Queensland election: Palmers united bring new style to politics

If Clive Palmer has a gentle side it is projected by his wife, Anna. So why is she following him into politics?

Anna Palmer at the waterfront mansion she shares with her husband, United Australia Party leader Clive Palmer. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

If Clive Palmer has a gentle side it is projected by his wife, Anna. She is as different as can be from the loud, polarising and flamboyantly wealthy man she married 13 years ago after the saddest of coincidences drew them together.

So what is she doing climbing into the shark tank of a Queensland election with him?

Ms Palmer, 45, ponders the question at their waterfront mansion on the Gold Coast, the sunshine pouring through 5m picture windows. A gleaming 23m motor cruiser is roped to the private landing outside.

“We do have a comfortable life,” she said with epic understatement. “And I did try to get involved in the party a few years ago, which in hindsight wasn’t a good idea because we had just had our second child. But now both the kids are at school and I have the capacity to do this. I want to contribute as much as I can.”

Meet the United Australia Party’s candidate for Currumbin and newly minted deputy leader as she steps out of the shadow of her larger-than-life husband.

In her first sit-down interview, Ms Palmer is keen to say she is her own woman, with her own ideas about what’s needed in state parliament and a style to match. She speaks carefully, weighing her words. From the other side of the room, Mr Palmer injects himself into the conversation. The $83m he sank into last year’s federal election was worth every dollar to stop “Shifty Shorten” winning, he said, after the question of his prodigious campaign spending cropped up.

Labor was the “citadel of evil”.

Clive Palmer in Townsville endorsing his United Australia Party candidates. Picture: Alix Sweeney

Asked if she agreed with him, Ms Palmer said: “I think that’s Clive’s colourful speech. He can do that.”

Mr Palmer, chuckling: “I do.”

“But,” she continued, casting a stern eye at him, “I am not as comfortable doing that. I am a little more reserved.

“I definitely don’t agree with the Labor Party’s policies. A lot of it is based on ideology and I really like the mixed economy in Australia where you have a social net to support people when they can’t do it, but everyone else who can perform and is able to is given the opportunity to do so. That’s what I like about Australia.”

There is the small matter that they don’t live in the seat she’s running for: Currumbin is 20 minutes’ drive to the south, hugging the locked-down border with NSW. The family has luxury residences dotted across Brisbane, Perth, Townsville, the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast but this one is home base, with six bedrooms and 11 bathrooms, because the girls attend school nearby.

Just so no one can quibble, they have bought yet another house at Palm Beach, closer to the action but still outside the marginal LNP-held electorate. Ms Palmer pointed to other local connections. Two of their private jets were kept at Coolangatta airport, on the NSW side of the state line, and they’re always doing something around Currumbin because they love the area.

“It has more of that Gold Coast feel of the older times,” she said. “It’s more family orientated.”

Ms Palmer has lived on the glitter strip since arriving from Bulgaria as an 18-year-old in 1993 to marry Mr Palmer’s best friend, Andrew Topalov. Her future spouse gave her away at the wedding because her parents, Alexander and Stella, could not afford to travel to Australia. Clive, of course, wowed them with his speech at the reception.

A studious girl, Anna had planned to follow her father into chemical engineering; her mother was an artist but like most families they struggled in post-communist Bulgaria. Her schooling in Sofia, the capital, was the equivalent of grade nine in Australia. But within a year she had mastered English and matriculated, earning a place at Griffith University to study science.

“She is pretty modest,” Mr Palmer said. After switching to law, Anna won the university prize for two years running.

He had known Andrew, a decade his junior, since they were both kids. The newlyweds were close to the Palmers — Clive, his wife, Sue, and children Michael, now 30, and Emily, 26. But the same, terrible tragedy would befall the families. Andrew and Sue both contracted cancer and died within weeks of each other in 2006. Shared grief initially brought Clive and Anna together. But within a year a stronger, more enduring emotion took over despite the 21-year age gap.

Mr Palmer, 66, still marvels at the match. “I certainly loved my first wife and I know Anna loved Andrew,” he said. “When that happens to you, you are devastated. You think, ‘what does my future hold? Is my life over?’ And the thing for Anna and I … it was good to know a year or so later we were still able to meet each other, have a good life together, be successful in our relationship. It’s a good message for all Australians. Not to give up … When you go to the statistics of people with our age difference, 20 years or so, after two years there is only about 2 per chance that the marriage will survive.”

Ms Palmer interrupts gently: “I think it’s 0.5 per cent, Clive.”

“Anyway, we’ve been married for nearly 14 years,” he said. “And I think normally when you meet someone a lot younger it’s difficult because you haven’t grown up with them, had them first as a friend. But at least I knew Andrew and Anna as good people for a long time. It gave me hope … she’s helped me a lot and I hope I’ve helped her.

“But that’s the thing about life — life’s a new experience. That’s what Anna is doing now. People say, ‘why are you standing for parliament?’ But life is all about new experiences. It doesn’t matter how much money you have got, there is always something to do.”

It’s worth remembering Ms Palmer had her own flourishing career before they married in 2007 and Mary, now 12, came along. Having been admitted as a solicitor, she also qualified as an accountant and was on the fast track at Rio Tinto before she gave up work. She stayed in the background when Mr Palmer was elected to federal parliament in 2013 as MP for Fairfax on the Sunshine Coast. The next year she put her up hand to to run in the state seat of Gaven on the Gold Coast but was rebuffed: her husband supported the executive’s decision.

The border closure looms large in her thinking. The plight of Canberra woman Sarah Caisip, denied permission to attend her father’s funeral in Brisbane, and expectant mother Kimberley Brown of Ballina, northern NSW, who lost one of her unborn twins after being told she could not enter Queensland, underlined the “heartless and completely senseless way” in which the rules were applied, Ms Palmer said.

Channelling her husband’s chutzpah, she has challenged Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to a debate on the issue. “We all love the song about how we are all Australians no matter where we come from, but everyone is forgetting that,” she said.

As for LNP leader Deb Frecklington, she said: “I wish she had been a little more vocal until now to put the LNP’s ideas forward.”

Sitting in her opulent home, its walls adorned by a 500-year-old French tapestry and art by Norman Lindsay, Ms Palmer hardly fits the picture of a champion of the people in her linen suit by Max Mara. But she has an answer for that. “People have to remember what’s really important and that’s your family … your children progressing, health,” she said. “All those things are the same no matter how expensive your couch is or what car you drive.”