No place for Clive Palmer in parliament: Ron Boswell

RON Boswell has called on the Abbott government to stop negotiating with Clive Palmer and says the MP shouldn’t be in parliament.

RON Boswell, who ran an anti-racist campaign to stop Pauline Hanson entering the Senate, has called on the government to stop negotiating with Clive Palmer and declared that the multi-millionaire shouldn’t have “a seat in parliament”.

The 31-year Liberal National Party Senate veteran said Mr Palmer’s comments about Chin­ese “bastards” and “mongrels” were “horrific” and damaging.

“This nation’s prosperity depends on trade. Australia has been a trading nation since we shipped our first bale of wool. China is our biggest customer for wool,” Mr Boswell, who retired from the Senate in June, said last night to a crowd of more than 300 LNP supporters, largely Chinese and Vietnamese.

“A political leader who makes those irresponsible, anti-Asian, anti-Chinese remarks should not have a seat in parliament or lead a party that controls the balance of power in the Senate.”

In Singapore yesterday, Trade Minister Andrew Robb echoed Mr Boswell’s warning, saying that Mr Palmer’s comments had done “potential damage to the prosperity and the prospects of millions of Australians”.

“We shouldn’t be in this position in the first place,'’ Mr Robb said. “We shouldn’t have to be wondering whether it will have a material and permanent impact.”

On the ABC’s Q&A on Monday, Mr Palmer attacked the Chin­ese government and the company he is in a commercial dispute with, saying the Chinese “shoot their own people” and that they were bastards and mongrels.

Later in the week, after a call for Chinese to boycott Mr Palmer’s businesses, the millionaire MP for Fairfax on the Sunshine Coast said he was sorry if anyone had been offended.

Palmer United Party senator Zhenya Wang, who is Chinese-born, told The Guardian Australia he had spent much of the week apologising to Chinese community groups who had written to him outraged at the comments.

“I don’t think it was a wise comment, I knew where he was coming from but for the greater audience, they don’t understand what it really meant and they felt offended and rightly so,” Senator Wang said.