The life of Clive: a thirst for engagement

THE would-be prime minister railed against university administration.

Clive Palmer

ON a western bend of the Brisbane River, among the sports fields, lecture theatres and libraries that make up one of Australia's famous sandstone universities, thousands of students are trying to find their place in the world. Mostly fresh-faced teenagers and twenty-somethings, the students at the University of Queensland are open to persuasion and inspiration as they chart a course into adulthood.

Perhaps that is why young Clive Palmer stood up in the refectory one afternoon in the early 1970s, proclaiming his views to anyone who would listen.

"There would have been about 300 students having their lunch there, and there was this lone voice talking," says former UQ law student Harry Fong, who cannot recall Clive's topic.

"The crowd was very anti what he was saying. I was clapping him for having a go."

Clive had skipped his Year 12 exams, so didn't have his choice of uni courses. Provisional entry allowed him to enrol in the arts faculty with a view to one day becoming a lawyer. He became adversarial early, perhaps best shown by the prominent role he had with the Right to Life Association while still a teenager. His anti-abortion crusades went against the campus theme, where women and socialists were fighting for a woman's right to choose, but church leaders had drawn his attention to the issue of unplanned pregnancies and so too had his Liberal friends. When Gough Whitlam was elected with a plan to allow a conscience vote on the easing of abortion laws, conservatives around the country responded. Clive joined rallies, even travelling around Australia, sleeping in presbyteries just to be able to take part in protest marches. Once he preached the wrongs of abortion for an hour and a half to an unsuspecting crowd at a freedom of speech forum in the Gold Coast hinterland.

Clive even authorised a newspaper advertisement, for a protest march through the heart of the Gold Coast's tourist district, with confronting photographs - including two that were reportedly of a 21-week-old aborted fetus, and another of the feet of a fetus in an adult's hands.

When Labor held its party conference at the Chevron Hotel in Surfers Paradise, Clive distributed Right to Life leaflets in the conference room, only for someone to remove them. He complained that people were being denied the right to have their say.

In the end, the Liberals voted in a bloc to defeat Labor's legislation in federal parliament and Clive was satisfied to have played a part. But in conversations with pro-choice advocates at university, Clive agreed pregnant women needed more support. So when pro-life officials came to Queensland to establish a support service, Clive and a couple of church leaders established Pregnancy Help on the Gold Coast, while an organisation of the same name set up office in Brisbane.

Clive - who noted Pregnancy Help in later resumes but not Right to Life - says he helped the organisations raise funds and coordinated its efforts on the Gold Coast. He arranged counsellors - "I realised that I had no real role nor did I want to have a role in face-to-face contact with people in those situations" - from church and like-minded organisations, and a hotline for expectant mothers to call for advice.

"An immense amount of good will exists in churches," Clive says. "Some of it is a bit judgmental, some of it's a bit negative but, still, there are people there who want to help."

The university newspaper, Semper Floreat, gave Clive the opportunity to express his broader opinions. The April 1974 edition has a young female protester on the cover. On page five - opposite an article by a yoga teacher, a crude cartoon and "an appeal to all aspiring Fellinis, Godards, Warhols" to support 8mm film workshops - is Clive's maiden work, a full-page article on the pending double-dissolution election, whereby both houses of federal parliament would be dissolved for a fresh election.

"In 1971-1972 the Australian economy, according to much of the Rupert Murdock (sic) press, was in dire straights (sic), so called unemployment being the major problem and the Prime Minister Billy McMahon being the brunt (sic) of everyone's jokes," Clive wrote, without the benefit of a good sub-editor. He went on: "The result of an election in 1972 could only mean the end of 23 years of Liberal-Country party coalition government, and Billy McMahon as prime minister. And so it came to pass that the L-CP lost the election to the ALP and McMahon lost the prime ministership to Gough Whitlam.

"Conditions in March 1974 have not changed much; the economy is still in dire straights, this time by the menace of inflation. Inflation is galloping along under the pressure of record industrial trouble, heavily increased government spending and haphazard economic policies. The situation has now been reversed - Labor politicians are now the brunt of everybody's jokes."

In one semester in 1974, when Clive was 20, he studied four subjects and scored his best marks in journalism - a six out of seven, for JR100, serious and popular journalism - and his worst, a three out of seven, in GT100, Australian political institutions. Clive also scored a four out of seven in both PE130 (track and field A) and PE140 (basic gymnastics), which kept his grade point average above the line of failure. He was elected to be the arts faculty representative on the student union and sought higher office on the UQ senate. Campaigning through Semper alongside the other candidates, Clive put himself forward as someone who was not so much a product of the university as an independent critic.

Photographed looking off into the distance, his wavy black hair parted for the occasion, Clive complained about lectures being overcrowded and understaffed, argued the workload was too heavy for some students - and said the college accommodation was too expensive and the parking fines too excessive.

"There exists in this University a great communication gap - Between the Administration and Students, and between students themselves," Clive wrote.

He and another candidate soon criticised the election process, complaining that ballot papers were sent out too early, before they had a chance to put forward their policies. He felt that if the students only knew what he stood for, they would vote him into the senate. They didn't, and Clive lost.

Still looking for a soapbox to stand on, and a support base to allow him to keep expressing his views, Clive offered himself to Queensland's Country Party. He worked in the governing party's head office, preparing for state and federal elections. Having already joined the Young Liberals, Clive then set to work convincing the Country Party that he and his friends on campus should have an alternative. A meeting was called and Country Party officials agreed to attend.

Only a handful of students were actually interested in the Country Party, as Clive recalls, but the people he had met through sport and other endeavours such as Pregnancy Help were happy to turn out for the meeting as a personal favour to him. He was learning how to build a loyal following, a political skill that would become even more important in the years to come.

The room at Union College was packed - "we even had people coming from the left-left-left, the Trotsky union", says Clive, who took some credit for the Country Party's agreeing to establish a branch. He says he cannot remember whether he was voted its first president, but left the branch soon after and spent more time in an elected capacity with the Young Liberals.

As an aspiring politician, Clive saw social issues as his strength. When a motion was proposed at a Young Liberals conference calling for neglected children to be separated from parents with criminal convictions, Clive made the point that sometimes these children were placed in state homes with young offenders.

"Under these conditions the homes are breeding grounds for criminals of the future," he said at the time, having briefly worked in a boys' home in Brisbane.

In 1974, Clive sought Liberal Party preselection for the state seat of Albert on the Gold Coast - one of Pregnancy Help's clients wrote a public letter of support - but was unsuccessful. He still warned, in a letter to the local newspaper, that "a State Labor Government is the most frightening prospect this state has faced".

Clive's animosity towards the Labor Party may have been exacerbated by his own experiences of Whitlam government policies. When semesters were introduced at university, spreading the workload throughout the year, Clive found himself further disadvantaged. He took a job with a real estate agent, helping to sell houses in Brisbane's inner western suburbs, but discovered the Whitlam government's Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme, later known as Austudy, had all but cut him off.

Fellow student Paul Tully was at one point manager of the Commonwealth Education Department's Student Education Centre. As Tully recalls, Clive was quick to challenge the perceived inequities of the system and gained publicity for threatening to sue the commonwealth.

"They used to look at whether or not you're a full-time student over the whole year to get paid Austudy for the whole year," Tully says. "As a result of Clive's persistence and threats to sue the commonwealth, they changed the Austudy regulations that you tested a person's full-time status on a progressive semester basis rather than over the whole year."

Clive and Tully would test the waters of the legal system in other ways, too. Tully had read how the owners of the US fast-food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken had sued its founder and former owner, Colonel Harland Sanders, for trying to compete with the chain using the name 'Colonel's Lady Dinner House'. He had an idea on the train one day, and decided to go and register the Australian business name 'Colonel's Lady Dinner House', or words to that effect. He expected to attract the attention of KFC and, sure enough, legal letters were soon being exchanged. Tully had beehives at the time, so he argued that that was why he needed a business name, and if the corporate end of town wanted the one he had chosen he would require funds to change letterheads and the like.

When the lawyers got serious, Tully says he asked Clive for advice and they ended up reaching a settlement of sorts. While Tully recalls only hundreds of dollars, Clive claims "at the end of the day they paid us $10,000 and I split it with Paul Tully".

But as Clive was trying to gain a foothold in politics, and stay afloat financially, he lost his place in the community organisation that had given him so much exposure. A falling out with the Brisbane office of Pregnancy Help led to the Gold Coast office being shut down.

It was becoming clear that Clive would need a stable, paying job. He had started dating another student, Susan Parker, and before long they were living together, more out of necessity than a desire to be de factos. She had all but finished her studies and had a job in administration at the university, earning about $80 a week - at one stage, giving half of that to Clive by way of an allowance.

"I was pretty lazy in those days," Clive says. "I wouldn't get a job or pull my weight, I was pretty immature."

When Sue told Clive she would no longer pay him, he was worried the relationship was over but she just wanted him to become independent. He had no steady income, just the occasional windfall, and couldn't see university leading to a job in the short term.

Ever the opportunist, Clive found a way to fast-track his entry into the legal profession, and took his mate Harry Fong with him. Starting out in the Public Defender's Office, Clive and Harry were among several would-be lawyers engaged to interview defendants and brief defence barristers on a range of criminal matters. In the years before the Fitzgerald inquiry into police and political corruption, however, Clive says there were worrying signs that police were forging confessions and making up evidence. Yet when the confident, outspoken and increasingly political young man sought to draw attention to this alleged misconduct, he was swiftly transferred out of the Public Defender's Office and into a dead-end job. Not only that, a threatening phone call then prompted Clive and Sue to flee interstate.

 This is an edited extract from Clive: The Story of Clive Palmer, to be published by HarperCollins on Monday.