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This was published 4 months ago
For his second lunch, Clive Palmer takes a fillet steak –cooked medium-to-well – with a side of asparagus and a long glass of chocolate milk. Really, he fancies Chinese, but this outdoor Gladstone restaurant is breezy and conveniently located next to his scheduled press conference with local candidate Tanya Wieden, whom he mistakenly calls Tracey.
“We’ve got 151 seats and my mind’s mush,” he says, apologising. Just an hour or so earlier, the United Australia Party chairman and lead senate candidate for Queensland was in Cairns railing against the World Health Organisation and major political parties in what he previously vowed would be the most expensive election campaign in Australian history. It is hungry work.
Clive Palmer on the road in Cairns.Credit:Zach Hope
“Giving speeches, travelling all around, you’ve got to keep a bit of energy going for the journos,” he tells this masthead. Somewhere in the air during the whistle-stop tour, he also provides a slice of his strategy for handling said journos: “Never let the questions distract you.”
Five days from the election, Palmer is making his final push aboard the $40 million private jet he boasts can fly anywhere in the world on a single stop. In the cockpit are his two full-time pilots. Flight attendant Rachael, who splits her time between the jet and Palmer’s super yacht, serves up fresh sandwiches, cheese and a tropical fruit platter, which includes raspberries stuffed with blueberries. This is the first lunch.
“What else do you do with your money?” he asks.
The UAP faithful in tropical Cairns and the blue-collar mining town of Gladstone share no such lifestyle, but they turn out in their dozens (perhaps more than a hundred at the latter’s Precinct pub), decked out in their bright yellow T-shirts, to hear from the larger-than-life mining billionaire, incongruously, speaking their language.
“Australians shouldn’t be classified in class structure … as citizens, we’re all equal,” he says in a separate interview. “The prime minister flies in here on a $100 million jet and is accompanied by 23 people, and they’re all paid for by taxpayers. The difference is the jet that we’ve come in today is one that I own. Once you get here, it’s the strength of your ideas that matter.”
Clive Palmer disembarks from his private jet to campaign for the United Australia Party in Gladstone.Credit:Zach Hope
The UAP’s ubiquitous advertising, funded by the miner’s billions, declares leader Craig Kelly to be the nation’s next prime minister. In private, Palmer is not so bullish, not even when it comes to his own prospects of clinching Queensland’s sixth senate vacancy.
What if, like the 2019 federal and 2020 state campaigns, all the millions and all the miles come to nought?
“Then you start saving up for the next one,” he says. “Governments come and go, ideas last forever.”
Besides the “freedom” catchcry – a rebuke of COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates – the UAP proposes to repay spiralling national debt by collecting a 15 per cent tax on iron ore exports. Local candidates say the policy of capping home loan interest rates – an idea rubbished by economists – is popular.
Wieden, in the electorate of Flynn, spruiks a region-boosting UAP proposal to lower taxes by 20 per cent for anyone living more than 200 kilometres from a capital city.
When given examples of under-resourced and struggling towns that are safely within the 200-kilometre capital city zones, Palmer acknowledges the policy needs to be refined. But this is not the point. It is the ideas – the debate and influence – that appear to matter most.
“Let’s face it, if you’re in a major party, which I have been, as an individual, there’s very little you can do with policy input,” he says.
“In our party, we’ve got individuals who can have ideas. We can recognise them and we can put them forward. And often, they [the major parties] say, ‘Well, that’s a solution to a problem, and they’ll grab it. That’s what uniting Australians is all about.”
Clive Palmer addresses the faithful in Gladstone.Credit:Zach Hope
Unlike the final weeks of the 2019 election campaign, in which Palmer directed his advertising spend towards bringing down then-Labor leader Bill Shorten, the UAP sees both major parties as fair game in 2022. At the Precinct pub, one of Palmer’s biggest hits with the crowd is a joke about waking up each morning and calling party leader Craig Kelly to discuss how to skewer the Liberals, the pair’s former party.
He believes cabinet minister Peter Dutton is at risk of losing to Labor in the seat of Dickson without the help of UAP preferences. But in Queensland’s notionally battleground seats – Longman, Leichhardt, Flynn and Brisbane – the UAP has preferenced Labor behind the LNP.
At the Cairns press conference, Palmer insists the preferences are determined candidate-by-candidate. It calls to mind another insight he provided to the travelling journalists about his media advice to new and raw candidates. “Never answer the question.”
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