In another week in which hits on the reputation, wealth, businesses and public support of Clive Palmer have become a national spectator sport, the tycoon produced a little troll. It was embedded in a social media post he shared as his response to the Queensland Treasurer, Curtis Pitt.
For not yielding to Palmer’s repeated demands that taxpayers’ money be risked to rescue his insolvent nickel refinery, which is being prosecuted by the Queensland government because of toxic sludge spills from its tailings dams after multiple warnings of the obvious environmental threat, Pitt became the federal parliamentarian’s newest public target.
The Tweet from Palmer was a classic ‘f..k you’ message. He expressed himself with an image of the troll raising the middle finger to the most influential politician in the state after Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.
Message to @curtis_pitt_mp from @PalmerUtdParty #auspol #qldpol pic.twitter.com/h5J2LJkcdn
— Clive Palmer (@CliveFPalmer) March 7, 2016
Consider the optics — a self-proclaimed billionaire and politician demands access to millions of dollars in public funds for his own poorly run business, then behaves like a teenager when he doesn’t get his way.
But the troll and its middle finger may also be an apt metaphor of his engagement in public life. Even on his financial knees, Palmer can find a way to offend, usually unnecessarily, with a stunt, threat or insult. Superficially it may be briefly amusing but most times he succeeds in undermining himself and edging a little closer to the precipice.
The Treasurer could have been excused for shaking his head in bewilderment. Instead, Pitt was droll, saying Palmer was “not really setting a new gold standard in diplomacy”. “If he has the money, then we would have expected Mr Palmer to use his own financial wealth and assets to keep that company going,” he added.
I'm not responsible for mass job losses: Clive
But this has always been a large part of the problem. While Palmer was once very rich he has never had billionaire wealth, but his many boasts to the contrary raised public expectations that he could buy out, or financially rescue, just about anything. And that was never possible. The Weekend Australian sought an interview with Palmer and sent him a number of questions. He declined to respond.
There is now a voyeuristic, schadenfreude-like interest in his troubles. Palmer’s conduct, his form for abusing people who get in his way, for suing people who dare to challenge him or call out his shaky grip on facts, and for sacking those over whom he can exert control, are not easily put to one side by fair-minded Australians.
A man who called himself Professor Palmer, who bought the title of Secretary-General of the self-styled ‘‘World Leadership Alliance’’, has become a spectacle awaiting a public drubbing.
Instead of rallying to back him in a time of need as his businesses go down the gurgler, even employees with much to lose at his refinery are willing his demise. They want him to feel financial pain even though there will be a direct and serious impact on their communities and jobs.
“I know that we’re not supposed to be saying anything like this because the point is to save the (nickel) company and save the jobs, but most of us have had a gutful of him,’’ says Ian Mawhirt.
A nickel refinery technician for 16 years until his redundancy in January, Mawhirt is one of about 240 sacked employees whose entitlements, collectively worth tens of millions of dollars, the federal member for Fairfax is not paying. Palmer wants taxpayers to take care of his responsibility for their long service, redundancy and holiday leave, worth several hundred thousand dollars to some needy families.
The lack of sympathy for him now is a sentiment Andrea Sternberg understands well. In an interview with The Weekend Australian, after Palmer had unveiled his novel phoenix-like plan to avoid paying $100m (by restarting the refinery under a different company), Sternberg described the traits of a man she had watched closely in his work and personal relations. She worked with him in his home, businesses and political office. She has also pondered the unavoidable question: Why does Palmer choose to unnecessarily alienate people?
Sternberg, who travelled overseas and across Australia with him while helping run his Palmer United Party, Coolum resort and the project to rebuild the Titanic, says he cannot help but alienate people. Like the scorpion which stings the frog in the Aesop fable, it is in his nature.
But there are, says the former psychiatric nurse who became a well-paid manager in the Palmer group, moments of self-insight. “He says ‘any publicity is good publicity’, but it does upset him. When I had to stay back after a meeting, he said to me ‘Andrea, do you think that’s right — what they are saying about me?’
“There would be this moment of reflection where he would be considering whether that was the truth of how people saw him.”
Sternberg recalls Palmer’s daughter, Emily, who would often try to temper her father’s excesses, saying in exasperation: “So we’re in the business of just creating unnecessary dramas, are we?”
But it was not possible to change. Sternberg doubts Palmer has the discipline to follow sage advice from people who know better. Tirades of abuse against trusted employees and confidantes were commonplace.
‘’You’re f..king fired! You’re f..king gone!’’ he repeatedly yelled in meetings and in abrupt phone calls, according to Sternberg and other staff. Rarely, say those being abused and instantly sacked, did he have good grounds for culling. Logic and rational behaviour had little to do with it.
Sternberg experienced it over several years until she walked for the final time in early 2015. She likened her employment to an abusive relationship. Like the curate’s egg, though, some parts were good. “Each time he abused me and sacked me, I’d say ‘okay, Mr Palmer’ and I would stay there for a bit and quietly get on with my work,’’ she said.
“If a security guard didn’t turn up to escort you out of the place after the sacking, you’d be all right. There would sometimes be a phone call later and he’d say ‘mate, I was joking — but you made me a bit cranky. I’m not a f..king charity, you know’.”
Sometimes, Palmer suspected that the staff he had sacked at morning tea and rehired later in the day were in a conspiracy to steal from him.
Other times, someone would be shown the door for giving frank and fearless advice — like suggesting that his plan to put noisy animatronic dinosaurs around his five star former Hyatt resort on the Sunshine Coast might be transformational for all the wrong reasons. There were times when he could blow a gasket with no obvious provocation at all.
Sternberg: “I’d say ‘Mr Palmer, I was just trying to do my job’. He’d say ‘Well, you weren’t thinking, were you!’, and I’d reply ‘No, of course not, Mr Palmer’. This would be after he had called me a ‘dumb c ..., a stupid f..king bitch, a f..king idiot. We were all idiots’.
“He was the reason the resort failed. Every single big decision was his. I don’t think he is capable of having a plan. If he ever did have a plan, it would change every day. A lot of people who worked for him knew what they were doing, but he couldn’t leave the place alone. We even had to close the weddings business there. A wedding was on one day when he walked into his favourite restaurant for his favourite dessert (‘Planet Chocolate — chef’s custom-made specialty of two shells of chocolate stuck together with a rich sugary sauce’).”
The weddings, says Sternberg, were worth more than $600,000 a year to the flagging resort. They were abruptly stopped because the owner’s penchant for Planet Chocolate had been interrupted by paying guests.
Another time, he ordered publishing executive Didier Guerin and his wife to leave the restaurant, go immediately to their VIP villa, pack their bags and get off the resort because of a complaint over a poorly cooked steak. They had been paying guests for many years but never again.
Sternberg: “Towards the end, I was going out and buying bread and milk at the supermarket in Coolum from my own money because there was nothing to feed the guests. The suppliers were not being paid so they weren’t delivering. Chef would call me and say ‘can you help Andrea, I’ve got guests who want breakfast’. Clive told us to stop buying good massage oils for the resort’s spa. He said ‘just buy (cheap) baby oil’.
“Maintenance is another word that doesn’t exist in his vocabulary. One of his managers said he was leaving the refinery because he didn’t want a death occurring on his watch. Clive just wouldn’t pay for the necessary safety and maintenance.”
Mawhirt also had safety concerns as he witnessed the rundown of maintenance at the refinery, which is officially designated a ‘‘major hazard facility’’. He said: “The people are sick of working with machinery that continually breaks down with no parts or money available. They are reporting the whole system is a mess of broken-down machinery and no parts or chemicals.”
Having investigated and reported closely on Palmer since early 2013 (and having been repeatedly accused by him of being personally directed in this work by Rupert Murdoch in secret conversations conducted over Skype, apparently to avoid telephone tapping by intelligence agencies), I find unsurprising the hapless position in which he now finds himself. It was always going to come to this. His belligerence overshadows the business acumen. His determination to have the final say, the last jab, the glutton’s share of every deal keeps him locked in interminable and costly disputes, most of which he loses.
Palmer is unlikely to be financially ruined — there are valuable personal assets and properties that belong to his wife, Anna, and children. These assets will probably be out of reach of creditors.
But he is in a big hole. With nickel prices unlikely to recover quickly enough, his last-ditch bid is probably doomed along with his reputation. He will be remembered as the politician who has destroyed more jobs in his own businesses (first at Coolum’s resort, then at Townsville’s refinery) than any parliamentarian before him. If he cannot achieve a major cash windfall in a separation from the Chinese government-owned Citic, which is mining his flagship company Mineralogy’s iron ore tenements in Western Australia but wants him gone after years of fighting, his hopes will be dashed.
And if the corporate regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, eventually looks into the way he does business, he may be explaining himself in compulsory examinations for a long time to come.
Mike Hennessy, a former security manager and bodyguard to Palmer, was one of the first to issue a public warning in late 2013 about the man who had been newly elected by the narrowest of margins in a seat in which he would not sleep more than a fortnight a year.
Hennessy was nervous when he told me: “I’ve wanted to say something for a long time because I personally think that the rest of this country and particularly the electors of Fairfax need to know what this person is like for real. He is an egotistical bully. The people of Australia are going to see it. He is Jekyll and Hyde.”
Three years ago, prior to the federal election, the portrait looked very different. As a beaming Ray Martin helped launch the Palmer juggernaut with a soft, unquestioning profile on Nine Network’s 60 Minutes, the Queenslander filled Australians’ TV screens, reeled off one-liners, spoke of a multibillion-dollar fortune and outlined his ambition, Donald Trump-style, to be Australia’s prime minister. There was a regular and warm place for Palmer on the ABC, too. Many saw him as an interesting business leader who appeared rich, eccentric, and courageous in challenging the status quo and taking on Tony Abbott and Queensland’s premier, Campbell Newman. But if it was really about vainly seeking public adoration while trying to achieve political leverage for the benefit of his business interests, there will be no way back.
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