Wreckage of Clive Palmer’s legacy lies strewn across Australia

Clive Palmer continues to confound by announcing he may stand for the Senate after leaving the lower house.

Clive Palmer leaving the SkyNews studio. Picture: Ray Strange.

In most political obituaries of Australians who have served the ­electorate, it is possible to describe their positive contributions to public life. But not for the first time, Clive Frederick Palmer, 62, who yesterday signalled the end of his ­career in federal parliament’s lower house as the member for the Sunshine Coast seat of Fairfax, pending a possible switch to the Senate, breaks the mould.

The wreckage of his legacy is strewn across Australia.

It is in the homes and small businesses of his constituents in Fairfax, where his mismanagement of a resort caused it to close, costing more than 650 jobs and harming the fragile economy of beachside Coolum.

It is symbolised by the “For Sale” signs outside the homes of some of the 1000 employees who have lost their jobs over the period of his ownership and micro­management of a poorly run ­nickel refinery in Townsville.

It is on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park near his refinery’s ponds of toxic sludge that, through negligence and a cavalier defiance of regulatory authorities, spilled despite warnings of imminent risk.

It is in the public funds, stumped up by Australia’s tax­payers, that will need to be drained to pay for the refinery workforce’s lawful entitlements such as redundancy, long service leave and holiday leave, because Palmer siphoned tens of millions of dollars from the accounts for his own use.

It is in the relationship with China which, after being per­suaded by Palmer’s assurances about a very mediocre iron ore province, has spent more than $10 billion on this lemon, and now budgets millions of dollars a year on ­lawyers to protect its interests from his ­impulsive actions as a ­serial litigant.

And it is in much of the dysfunction of the Senate, to which he introduced Tasmania’s Jacqui Lambie, Western Australia’s Zhenya Wang and Queensland’s Glenn Lazarus in 2013.

While sowing chaos in Can­berra, Palmer also made a major contribution to the 2015 collapse of the Campbell Newman-led Liberal National Party government after the then premier and his deputy, Jeff Seeney, flatly rejected the tycoon’s repeated demands for preferential treatment of his coal province in central Queensland.

Fortunately for Labor’s Annastacia Palaszczuk, her minority Labor-led government, which has held the reins for 15 months, has not been buffeted by the Palmer United Party’s founder. His rocky relationship with the previous Labor government culminated in him issuing proceedings for defamation against then Labor pre­mier Anna Bligh and her treasurer Andrew Fraser, who were defen­dants in the Supreme Court before Newman and Seeney copped their defamation writs. All those cases are now settled.

But yet to be settled is Palmer’s political future. He knows that in Fairfax he is a shot duck. The ­voters cannot stand him. Those who voted for him in September 2013 are keeping their heads down — it is social death up there for his constituents to admit he was first choice on their ballot papers. He is, however, positioning for a tilt at the Senate.

He was pressed about it by Sky News hosts Peter van Onselen and former New South Wales premier Kristina Keneally yesterday, but Palmer first wanted to promote “some of our new policies for the Senate — one of them is that parliamentarians should leave parliament with no entitlements — that to serve the community is more important than serving your own pocket. So if people want to come to parliament they should come to do what good they can do and not leave with any entitlements at all”.

It sounds eerily similar to the policy deployed at his Townsville nickel refinery, where the staff did their best and did indeed leave without any entitlements at all.

Asked about the Senate, he ­replied: “Well, it’s a live option. But, you know, I’m such an ­unpopular person in the country. And if I watch Sky News and Paul Murray, I’m just convinced that I’m a totally useless person and I’ve never contributed anything for this country or this ­nation, (so) why would people want to vote for me?”

It is a fair question. Why would anyone vote for Palmer? Three years ago when he announced himself as a “multi-billionaire” candidate for the federal seat of Fairfax — and the next prime ­minister — some of us at The ­Australian, and particularly in his stamping ground of Queensland, knew this would not end well.

Palmer had become very prominent, very quickly, aided by a great deal of free political ­advertising disguised as journalism from a fawning, unquestioning media. He racked up tens of thousands of kilometres a week in 2013, crossing Australia in one of his four jets, announcing candidates in 150 seats under the banner of the Palmer United Party, and getting prime airtime.

He could not be too choosy in his haste to leave a national political footprint. Several of his party’s candidates were members of his family. Others were ­members of the executive and management teams of his failing businesses.

One of them told the ABC’s 7.30  during those halcyon days that if Palmer instructed him to go to the moon, he would indeed try hard to go.

But for several Queensland watchers of Palmer’s juggernaut back then, it felt like history was on a repeating loop.

Palmer was a colourful character from the Gold Coast who, in his early years as a political maverick, had been in the ear of a deluded Joh Bjelke-Petersen, urging the then premier to run for PM.

Joh also made extravagant promises as he strutted the ­national stage but he fell in a big heap amid Queensland’s police corruption scandal and the ensuing Fitzgerald inquiry. ­Before being bundled back to Kingaroy, however, his “Joh for PM” campaign also doomed John Howard’s.

Palmer — like anyone running to be prime minister — was fair game for close scrutiny. And that was before you weigh the contradictions of a property and resources tycoon referring to himself, in private letters, media releases and serious financial documents, as “Professor” when he did not complete university; or promising in 2013 that he was building a replica of the Titanic at a shipyard in China’s Jinling when the shipyard’s owners saw no cash or contract for a half-billion-dollar undertaking; or calling himself a billionaire mining magnate when he does no mining and has never been a billionaire.

But he was fortunate because several of Australia’s most influential and widely watched media outlets had joined his cheer squad. Senior journalists granted unfettered access to him did not take ­advantage of multiple oppor­tunities to test his increasingly ­extravagant claims.

Completely spurious assertions from Palmer in his quest for attention on the way to building a political platform were accepted as gospel truth. The ABC’s Australian Story led the charge early on with profiles in which Palmer looked down the barrel of the camera and said a Chinese company, Citic ­Pacific, was paying him “royalty every year which is equivalent to about $500 million or something like that”.

He added: “We developed a $7 billion project in the Pilbara, a new port at Port Preston. We ­employed about 8000 people at our joint venture.”

It should have been an early clue to Palmer’s extraordinary propensity for telling huge porkies on a fairly regular basis. He ­repeatedly made these fanciful claims that he received a royalty of about $500m a year from the Chinese. He undoubtedly wanted it to be true. It was also a political boost — the appearance of extra­ordinary wealth in a maverick who wants to be a leader is attrac­tive to voters, as Donald Trump has discovered.

Those early claims about how he developed a $7bn project in the Pilbara in Western Australia, ­employing 8000 people, were fiction. The project and the employees were wholly funded by the Chinese, yet he peddled these ­untruths without challenge.

His other early claims of ­exquisite skill were said to be in ­litigation. Palmer boasted of a perfect ­record — almost 70 cases, and never a loss. These claims of great legal prowess were false, too. During an SBS interview when Ellen Fanning challenged his claim about his 100 per cent success rate in court — and reminded him that he had been trounced by Frank Lowy — Palmer’s response to being caught out was a classic: he reckoned he would have won if it had gone to appeal.

He has claimed that as a boy he sat on the knee of Mao Zedong in China. And that he had a plea­sant exchange in the rose garden of the last emperor of China, Puyi.

About my own journalism and a stint in London 25 years ago, he once texted me: “Remember when u use live Buckingham Palace and write stories that said ‘sources close to Buckingham Palace said’?

“And u use to make up stories about the Royal Family. Not interested in fantasy from a 4th class Jurno that we will be suing.”

I tried to explain that for the two years I lived in London, I could not afford to rent anywhere but south of the Thames — right on Brixton Road at The Oval.

He has repeatedly claimed that our investigations of him only started because Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corporation, wanted it.

We were accused by Palmer of involvement in a supposed Watergate-style break-in at his offices and the theft of a computer, which he said held some of the documents that fell into our hands.

One of these documents was a legal letter he instructed his lawyers to write to CITIC ­Pacific in March 2013, demanding the ­Chinese company pay him $200m ­urgently or everyone would be axed from their jobs. The letter’s forecast about the job ­losses and his financial crunch were prescient.

The claims about our connection to a break-in were rubbish but they did divert the media for a day in the news cycle.

But Palmer is often paranoid and conspiratorial. He has insisted in federal parliament that ASIO bugs his offices. When his former security chief, Mike Hennessy, told Palmer in 2013 that his ­luxury car was covered in bugs after a two-hour drive from the Gold Coast to the Coolum resort, the colour drained from the ­tycoon’s face.

Palmer’s purchase of the Hyatt resort from Lend Lease Corporation and his promises to keep things humming along were ­another large clue to his character shortly before he entered politics.

He renamed this respected destination the Palmer Coolum ­Resort, rebadged its restaurant as the Palmer Grill, hung framed photographs of himself on the main wall of the five star foyer, put the ABC’s Australian Story profile of him on a continuous loop on TVs in the holiday accommodation, and ordered fibreglass dinosaurs to turn the grounds into Jurassic Park.

He lost the annual Australian PGA Championship event after parking a bulldozer on the green and warning it would be torn up unless he got his way in the ­negotiations.

TripAdvisor’s published resort reviews were thrilling and funny. One guest wrote: “There are cars in restaurants and colour photocopies of Clive Palmer in the foyer, not to mention the once lovely PGA course ruined by Dinosaurs. I woke up on day 2 hoping I was dreaming.”

Another guest wrote: “Every wall is covered with photos of Clive with various heads of state. His vintage cars sit all over the place, including the Captain’s Table and the reception. The golf putting green has been ripped up as a ­repository for more vintage cars.

“Dinosaurs are plonked on the resort and pieces of them are awaiting assembly stored behind a restaurant. Titanic II flags drape in odd locales, with vintage cars and dinosaurs.

“Should the Palmer Political Party get going and the same management style be adopted, Australia is doomed.”

Palmer is changing horses now. From the House of Representatives, he is likely to try his luck in the Senate.

Even as regulatory authorities, liquidators, creditors, the Chinese, the sacked workers and others want him held to account, Palmer is still backing himself. It’s ­evidence that while he may have been the most disastrous politician in recent memory, he’s got the thickest skin.