Media can’t see story for dinosaurs and twerking

CLIVE Palmer’s business dealings demand serious scrutiny.

ELEMENTS of the political class were licking their lips at the arrival of Clive Palmer, thinking he might represent all they loved about former Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Trendy progressives in public broadcasting and at Fairfax Media delighted in the hope of federal Coalition ambitions ruined by another embarrassing banana-bender taking out his frustrations on Canberra. Excited by these expectations for his Palmer United Party, they suspended normal scepticism about Mr Palmer’s political plays and business dealings. More deft on his feet than his visage might suggest, the self-described mining “billionaire” masterfully has given this audience everything they might desire — from twerking for the cameras to vacuous bons mots about compassion for refugees or alarmism on climate change — so they tend to pamper rather than pursue him. Mr Palmer’s cleverest ruse has been to feed their postmodernist preoccupation with deconstructing motives instead of dealing in facts. Preposterously, he dismisses inconvenient facts and damaging revelations as evidence of a Chinese communist or Rupert Murdoch conspiracy (take your pick or combine the two) to bring him down. If not so serious this would be a plot worthy of Peter Sellers; he could play Mr Palmer and all his imagined foes in a psycho-political thriller version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

However, this is more than a little serious. Australia has just squandered the proceeds of a once-in-a-generation mining boom and record terms of trade. Instead of restructuring our economy, upgrading infrastructure or building national savings, we have accrued a mounting national debt, structural deficit and red ink as far as the eye can see. Aside from these fiscal legacies we have embedded a worrying culture of entitlement that — with new offers in paid parental leave and government-funded marriage counselling — is being entrenched rather than overcome. Yet where the freshly mandated Coalition government attempts to repair this situation, through higher education reforms or a Medicare price signal, it is thwarted not only by the Greens and Labor but by the disaffected and disorganised conservatives of PUP.

Mr Palmer entered the political fray only for revenge against the Campbell Newman government in Brisbane. As a major donor to the Liberal National Party the mining proponent expected preferential treatment for his Galilee Basin coal interests — and didn’t get it. So he set out to wreak vengeance. It is as simple, destructive and undeniable as that. The national interest is paid no regard and Tony Abbott is, in many ways, collateral damage for a political force bent on self-interest over political achievements. Mr Palmer is a mining speculator rather than miner; more a struggling millionaire than multi-billionaire; and an aggressive litigant who fires off writs to attack critics (including The Australian) but, at least lately, rarely proceeds or wins. Not even life-size dinosaurs seem capable of keeping his Sunshine Coast resort from extinction. His nickel refinery has run foul of environmental authorities over spills on the Great Barrier Reef, yet he portrays himself as a green activist in cahoots with Al Gore.

Mr Palmer was so desperate to do damage at the federal election that he siphoned $12 million from Citic, his Chinese business partner. We know, by his own admission, that he falsely backdated a legal document to justify withdrawing the funds, and we know from bank documents where the money went; more than $10m went either directly to PUP or to its advertising agency. The facts are available in court, where the case is playing out between this powerful politician and one of the most significant investment arms of our largest trading partner. West Australian and Queensland police are now also conducting their own investigation.

Yet most media seem unwilling or unable to report these matters. On the ABC we have seen a couple of dramatic walkouts as interviewers have posed questions based on reporting by this newspaper’s Hedley Thomas. But in the past two years neither the ABC nor Fairfax has been able to progress this story independently. We hope they are capable of deconstructing their own motives and don’t see Mr Palmer as an inconvenient target. Thanks to Thomas’s reports (bizarrely overlooked in the annual Walkley Awards in favour of a hand-out from US intelligence traitor Edward Snowden), we know that Mr Palmer is our very own Silvio Berlusconi; a cashed-up bully willing to use his lawyers, money and, apparently, his business partner’s funds to get his way, even at the expense of our country’s future. But to what end? To settle scores, sure, and, perhaps, to advance his business interests, but certainly not to assist the national fiscal challenge. In fact, he does great harm. The only eventuality more humiliating for our national political discourse than Mr Palmer’s ability to win seats and hold sway in our national parliament is the parallel willingness of the bulk of our journalists to indulge his antics, ignore his failings and refuse to report or investigate his business affairs.