Palmer weighs in from afar; Eye-tracking software firm brings aboard Vic Racing’s chief

Clive Palmer’s yacht is currently docked at St Tropez for his son’s wedding. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

No sign of any billionaires at Labor’s fundraising events on Tuesday night, but one keeping a bead from afar was Clive Palmer, currently luxuriating along the French resort town of St Tropez for his son’s wedding.

Michael Palmer and long-term fiancee Georgia Clancey tied the knot Wednesday morning (AEST) after a six-year engagement, the ceremony held before about 60 family members and close chums.

Palmer told Margin Call that despite the lure of cake and fireworks he still managed to tap into an energy reserve to take a glance at the budget papers. “After his wedding,” we were assured.

An old family snap of Clive Palmer, his then baby daughter Mary with wife Anna, and his children Emily and Michael.

A serial litigant and troublemaker, Palmer added, philosophically: “In a world where we’ve got so much war and anger, it’s always good to celebrate happiness and peace, I guess. We all know how to make war, but making peace and love and happiness is a lot harder.”

Quite a shift in gear for a guy who took out full scale ads, for months, vilifying former ASIC chairman James Shipton, or attacking state governments over their Covid-19 restrictions, or hyping up crackpot Covid-19 remedies like hydroxychloroquine. The man isn’t at ease without a good war.

Palmer has four children – Michael, his only son, was one of two kids born during his first marriage. Contacted on his superyacht, Australia, we caught Palmer while he was deliberating whether to stay port-side for the Monaco Grand Prix.

“I might stay for that,” he said, a bit torn. “But I’ll be heading back to Australia to get on with creating jobs for the country. We desperately need them.”

Heads up

Eye-tracking software minnow BioEye has secured a boardroom coup, signing Victorian Racing Club CEO Steve Rosich as a director in recent weeks.

Unfamiliar with the company? They’re a biotech with an app that touts an ability to screen for concussions in roughly 60 seconds.

The firm’s been conducting clinical trials on AFL players over the 2022 season, secured with Rosich’s assistance (he’s a former Fremantle Dockers chief executive and still has suction in the game).

Steve Rosich has joined BioEye. Picture: Luis Ascui

Those results are likely to be released later this year. Further tests were carried out on Southport Sharks players over the weekend. With Rosich in tow it seems more than likely the app will probably be tried on jockeys, too. But the company is talking a much bigger game than just sporting concussions, claiming its app can help screen for Alzheimer’s, MS and Parkinson’s.

Slow mo

Applications closed five months ago to hire a replacement for Kate Jenkins, the nation’s sex discrimination commissioner, and yet still no word on her successor.

This sort of indecision isn’t remarkable for the slow-moving beast of government, but we note that Jenkins formally ended her seven-year tenure almost a month ago. Is Richard Goyder somehow involved in the screening of applicants? How else to explain the dithering.

Former sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins. Picture: Nick Cubbin

Anyway, Rosalind Croucher, the Australian Human Rights Commission president, is acting in the position, for now, with Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus the buck-stop to make the call.

His office said on Wednesday that it isn’t “unusual for there to be gaps in appointments’’. That’s a weak defence of inefficient succession planning. They added: “There is a need to proceed with caution and make sure we are getting the right person.” In other words, they’ve had a heap of applicants and are still pining for a unicorn.

Jumping ship

The Commonwealth Bank declared this month that it’s letting go of up to 230 employees, purportedly as a cost cutting measure. This after the bank pulled a record $5.15bn profit during its December half-yearly update.

Meanwhile, there’s one significant departure the CBA wasn’t planning on cutting loose anytime soon. The bank’s executive director of fixed income and FX strategy Martin Whetton has bid adieu for a job with Westpac as its head of global financial markets strategy. That’s no small loss for the dollarmites, given that Whetton is one of the few people who can actually explain the plumbing of the financial markets on television and radio. All the better for Westpac’s clients, of course.

Liberal manoeuvres

Meanwhile, some minor manoeuvrings in the NSW Liberal Party with the exit of chief fundraiser Kerry Gazal, the party’s corporate relations and events manager. Gazal’s replacement? Dr Kylie von Muenster, who ran unsuccessfully in Coogee against Labor’s Marjorie O’Neill.

Men in white coats

The lab coats at Trent Twomey’s Pharmacy Guild of Australia embarked on a Robocall-style campaign over the weekend in aid of its escalating war on the Albanese government. Recipients endured some scare-campaigning on a medicine shortage that’s allegedly being caused by recent tweaks to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. For those with short memories, Health Minister Mark Butler announced a doubling of the amount of drugs that people can collect with their scripts, effectively halving the cost of medicine for some conditions.

Eamonn Fitzpatrick.

This rev-up in rhetoric was surely helped along by lobby shop CT Group, which picked up a contract with the Pharma Guild on April 28. No secret there, it’s been written before.

But hang on – wasn’t the Guild already signed with seasoned dark arts practitioner Eamonn Fitzpatrick? He was sighted at Aussie’s cafe in federal parliament on Wednesday holding forth at his usual table.

One imagines it might have been a little awks for the Labor strategist to keep assisting the Guild while it ratchets up its bitter campaign against the government.

So is he still working for them? Fitzpatrick couldn’t be reached to set us straight, but Margin Call understands he’s wiped his hands of them. Then again, the lobbyists’ register says they’re still on his books, and have been since July 2022. A go slow?