Liquidation call reveals all our worst fears about Clive

Clive Palmer once complained about the difficulties of being a member of one of the “smallest minority groups” in the country — billionaires. “It’s very difficult being a billionaire because you’re held up to ridicule, people make fun of you all the time,” he lamented. “But in reality being a billionaire tells you one thing, what’s important in life.” This heavy burden is one from which Mr Palmer has probably already been relieved (if, indeed, he ever was a billionaire). The latest developments in his controversial, contorted and collapsing business empire raise a more important question: whether he should shed another burden, his membership of the exclusive, influential and crucial minority group that is our federal parliament.

The administrators of his troubled Townsville nickel refinery, which was shut down last month, now recommend liquidation and have raised a range of serious matters about Mr Palmer’s conduct. These include the likelihood Queensland Nickel traded while insolvent, that Mr Palmer was a “shadow director” of the company and that he siphoned funds for his own use and more than $20 million to establish and run his political campaigns through the Palmer United Party. All this raises critical questions about Mr Palmer’s honesty and integrity, as well as whether he has shown appropriate regard for his employees, customers and business partners. It also clearly demonstrates that he has been less than transparent with the public. The legalities and financial responsibilities of all these matters will be decided by the authorities and, possibly, the courts, but in the political arena surely we have seen and heard enough of Mr Palmer’s activities and antics to conclude that he has been nothing but a burden on our political system. A federal election is imminent and voters in the Sunshine Coast seat of Fairfax will have the chance to destroy the PUP founder’s political career at the ballot box.

The member for Fairfax helped on Queensland National Party campaigns in the 1980s that re-elected suspect premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who was subsequently disgraced. Mr Palmer would have learned many tricks in those days including how to keep the media preoccupied with morsels — “feeding the chooks” — to help steer them away from real stories. This has been a characteristic of Mr Palmer’s unique, spectacular and now, surely, short-lived political experiment. Apart from having tens of millions of dollars to spend (which was, as we now know, taken from a struggling business that has since turned hundreds of people on to the jobless queues), he has known which buttons to press to keep the ABC and much of the Canberra press gallery onside. Flash cars, outlandish stunts and wild claims have provided the entertainment factor while it is difficult to ignore how the preferred narrative of many journalists was fuelled by attacks on the conservative side of politics and Tony Abbott in particular. Sadly, it worked; for close to three years.

The ABC ran a critical piece about Mr Palmer on its flagship Four Corners program on Monday night. Essentially it rehashed and confirmed revelations that have been detailed in this paper for years. The program ran facts, voicemail recordings and assessments (without attribution) that have been aired previously in our pages and most of which was clear to our readers even before Palmer was elected in September 2013. Our national chief correspondent, Hedley Thomas, has broken a series of stories as he has probed Mr Palmer’s affairs, including disputes with Chinese giant Citic over deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars, doubts over the nickel refinery, chaos within his Coolum resort and revelations about how his political party was funded. “Contrary to the flim-flam and spin, Clive Frederick Palmer is not a professor, not an adviser to the G20, not a mining magnate, not a legal guru and not an advocate for freedom of speech,” Thomas summed up on the eve of the election. “He’s probably not a billionaire.” His reports laid out where the business ventures were heading: “Environmental problems and shutdowns loom at the nickel refinery. Dinosaurs reign where tourists fear to tread at Coolum.”

The authorities and democracy will now take care of Mr Palmer, while the government might be left to try to take care of his former employees. But the question hanging like a refinery plume over this saga is where the ABC (and most other media) has been. While this newspaper and Thomas were dealing with public barbs and private legal threats, Mr Palmer played other journalists off a break — flattering his favoured reporters, airing conspiracy theories about Rupert Murdoch and sharing a stage with Al Gore. Proper scrutiny would have thwarted him (he won Fairfax by just 53 votes). But the ABC was more interested in offering itself up as his platform of choice and having managing director Mark Scott host the maverick MP at parliament’s midwinter ball. The ABC, the gallery, the people of Fairfax and even Mr Palmer’s candidates were sold a pup.