Clive Palmer’s sorry saga heads to an ignominious end

The PUP leader caused havoc in business and politics.

The surreal saga of Clive Palmer’s crumbling empire reached crisis point yesterday as he slipped cap in hand into Brisbane’s Executive Building seeking a loan guarantee for $40 million from Labor Treasurer Curtis Pitt. At stake was the future of Townsville’s nickel refinery and the jobs of almost 800 workers. In October, Mr Palmer said he would not allow Queensland Nickel “to borrow funds from the Queensland government’’. The company had net assets of over $1.9 billion, he boasted in a Palmer United Party press release. The refinery’s annual revenue exceeded $680m and it “was responsible for over $1,300,000,000 worth of economic activity in Townsville’’. If so, and factoring in Mr Palmer’s purported assets, he should provide the capital injection the refinery needs to save Townsville from a wretched Christmas and new year.

Ironically, the Palaszczuk government has reason to be grateful to Mr Palmer. Had he not destabilised Campbell Newman’s Liberal National Party government when Mr Newman rightly refused to give Mr Palmer’s projects preferential treatment, Labor may not have snatched victory in January. As Hedley Thomas wrote on Saturday, Supreme Court documents suggest Mr Palmer began demanding favourable treatment for a coalmining proposal in the Galilee Basin as early as April 2012 — a month after the LNP was elected. The Australian has followed the story in detail from that point, in contrast with the indifference shown by the national business daily.

Mr Newman’s principled stand — and the LNP’s refusal to hand Mr Palmer a winnable federal seat — led him to set up the Palmer United Party in April 2013. With millions of dollars siphoned from (and later repaid to) his estranged business partner Citic, Mr Palmer was helped in to his seat in federal parliament. From the start, though, PUP has been loose with the truth. Among its “achievements’’, the party’s website boasts the long list of Coalition budget savings and economic reforms it blocked in the Senate. It also, the site claims, “proved that government and community debt was not a problem for Australia’’ and “removed Bronwyn Bishop as Speaker’’.

In Queensland, styling himself as a protector of the disadvantaged, he railed at every turn against the LNP’s responsible efforts at budget repair. For all Mr Palmer’s conflated pretensions to be the “battler’s friend’’, however, it was no surprise on Monday, when he tried to use the prospect of sacking 776 nickel refinery workers as a lever to persuade the West Australian Supreme Court to order his estranged Chinese business partner Citic to pay him $66m. The ploy failed.

Coolum residents on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast have already paid a high price for Mr Palmer’s business failures. As the former Hyatt — once one of Australia’s most sought after resort hotels — degenerated into a dinosaur park, dozens of staff lost their jobs. Eighteen months ago, The Australian highlighted Mr Palmer’s grubby treatment of 340 owners and part-owners of villas at the resort, who were unable to use their properties that were left without water and power for months. Mr Palmer was trying to buy them out at a price of his choosing. Complicated legal wrangles continue.

In June last year, Mr Palmer the climate campaigner was on display as he stretched the bounds of credulity by joining former US vice president Al Gore at Parliament House for a press conference about confronting the “climate crisis’’. A few weeks earlier, though, operations had been suspended at his Townsville refinery after toxic sludge from tailings dams spilt on to the edge of the Great Barrier Reef. Previously, Mr Palmer had threatened the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority with a $6.4bn law suit after it tried to limit pollution from the refinery. Litigation is a routine part of Mr Palmer’s business and political modus operandi, with The Australian a prominent member of the “I’ve been sued by Clive Palmer club’’.

Unfortunately for taxpayers and for those relying on Mr Palmer for their livelihoods, the “billionaire’’ has received minimal scrutiny from much of the supposedly serious media. The ABC, where his syrupy chats with Tony Jones were based on mutual antagonism towards Tony Abbott, has only recently paid any serious attention to Australia’s very own Silvio Berlusconi. The Australian Financial Review and its Fairfax Media brethren have been all but missing in action.

Any objective assessment of Mr Palmer’s record would conclude that his capricious and sometimes duplicitous conduct in business and politics has taken an incalculable toll on the federal budget, the Queensland budget, university finances, relations with China, good government in general, Sunshine Coast tourism, Coolum property owners and many others. Yesterday, he whinged that the Queensland government had refused to support Queensland Nickel. It needed to be at the forefront of supporting the people of Townsville, he said. By supporting him. Taxpayer largesse, however, has its limits.