By Kishor Napier-Raman and Stephen Brook
CBD’s ears pricked up when we heard a blind item on 3AW’s Rumour File about a businessman buying his childhood home with plans to redo the joint, with a new home theatre among the modern modifications.
Turns out the mystery buyer wasn’t just any old nostalgic captain of industry, but billionaire mining magnate and perennial future prime minister Clive Palmer. He bought the four-bedroom Williamstown bungalow for $4.5 million late last year.
Clive Palmer: Gold coast mining billionaire, and Victorian.Credit: James Brickwood
That price tag, a fourfold appreciation since the block last traded in 2006, is mere change for Clive, and far cheaper than his grandiose plans to bring the Titanic back to the high seas, which he’s been at for more than a decade now. Any day!
More surprising is the admission that Palmer, who lives in a Gold Coast gated community called Sovereign Islands, is a Victorian.
In a revelation that could not be less on brand, Palmer was born in Footscray and grew up in Williamstown in the 1950s until he was aged about nine, when his parents, prompted by concerns about his asthma aggravated by nearby industrial pollution, moved north.
Clive is, to us, as pure Gold Coast as can be. He made his first buck as a real estate agent during the region’s 1980s property boom, when the white shoe brigade of developers and Queensland’s Hillbilly Dictator premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen ruled the roost.
We’re not sure Palmer, once a humble staffer for Sir Joh, turned political chaos agent and outspoken opponent of COVID vaccines, vibes with Australia’s most progressive state.
But this isn’t the first time Palmer has embraced his Victorian roots. In 2013, during his first national election campaign (the only time he actually won a seat for himself), Palmer showed up to visit the suburban house for a surprise doorknock. Nobody was home. This all went down shortly after he’d twerked in the studio for Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O (the reason was Miley Cyrus’ Wrecking Ball had just been released).
We wanted to learn more about the Williamstown youth’s grand plans for the address – perhaps a Museum of Clive? But the billionaire was overseas, and his people none the wiser about this particular nostalgic purchase.
FRANK FLIES IN
It’s been nearly six years since billionaire Westfield co-founder Sir Frank Lowy retired to Israel.
But the 93-year-old mall mogul is back in Sydney, where he still has a home on Wolseley Road, Point Piper, Australia’s richest street. He was spotted in the front row at Moriah College’s Rise Up event at the Hordern Pavilion Tuesday night, part of the esteemed Jewish school’s capital appeal to raise $100 million for a slew of upgrades.
Guests on the night, which also included star real estate agent Simon Cohen of Luxe Listings fame, heard that the school had already raised about half of that.
No doubt Sir Frank has helped out. He’s a patron of Moriah, and the family has donated well north of $5 million over the years. Plus his daughter-in-law Judy Lowy is the founding president of the Moriah Foundation.
BOM’S AWAY
Recent reports in this masthead of a toxic and chaotic workplace culture within the Bureau of Meteorology clearly caused a rumbling within the Commonwealth’s weather watching agency.
But we didn’t expect the aftershocks to be quite so seismic. On Wednesday, users of the BoM app around Australia received a tsunami warning, some in areas as far inland as the Canberra suburb of Kingston on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin. Those political fault lines are going well, it seems.
Jokes aside, the alerts were simply a test of the BoM’s new tsunami early warning system. And the bureau was good enough to inform people on X of this 14 minutes before the first alerts went out. This did little to alleviate confusion, leading the BoM to continue tweeting that there was no tsunami threat to Australia.
“There is NO tsunami threat to Australia,” a BoM spokesperson told CBD, capitals for emphasis.
“The Bureau acknowledges and apologises for any confusion that this test may have caused.”
According to the bureau’s own records, the last tsunami impact felt in Australia came after the 2011 Japan earthquake. Unusual currents were noted at Sydney Harbour, and several swimmers were washed into a lagoon at Merimbula.
It’s good to be prepared.
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