Mark McGowan, Clive Palmer blasted in defamation case ruling

The court battle between Clive Palmer and Mark McGowan ends with both being awarded token damages, and copping a savage spray.

Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan outside court. Picture: NCA NewsWire / James Gourley

A Federal Court judge has blasted Queensland billionaire Clive Palmer and West Australian Premier Mark McGowan for wasting the court’s time, after their costly defamation actions against one another ended in each man being awarded token damages.

The $20,000 awarded to Mr McGowan will cover only a sliver of the total legal costs incurred by WA taxpayers as a result of the matter, while the $5,000 awarded to Mr Palmer will similarly pale against the costs he incurred during the fight.

Justice Michael Lee criticised both men for bringing the matters when handling down his judgment on Tuesday afternoon, slamming the dispute as an unnecessary distraction.

“The game has not been worth the candle,” he said.

“These proceedings have not only involved considerable expenditure by Mr Palmer and the taxpayers of Western Australia, but have also consumed considerable resources of the Commonwealth and, importantly, diverted court time from resolving controversies of real importance to persons who have a pressing need to litigate.”

Mining billionaire Clive Palmer. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dan Peled

Justice Lee found that both men had defamed one another in their war of words over the course of 2020, although he awarded only token damages to each man.

Justice Lee said the comments at the heart of the proceedings had done little to no damage to either man’s reputation. The comments made by Mr McGowan about Mr Palmer had done only “very minor” harm to the billionaire, while it was more likely that Mr McGowan’s reputation had actually been enhanced by the imbroglio as evidenced by his resounding win at the 2021 state election.

Both men, he said, had chosen to be part of the “hurly burly” of political life. One of the downsides of political life was that political figures must expect a degree of public criticism not usually visited on the general public.

“Enoch Powell once remarked, ‘For a politician to complain about the press is like a captain complaining about the sea’. These proceedings demonstrate a politician litigating over the barbs of a political adversary might be considered a similarly futile exercise,” he said.

Mr Palmer launched the proceedings against Mr McGowan following a lengthy public slanging match between the pair back in 2020, when they were clashing over WA’s pandemic border closures and extraordinary legislation designed to kill off Mr Palmer’s $30 billion arbitration claim against WA over a stalled iron ore project.

Mr McGowan responded with his own defamation counterclaim against Mr Palmer over comments he had made in media interviews and advertisements that suggested the WA premier was corrupt and dishonest.

Federal court judge Hon Justice Michael Lee. Picture: Aaron Francis/The Australian

Speaking to journalists after the judgment was handed down, Mr McGowan said he could not yet comment on the total cost to taxpayers from the legal battle.

“The court action was started by Mr Palmer, not by Western Australians and not by me,” he said.

“The last thing I want to be doing as premier of WA is dealing with defamation cases. To be blunt, I didn't want to be put in this position but everything I have done has been an attempt to protect the interests of WA.”

He said the government’s success in killing off Mr Palmer’s arbitration claim against WA, which sparked the war of words that ended in court, was one of the finest moments in the state’s recent history.

“We could have been looking at a $30 billion bill,” he said.

“That's what we were trying to protect the state from, and I'll go to my grave proud of what we did.”

Opposition leader Mia Davies said the court had found that Mr McGowan had taken the opportunity to advance his political prospects by defaming Mr Palmer, leaving West Australians to pick up the bill.

“This spat between the Premier and Clive Palmer has cost the West Australian taxpayers in dollars, as well as time that the Premier could have spent dealing with the multitude of crises on the home front in health, housing and easing the cost-of-living for everyday West Australians,” she said.

During hearings earlier this year, Mr Palmer made the extraordinary claim that he had feared for his life after the arbitration legislation was passed, telling the court he believed the law had given Mr McGowan a “licence to kill”.

Justice Lee ridiculed Mr Palmer’s testimony as “fantastic … in the original but now secondary sense of that word”.

“The unsettling spectre of Western Australian Government thugs or assassins needing immunity from the State to absolve them from the criminal consequences of physical violence had, I confess, not occurred to me,” he said.

“To even his most rusted-on partisans, Mr McGowan would be unlikely to have been thought to resemble Ian Fleming’s fictional MI6 character, James Bond.”

He said he did not place any significant reliance on Mr Palmer’s evidence, describing him as a “combative and evasive witness”.

The hearings also proved embarrassing for Mr McGowan and his top law officer, attorney general John Quigley.

Mr Palmer’s lawyers cross-examined the premier on cosy text messages exchanged between him and WA media baron Kerry Stokes, while the trial also exposed messages sent between Mr McGowan and Mr Quigley in which the pair mocked Mr Palmer’s weight and Mr Quigley made jokes about his own sex life.

Mr Quigley also sought a “do-over” of his testimony after realising he had incorrectly recalled details of what he knew about the state’s legal strategy in drafting and passing the anti-Palmer legislation.

While the attorney general’s testimony was “all over the shop”, Justice Lee said being a confused witness was quite different from being a dishonest one.