Palmersaurus Wrecks: Billionaire businessman Clive Palmer’s audacious attempt to return to Australian politics
Clive Palmer left a path of destruction among voters and former employees, yet he is attempting to resurrect a political career. Vanessa Marsh speaks to Fairfax voters on the Sunshine Coast and those he’s trying to woo in the Townsville seat of Herbert.
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THE bright yellow billboards featuring a smiling Clive Palmer giving the thumbs up pepper the entire country, ads promising he’ll “Make Australia Great” dominate the airwaves, unsolicited text messages are sent to our phones and the controversial videos saturate our screens.
Chris Shannon shakes his head as he speaks with The Courier-Mail, exasperated by the bombardment of advertisements all dedicated to Clive Palmer’s second attempt to win a seat in Australia’s House of Representatives.
Senior politicians accused of plotting to ‘destroy’ Clive Palmer | The Courier-Mail
Clive Palmer announces return to politics | The Courier-Mail
Shannon lives in the electorate of Fairfax – where Palmer was the Federal member from 2013 to 2016 after winning the seat by 53 votes in what was one of the tightest political races and longest recounts in Australian history.
Palmer announced his audacious return to politics in June last year, raising eyebrows with his plans to run in the Townsville seat of Herbert, a community still recovering from the disastrous collapse of his Queensland Nickel refinery.
Since then, he’s inundated billboards, television screens and the airwaves promising to “Make Australia Great” if people vote for his United Australia Party.
“But the only thing he delivers is heartbreak and a sense of despair,” Shannon says of Palmer’s political promises.
The retiree knows better than most the sorrow Palmer left in his wake in Fairfax, an electorate which takes in 1004sq km of Sunshine Coast communities spanning from Kenilworth in the west to Maroochydore, Buderim and Coolum Beach in the east.
He’s one of the shareholders in the mothballed Palmer Coolum Resort where a fierce four-year battle between the billionaire and mum and dad investors has reached fever pitch. Once the jewel in the Sunshine Coast’s tourism crown, the resort was “temporarily” closed for refurbishment in 2015, putting 600 staff out of work, leaving shareholders of the resort’s 144 villas in limbo and punching a gaping hole in the region’s tourism industry.
What’s followed is a constant source of misery and stress for the retirees, who each paid between $50,000 and $100,000 for a quarter share of a villa in the resort where power and water have been cut, leaving their unsellable investments to crumble.
“He’s caused so much misery here that you wouldn’t believe it,” Shannon says.
“It’s been a shocking couple of years (for us), it’s been as tough as it gets.”
“Quite frankly (the political ads) make me sick.”
Fellow villa shareholders Maree Frecklington (mother-in-law of State Opposition Leader Deb) and Sally Bennett say Herbert voters need to do their research.
“His track record is he has shown no consideration for people in his electorate, in his employ or that he’s done business with generally,” Bennett says.
“And if they’re the standards that are going to be brought by him to any government in this country, we’re going backwards.”
Frecklington adds: “Do your research; he splashed money around to get in at Fairfax and he did nothing for anyone.”
A United Australia Party spokesman disputes that, telling Insight Palmer had an enormous positive impact during his time as MP.
“Clive Palmer, as the Federal Member of Fairfax, breaking the Coalition’s hold on the seat for the first time in history … made a significant impact, paving the way for an international airport and delivering the long promised $4.9 billion to upgrade the Bruce Highway,” the spokesman says.
Keeping Qantas Australian owned, stopping the GP co-payment, reducing electricity prices and stopping $10 billion of cuts to social security are among a list of 12 of Palmer’s “national achievements” that are “among many others”, according to the party spokesman.
PALMER, who recently landed back on the Forbes rich list with an estimated wealth of $2.84 billion thanks to a mammoth court win over Chinese company Citic, has already sunk millions into the federal election campaign before the starting gun has even been fired.
Reports have speculated he’s prepared to sink more than $50 million into what political experts have dubbed an “unwinnable” campaign for the mining magnate.
One man who knows the struggle of competing with Queensland’s richest man is Ted O’Brien, the Liberal MP who lost Fairfax to Palmer by the skin of his teeth in 2013 and became Palmer’s successor, winning the 2016 election.
“While my campaign team grappled over taking out a quarter page newspaper ad in the final week of the campaign, he had weeks where he wrapped the entire paper with (ads),” O’Brien says.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever seen big money move an election at the grassroots level.”
O’Brien says it was frustrating to watch how Palmer wielded his power in the 44th parliament.
“Taking off my hat as a political opponent, because first and foremost I’m a resident of the Sunshine Coast, what broke my heart was here we had a situation where we had a local federal MP who had the balance of power … and Clive suddenly became vitally important to get legislation through.
“We had this dream opportunity to get things for the Sunshine Coast but for a fellow who spent his life doing deals and in negotiations, he didn’t negotiate a paperclip. We got nothing,” he says.
“Palmer’s attendance in parliament reflected his performance in the electorate – that is: woeful.”
Three years after Palmer’s time in Fairfax, O’Brien says the electorate still feels the billionaire’s lasting impact, particularly at Coolum where the resort closed in 2015, two years into Palmer’s time as MP.
“It led to an erosion of the brand Coolum from which we are still recovering,” O’Brien says.
“Coolum has now gone streets ahead, but it still has some way to go because that resort from all reports is suffering from everything from mosquito and rat infestations through to delinquents ruining the joint and taking up unnecessary time from the local police force.”
But the MP says his former political rival was not without his merits.
“I think he’s good for a laugh,” O’Brien says.
“If so many people weren’t damaged along the way he would actually be a very funny man. He’s quick-witted, he knows how to crack a joke, I don’t believe he’s a fool, I think he’s a smart guy. I just wish he would put some of those natural talents to work for other people.”
THERE aren’t many who would call Clive Palmer a fool. His business nous, considerable wealth, legal expertise and charisma make him a formidable opponent in any arena he enters.
But political commentator Paul Williams says even that won’t be enough to land Palmer a seat in parliament.
“He’s got virtually zero chance,” Williams says.
“The populous right in Queensland is already overcrowded. You’ve got an LNP that is desperately moving to the right, you’ve got Palmer, you’ve got Pauline (Hanson), you’ve got (Bob) Katter, it looks like Fraser Anning will have his own outfit and I dare say Jacqui Lambie will field candidates again. It’s a very crowded field so he’s competing on a fairly narrow strip of land trying to harvest votes that won’t come his way anyway.”
So why would a savvy businessman like Palmer drop millions on an unwinnable campaign?
“I think it’s a lot of relevance deprivation syndrome wrapped up in it,” Williams says.
“He’s got plenty of money and I think he likes being the generous benefactor. And remember he’s still got an animosity to the major parties.”
That perceived animosity between Palmer and the Federal Government was last month laid bare in court documents filed as part of Palmer’s bid to have criminal charges brought against him and his company Palmer Leisure Coolum thrown out.
Palmer claims the charges brought by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which relate to a failed takeover bid of villas at the resort in 2012, are an orchestrated campaign by senior government officials to stop him re-entering politics.
But Palmer is not letting the court action slow him down, his bright yellow billboards stand like sentinels along the highways, his radio ads dominate the airwaves and his television commercials are inescapable.
He’s even orchestrated a controversial text message campaign, launched a digital game and continued to post his quirky and bizarre poems and memes online.
Among the UAP commitments to help “build a better Australia” are tax breaks for the bush, creating jobs, a drought and disaster relief fund, and changes to small business tax to “turbocharge” the economy.
Williams says the saturated advertising and Palmer’s personality will mean he still attracts plenty of votes – although Newspoll this week showed him winning only 8 per cent of the primary vote in Herbert despite his media onslaught in the electorate.
“Some people love maverick politicians and I think you can honestly say he’s what we call a maverick in Australian politics,” Williams says.
“(He’s) someone who is an outsider playing the insiders’ game but again Clive is a different kind of insider, he’s like a Donald Trump, not in the sense of the extremist racist stuff (of Trump), but he’s a rich man assuming the mantle of an ordinary outsider.
“But I think the electorate’s appetite for maverick politicians has reached its zenith and is on the slide.
“I think the electorate is after sensible grown up government and stable government so no more leadership turnstiles and that sort of nonsense.”
Williams says Palmer – who was named a National Living Treasure alongside Olivia Newton-John and Kylie Minogue in 2012 – has long been seen as an Aussie larrikin who spoke his mind, a position that commands enormous political currency.
But he says that image wouldn’t go far in Townsville and the seat of Herbert, where the collapse of his company’s Queensland Nickel refinery in 2016 left 800 people out of work and left a trail of debts estimated to be worth more than $200 million.
THE REFINERY’S collapse is at the centre of a mammoth three-year legal battle which is set down for a two-month trial in the Brisbane Supreme Court in July.
“Voters have long enough memories … the people of Townsville, given the recent problems with the nickel refinery, it would seem that he wouldn’t be well received.
“Let’s not underestimate the skills of the Labor MP in Herbert (Cathy O’Toole), she’s been very good at hammering Clive about unpaid entitlements and she’s been very good at hammering the Liberals.”
That hammering of Palmer over the nickel refinery fallout has led the billionaire to launch a half million dollar lawsuit against O’Toole, who he claims defamed him in a radio interview about entitlements owed to workers.
Despite the legal threat hanging over her head from Queensland’s richest man – who once listed litigation as his hobby – she’s refusing to blink or back down in the battle for Herbert.
“Personally I think that Palmer’s track record speaks for itself,” she says. “People in Townsville are not stupid. They have very long memories. (The QNI collapse) really decimated this city, a lot of people had to leave town to get jobs.
“My focus is just to remain completely focused on winning Herbert again and not being distracted by Palmer’s political antics. I think this will be a tough battle. It’s not an election that you’d relax in; we are the most marginal seat in the country and I’ll be fighting tooth and nail to hold the seat for Labor and that will be my focus.”
One Herbert voter who certainly won’t be voting for Palmer is Townsville electrician Aaron Raffin, a former QNI employee who says he is still owed $20,000 of entitlements.
“You just have to grit your teeth and walk away when you see him putting billboards up and ads on the radio costing tens of thousands of dollars,” Raffin says. “He wasn’t up to (the job) last time; we were paying him to sleep in parliament. That’s his downfall – he’s not there for the people, he’s there for his own agenda and people know that.”
Despite the naysayers, the UAP spokesman says the party is experiencing a “groundswell of support”, telling Insight the party, which plans to contest all seats in the upper and lower houses, already has 10,000 members with an average of 1500 more joining each month.
“This is a critical time in our history. Already, a huge number of people have withdrawn support and lost confidence in the Liberal and Labor duopoly that is dragging the country down,” the spokesman says.
“Hardworking Australians are looking for an effective alternative and that alternative is the United Australia Party. We will provide the strong leadership, the vision, the policies and the plan to make Australia great again.”
Originally published as Palmersaurus Wrecks: Billionaire businessman Clive Palmer’s audacious attempt to return to Australian politics
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