The real reason Clive Palmer has gone quiet about that missing $12m

THERE is a reason Clive Palmer throws a toddler’s hissy-fit and tries to block journalists who ask sensible questions about his ­alleged fraud of more than $12 million of China’s funds.

The reason has nothing to do with the concern he feigns for due legal process in Brisbane’s ­Supreme Court, where he is ­defending serious allegations of dishonesty.

Palmer wants the media — and anyone contemplating a vote for the sagging Palmer United Party — to believe that because of these civil proceedings in Brisbane he must be respectful of the court, keep his lips sealed and talk ­instead about his brilliance.

There are problems with this claim. First, there is the obvious ­inconsistency: Palmer has popped out press releases, issued tweets and hogged the media spotlight when he has wanted to carry on about his other legal matters that have been the subject of civil proceedings. Yet in this particular case, with its allegations of serious wrongdoing, he has suddenly ­become a legal purist.

Second, all the documentary evidence in the Supreme Court — showing how Palmer funnelled more than $10m into his PUP (and almost $100,000 to American Express) soon after he withdrew Chinese funds totalling $12.167m from a “Port Palmer Operations” bank account in August and ­September last year — is being considered in Brisbane in the ­absence of a jury.

Jurors may be swayed by publicity. But in this case a judge is hearing the evidence. Palmer can say whatever he likes to defend himself in forums like the National Press Club because Justice David Jackson QC will not be influenced by claims Palmer might make outside the Supreme Court.

The more likely explanation for Palmer’s silence is his lawyers, sensibly, have told him to shut up — not because of a bearing on the civil proceedings, but because major fraud squads in Western Australia and Queensland have launched criminal investigations.

This is what happens when documentary evidence of a significant alleged white-collar fraud is tied in a neat bow and presented to police chiefs by a complainant. The lawyers won’t want Palmer to incriminate himself. In this case, the complainant is China — but it wouldn’t matter if it had come from Jacqui Lambie.

Palmer has a habit of publicly denying the very conduct he has already admitted in his legal ­replies, such as his role in falsely backdating by 11 months a key ­document — the Port Management Services Agreement, which the Chinese call a “sham” — that Palmer executed and signed. He did it again yesterday, insisting he had not backdated the document. Clive, this is silly — you have ­admitted you backdated it. Have you misled the Supreme Court, which would be perjury, or told a whopper to the National Press Club? Choose the latter.

It is difficult to imagine how any other serving political leader could soldier on in public life so belligerently after admitting having fabricated the origins of such a document that Palmer invented to try to justify the withdrawals.

This raises another question. Why is Palmer neither testifying on his own behalf in the ­Supreme Court case nor intro­ducing evidence from others?

Accused of defrauding Australia’s most important trading partner and determined to prove his innocence, he might have been ­expected to go straight to the ­witness box and put to the sword the allegations of those Chinese “bastards” and “mongrels”, as he called them when he lost it with Tony Jones on the ABC’s Q & A. ­Instead, he is staying well out of it.

The media’s legitimate probing of a politician who has, by his own admissions in legal documents, used China’s cash (which Beijing believed was going to be spent ­running a port) to buy power in Australia’s Parliament brings on a deluxe tantrum every time.

His bullying and abuse of ­inquisitive journalists — and his claims of the conspiracy he claims is mushrooming to include Kerry Stokes, who controls The West Australian newspaper, along with the ABC, and his original enemies (News Corp, Rupert Murdoch and me) — are increasingly bizarre.

It is not easy to channel the late Joh Bjelke-Petersen while behaving in business and in politics like Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi.

And it is painful to watch.