Clive Palmer: Quarterly Essay is a missed opportunity to delve deeper

A BIG part of the problem with Guy Rundle’s Quarterly Essay on Clive Palmer is that he isn’t the right person to have written it.

Clive Palmer’s use of Citic’s $10 million gets only brief treatment by Guy Rundle. Picture: Kym Smith

THE single most extraordinary fact about Clive Palmer and his conflated business and political interests is that he took $10 million from his Chinese government-owned joint venture partner to fund his political party, which now holds considerable influence in the Senate.

Nothing like this has ever happened before in Australian political history, but the sheer gobsmacking significance of it will be lost on readers of Guy Rundle’s Clivosaurus, where it is mentioned only in passing.

Palmer’s use of Citic Pacific’s money for electoral purposes is noted just three times in the essay, and each reference is one sentence long. Rundle doesn’t even state the amount of money involved.

This pivotal issue is the centre of a Supreme Court action brought by Citic, an investigation by the West Australian police, and Palmer’s latest TV studio storm-off, yet not only does Rundle blithely bypass it, he shirks rigorous analysis of Palmer’s business interests and finances.

Rundle is a former editor of left-wing magazine Arena and is now described as a roving correspondent for the website Crikey. A big part of the problem with this essay is that he isn’t the right person to have written it.

When it comes to Palmer, he lacks the depth of The Australian’s Hedley Thomas and Sean Parnell, who have covered the businessman-turned-politician in immense detail in this newspaper and in a 80,000-word book respectively.

It is a bit of a mystery why Black Inc publishing maestro Chris Feik opted for Rundle for what might have been a timely and important essay on Palmer, other than that he wanted a gonzo approach rather than a probing one.

Rundle has drawn extensively on Parnell’s book, Clive: The Story of Clive Palmer, a fact disclosed about halfway through and in the acknowledgments, and this means there’s little new material on Palmer’s early life or on his present business interests.

Rundle’s treatment of Thomas is one of many disappointing aspects of this essay. Thomas, a formidable investigative journalist with five Walkley Awards to his credit, is introduced in such a perfunctory way that readers will see him as a Murdoch hack who does the bidding of his master. Rundle’s linking the coverage by The Australian and Thomas especially with Palmer’s bizarre claim about Rupert Murdoch’s ex-wife Wendi Deng being a Chinese government spy is fundamentally flawed and unfair to Thomas.

To set the record straight, Thomas’s first big piece about Palmer and his political ambitions was published on June 15 last year. The article, which carried the headline “Should this man run our nation?”, followed Palmer’s boast that he would become prime minister.

As the election drew closer, Thomas wrote a steady stream of stories about Palmer, culminating in a front-page article that exposed a series of claims that Palmer had made about being a professor, a G20 adviser, a mining magnate and a billionaire. Palmer made the comment about Deng being a Chinese spy on the day of publication, September 5, so Thomas’s burrowing into Palmer’s life was well underway when Palmer made these remarks.

This critique of News Corporation and The Australian in particular wouldn’t be so ludicrous if Rundle didn’t then lambast the media at large for ignoring Palmer. While he says News was “going for him … for going up against Rupert” in the very next breath he says the remainder of the press ignored him “throughout the election campaign and its aftermath”. Well, this situation surely underscores the public interest merit of News devoting considerable resources to probing Palmer?

Rundle also argues, unconvincingly, that The Australian’s focus on Palmer was unfair because commensurate attention had not been given to other “politically engaged” rich men such as James Packer, Frank Lowy and Rupert Murdoch. But Rundle doesn’t concede the obvious point that none has a political party with seats in Parliament and a potential stranglehold on the Senate.

Lest you think this critique merely reflects a personal interest as a part-time News employee, I should also disclose that Black Inc is the publisher of my previous two books and, I hope, my next, so it’s clearly not in my personal interest to be saying these things.

The Murdoch conspiracy theories and the padding from Parnell’s book detracts from some reasonable analysis by Rundle of the state of Australian politics in the modern era. This essay represents a good opportunity to drill down into these issues and Rundle offers a few original insights into our political despondency.

He makes an interesting point about the social settlement in Australia that goes back to the 1907 Harvester judgment, which set minimum wages. He points out that the judgment took much of its moral language from the 1891 Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum, on the conditions of labour. This doctrine, and its secular variants, sits “at the very centre of Australian political values, and major parties depart too far from it at their peril”. John Howard’s introduction of WorkChoices in 2005 is one such example. And he points out that Tony Abbott’s success last year came about because he “feinted towards that doctrinal ideal”, and that his government’s subsequent troubles this year came about because he undermined “the very foundations of our collective life”.

In this context, Palmer embodies non-Labor centre-right politics of the old United Australia Party that sees the state, labour and capital engaged in a “triple partnership”, and so his rise reflects public disenchantment with the neo-liberal agenda that has been embraced wholeheartedly by both sides of politics in Australia.

One reason to buy this essay is not the essay itself, but the correspondence on Noel Pearson’s previous QE, A Rightful Place. The correspondents have put much thought into the issues raised so eloquently by Pearson. They are Megan Davis, Rachel Perkins, Celeste Liddle, John Hirst, Henry Reynolds, Peter Sutton, Paul Kelly, Robert Manne and Fred Chaney.

Paul Cleary is a senior writer with The Australian and the author of four books.

Clivosaurus: The Politics of Clive Palmer

By Guy Rundle

Quarterly Essay 56

Black Inc, 116pp, $19.95