Sunday Night gives viewers an inside look into the bizarre world of Clive Palmer

IT was weird. Very weird. From broken loos and around-the-world wild goose chases to one deer in the headlights. This is the world of Clive Palmer.

ANIMATRONIC dinosaurs, private jets, and an obscene collection of classic cars.

Welcome to the wacky world of the man who will wield enormous power in the Australian Parliament come July 1 — Clive Palmer.

Viewers were given a look at the mining magnate’s lifestyle last night in a bizarre profile on Channel 7’s Sunday Night.

Mr Palmer, whose Palmer United Party will have a controlling influence over the new senate next month, led journalist Mike Willesee on a wild-goose chase from Boston, to Queensland, and finally to Canberra — and he came across more like a crazy uncle than an upstanding politician.

The program depicted Mr Palmer on his private aeroplane, which has his name emblazoned across it, where he sang for the camera and picked up the phone at one point to pretend to order takeaway food from Tony Abbott.

Earlier, Mr Palmer invited Channel 7 to shadow him and his team on a tour of Boston — except the MP failed to show up.

Clive Palmer visits Queensland Parliament for lunch. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

So Willesee was forced to follow his apparently clueless senators-elect from one swanky function to the next — with Mr Palmer missing in action, apparently because the toilet on his private aeroplane had malfunctioned.

Willesee finally caught up with Mr Palmer back in Queensland — and things only got weirder from there.

Willesee was visibly cranky about having been stood up in Boston. “It was a long way to go for a no-show,” he complained.

Mr Palmer, who represents Queensland in the lower house, laughed off the incident. And so the interview continued with a tour of his cheap-looking dinosaur theme park — Palmersaurus — and a close-up look at his obscene classic car collection, which includes vehicles once owned by British statesman Louis Mountbatten and the president of Mexico, naturally.

Willesee also grilled the Palmer United Party senators-elect including former rugby league great Glenn Lazarus, who described his party as no different to a footy team, Jacqui Lambie, a former soldier who spoke of her time in a psychiatric ward after sustaining a back injury, and Dio Wang, the CEO of Palmer’s mining company Mineralogy.

“I think they need a kick up the rear end,” Ms Lambie said of her future parliamentary colleagues. And she said this of Mr Abbott: “I don’t believe he is a strong leader. I’m not sure he knows exactly what he is doing.”

“We’re gonna be the next government of Australia,” Mr Palmer uttered at one point.

Clive Palmer catches up on sleep during Question Time in Parliament House. Picture: Gary Ramage

The program also gave the country one of its first looks at Motoring Enthusiast Party senator Ricky Muir, who has agreed to join a voting bloc with the PUP.

The interviews with Mr Muir were the hardest to watch, with the very green politician stumbling over his answers and often staring blankly at Willesee in silence, like a deer in headlights.

The timber mill worker scraped into the senate through a quirk in our electoral system, having attracted only 0.5 per cent of the vote.

“I’m bringing in the voice of the everyday Australian,” Mr Muir said (in one of his few clear sentences).

All of the senators insisted they would vote with their own minds and not be slaves to Mr Palmer, but said they were like-minded and therefore were likely to vote the same anyway.

In another awkward moment outside Parliament House, Mr Palmer — unaware his radio mic was still on — was caught on camera feeding lines to his rookie senators about their voting intentions.

When it came to the tough questions, Mr Palmer evaded answering like the most experienced spin merchants.

Ultimately, the profile portrayed Mr Palmer as slippery, kooky and more than a little disingenuous — like a rich man who says and does whatever he likes.

Mr Palmer hit back on radio today, calling the Sunday Night story “biased and churlish”.

“Mike Willesee recorded about an hour of a really serious interview with me about political things and other things but he didn’t show any of that,” he told ABC radio.

“He doesn’t show you all of the footage. Just selective pieces.”

Mr Palmer described Mr Muir as an “ordinary” Australian.

“He’s there because people think he’s more in contact with the real world,” he said.

Clive Palmer addresses business people in Sydney at a breakfast hosted by the NSW Business Chamber at the Shangri-La hotel. Picture: Stephen Cooper.

Originally published as Sunday Night gives viewers an inside look into the bizarre world of Clive Palmer