Clive Palmer, the pest that politics doesn’t need

YES, it’s been a decade of broken politics in Canberra, but surely voters deserve better than Clive Palmer 2.0. His latest tilt for power is about as welcome as cane toads, writes Peta Credlin.

ONE of the joys of my past week in Far North Queensland has been the glorious weather and down to earth people.

Somewhere along the way, I hope I have some FNQ DNA in my genes because I love a place where commonsense is as free-flowing as cold beer. But as good as it is, there’s a few imported pests it could do without, like cane-toads, or Victorian-born Clive Palmer. Everywhere I looked, he was there, looming large from his garish yellow billboards or bellowing out of the TV with ad after ad designed to resurrect his political career. Surely people couldn’t be stupid enough to fall for this twice I said to myself?

But could they?

After all, advertising works. If it didn’t, no one would do it; because it costs money, and why waste money on something that produces no benefit? Thanks to the million dollars a month he’s currently spending, should he run again, Palmer will get votes. But while advertising works, the product being advertised sometimes doesn’t … at least, that was my experience with Palmer as I sat in the parliamentary adviser’s box day after day and as often as not, he didn’t even bother to turn up.

Clive Palmer talks with guests during a United Australia Party function. He’s currently spending more than a million dollars a month on advertising. Picture: Stewart McLean

First, some history: Palmer was originally a “white shoe brigade” Joh Bjelke-Petersen backer and was briefly the campaign director of the QLD National Party. Opportunistic business deals, trading mineral rights, bluster, and the threat of law suits, took him a long way: just a few years ago, he was supposedly a billionaire, a controversial “national living treasure”, a professor even, all the while running a (once successful) resort in Coolum and the Townsville nickel smelter. He had a multimillion-dollar royalty stream from a Chinese-developed Pilbara iron ore mine and was allegedly on the verge of opening a new coal province in central Queensland. He was a big donor to the LNP, although usually promising to give more than he actually did; until a spectacular falling out with Premier Campbell Newman, his resignation from the LNP and the creation of the Palmer United Party (PUP) just months out from the 2013 federal election.

That Palmer is spending millions to chase votes again doesn’t surprise me — after all, it worked a treat in 2013. Not only did he get himself elected to the House of Representatives but, with roughly 5 per cent of the national vote, he also got three PUP senators, to give him the balance of power in the upper house. In those heady days, his sometime dining companions were then Abbott minister Malcolm Turnbull and the man Abbott removed as treasury chief, Martin Parkinson (who Turnbull later made his own departmental head once he became PM).

Former Senator Jacqui Lambie defected from the Palmer United Party in 2014. Picture: Mathew Farrell

You’ve got to wonder what they had in common but then this was around the time Palmer started to block legislation to stall the 2014 budget leading to poor polls and a sense the government couldn’t get its agenda through. Of course, then it all went bad for Clive. PUP senators Jacqui Lambie and Glenn Lazarus defected. His Coolum resort became a fake dinosaur park and then closed. Worst of all, the nickel smelter shut, leaving some 800 people unemployed; with the Commonwealth taxpayer picking up the tab for $65 million in unpaid workers entitlements and the government suing for repayment. He left the parliament, but not before boasting that he’d brought down the Abbott government.

Just as bankruptcy beckoned, a court case restored the Chinese royalties and — once more, flush with cash — instead of repaying Commonwealth taxpayers for helping-out his workers, his face is once more on dozens of billboards around the country and his self-promoting ads are flooding the airways — no fewer than 800 ran last month on just one Sydney radio station alone.

Palmer’s Coolum resort became a dinosaur park and then closed. Picture: Glenn Barnes

Now some of what Palmer says, about scrapping the Paris Agreement and the incessant infighting of the political establishment, makes sense. It’s just that he’s the last guy with any moral standing to make these arguments. Surely people haven’t forgotten the way Palmer fawned over Al Gore when he joined him at Parliament House in June 2014, pretending to be a climate change warrior, in one of the weirdest press conferences I’ve ever seen? Despite Abbott winning in a landslide pledging to scrap the carbon tax only months earlier, (and plenty of PUP voters backing that stance too), Palmer stood side-by-side with Gore and proposed a new emissions trading scheme as well as a continuation of the damaging renewable energy target.

Get out of Paris now says Palmer? Give us a break. That’s about as believable as the workers in Townsville getting a fair deal.

It’s been a decade of broken politics in Canberra that’s for certain. Surely Australians deserve better than Clive Palmer 2.0? If someone who has made serious money wants to donate to a political party and, in the process, chew the ear of politicians, fair enough. Donations are part of political free speech in a democracy but there’s a world of difference between donating to a political party that you don’t control; and buying votes for a party you own. It’s my same complaint with militant unions, and to be honest, Malcolm Turnbull’s multimillion-dollar donation to keep his job at the last election. But in Palmer’s case, there’s more than enough threats to the public’s faith in our system without the Berlusconi-isation of Australian politics.

Originally published as Clive Palmer, the pest that politics doesn’t need