorice all-sorts electorate with the blue-collar battlers of Bray Park mixing it with the well-to-do of Samford Valley and Mount Glorious.

Clements says the electorate is, however, composed mainly of working families caught in the cost-of-living crunch who fear rising crime.

“The youth crime within Pine Rivers, and especially around Strathpine, Warner and Bray Park is quite significant,” Clements said.

And he was surprised and shocked when he learned recently that the electorate is a domestic violence hot spot.

“I didn’t realise how bad it was in our electorate.’’

Clements lives at Highvale in the Samford Valley in the federal electorate of Dickson held by Federal Opposition leader Peter Dutton whom he calls a friend. The pollsters are predicting the Miles government will lose 20 seats. Clements says Pine Rivers is number 19. “I know I have to work hard to get it,” he said.

His first deployment to Afghanistan in 2011 changed his life forever, he said.

He sifted through intelligence gathered by unmanned aerial vehicles and informants on the ground.

“They used them successfully in Iraq and just about every mission in Afghanistan UAV support,” he said.

Clements’ battalion operated out of Tarinkot in Uruzgan province.

“We worked hard and I am proud of the job we did there,” he said.

“It was quite scary because it was the time of the green-on-blue insider attacks.”

He had two friends – a Briton and an Australian – killed when coalition forces were fired upon by Afghan troops or civilian police.

“In Kandahar I would go out with the Afghans every second day. I was a combat intelligence officer for the infantry battalion.

“I had a few roles within that. I was also an adviser to the Afghans for country intelligence.”

Clements rarely went on patrol without his explosion detection dog.

“When I was with the infantry battalion my job was to identify threats and to counter those threats and avoid getting into shootouts,’’ he said. “We had constant threats but we were able to negate them.”

He said he spoke to the Americans on an hourly basis.

Of the Taliban group he identified, Clements said they were jihadists who were committed terrorists who welcomed martyrdom as part of what they believed to be a religiously sanctioned war. He said it was hard to put into words the intensity of the work he and others were subjected to in a war zone.

“But (saving lives) was the most rewarding thing I have ever done.

“Do I think I made a difference? Yes, significantly. One of the hardest things for me to do was to get up every day and tell my friends I had found people wanting to kill them.

“We came home with everybody; I did my job.”