“I was hunting for fishies!” a four-year-old Clive Palmer said, as he was coaxed back through the porthole, having climbed out onto a thin ledge running around the Dutch freighter on which the Palmer family were travelling. Having resisted attempts by the crew to haul him in (“You get away from me!”), Clive had finally been persuaded by his mother that he had something on his back.



Decades later, the anecdote, printed at the time in the Women’s Weekly, resurfaced and was passed around, to general amazement. For many it captured young Palmer: bumptious, foolish, easily distracted, lacking common sense.

Simultaneously, there was another story being told, as Hedley Thomas’s investigations into Palmer’s mining interests continued their remorseless advance. Palmer was a shonk, a flim-flam guy. There was no shortage of corroborating evidence for that view. By 2008, Palmer’s involvement with the Queensland National and Liberal parties had become all-embracing, with a donation of nearly half a million dollars, and an emergency donation of $100,000 given to the Liberals to save them from bankruptcy. When the Nationals finally absorbed the Liberals and became the LNP, Palmer was accused of having bought a party.

To anyone who had been following the LNP’s internal feudings – which was not many, outside Queensland – the motives for Palmer’s launch into brand-name politics were obvious. Having failed to split the LNP and form a new party with sitting members, he was entering federal parliament as a pincer movement against Campbell Newman – an accusation borne out by his subsequent success in having the Senate launch an inquiry into the Queensland government. Others suggested that it was only ever about getting the Galilee Basin project moving by any means necessary. Still yet a third interpretation was that Clive had gone a bit mad, and that this massive political endeavour was him off on a frolic of his own.

By the time these three explanations had travelled a distance, intertwining and coming apart again, I’d spent a few months watching Clive in action, reading his backstory, trying to think ahead of his latest stunt. Increasingly, I began to wonder if we were seeing the same person. Whatever and whoever Clive Palmer was, he wasn’t a simple man, and his desires were not easily interpretable, even to himself. His standing up for the common folk was not always principled, naturally, but his apparent venality was not always selfish. If he was building a populist outfit to win over old culturally right-wing Labor voters and “cut the crap” Liberal ones, he was going about it in a pretty bloody funny way, standing next to Al Gore and taking on a greenish hue, thus pissing off Queensland Laborites, while holding the line against Hockey’s fiscally conservative, punishing budget.

Who is Clive Palmer? He’s a man so utterly a creation of the Gold Coast that you can smell the coconut oil and sand on him, but he’s also an observant Catholic whose public statements have the timbre of religious tradition about them. He’s a man who wanted to be a lawyer and a stable man of the establishment, but found that his truer nature as a natural-born salesman and wheeler-dealer would win out in the end. He’s a long-time associate of the Queensland LNP, an outfit that was an enabler of racist brutality for decades, yet he wrote a poem lamenting the murder of Steve Biko.

‘Palmer’s conflicting tendencies are held together with a tad less calm integration than he would wish for.’ Photograph: Mike Bowers

He’s a relentless builder of empires, however flimsy, whose life appears to have been genuinely influenced by the countercultural currents of the 1960s. He’s a man who speaks of a love revolution, then sues everybody. He contains multitudes, which explains the amplitude and the waddle. These conflicting tendencies are held together with a tad less calm integration than he would wish for, of which more in a bit, but for the moment it is worth considering that the politics of Clive Palmer, whatever personal vendettas and agendas may be being exercised through them, are exactly what they claim to be: a mildly centre-right politics, grounded in Australian Catholic traditions and social movement doctrine, and tracing their lineage back to the party whose name he wanted to adopt, the United Australia Party.

In this respect, Palmer’s objective politics tap into his personal history – his father’s friendship with, and role as informal advisor to, Catholic centrist politician Joe Lyons, and his mother’s commitment to, and communication of, a serious Catholicism, with its notion of service in the world. Palmer’s first way of bearing witness to that commitment was in a relatively fraught and ostentatious form, as part of the aggressive Right to Life campaigns of the early 1970s, a movement he now leaves off his CV. It’s an embarrassing item, to be sure, but perhaps he is also genuinely ashamed of Right to Life’s merciless and persecutory style; he has continued to play up his involvement in Pregnancy Now, and his departure when it began to drift into a pure anti-abortion mode.

The policies that Palmer urges now – which oppose harsh budgeting that targets the poor, which see the state, capital and labour as engaged in a triple partnership, which reflect a belief that further privatisations would be a betrayal of our common holdings, and take a Keynesian and demand-driven attitude to deficit and public debt – these are nothing other than the centre-right politics that determined the position of the non-Labor parties from the formation of the UAP in 1931, and carried right through, including into much of the Howard/Costello era.

Indeed, this long period was bookended by two similar events: the Nationalists’ attempt to kill the arbitration system in the late 1920s, and the subsequent election of the Scullin government in 1929; and John Howard’s hubristic introduction of WorkChoices in 2005, and his subsequent election loss at the height of a boom. Because the arbitration system and the Harvester judgment that inaugurated it took their moral language from Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical that sparked off the Catholic social movements, we can say that it is this doctrine, and its secular variants, that sits at the very centre of Australian political values, and major parties depart too far from it at their peril. It consists not merely of a set of social rules, but of an idea of what it is to be human, an idea of depth, and of selfhood as achieved in the exercise of mutual obligation.

Such a doctrine, drawing also from nineteenth-century social liberalism and classical and Christian notions of freedom as flourishing within communal life, is a world away from the atomised and content-less self of classical liberal doctrine, and the neoliberal political-economic movement that derives from it. Part of Tony Abbott’s success in the 2013 election was because he feinted towards that doctrinal ideal, and made an explicit compact with the voter that he would maintain the social policies that expressed such notions of collectivity – indeed, that he would execute them better than the chaotic Labor Party. Many of Abbott’s difficulties in the first half of 2014 arose not only because he lied about his intentions, but because this lie embodied an attack on the very foundations of our collective life, as expressed in Medicare and other measures.

‘To ask what it is that a political figure believes him or herself to be is not to take that belief as true.’ Bernie Fraser, Greg Hunt and Clive Palmer, 2014. Photograph: Mike Bowers

Palmer has been completely consistent in doing what he said he’d do – vote to abolish the carbon and mining taxes – and completely in accord with his stated beliefs in developing a set of policies in response to the surprise budget. For six months he has said he and his party would not agree to the Medicare co-payment, the harsh new arrangements for unemployed youth, an increase in university fees or “assets recycling,” and he hasn’t. Much of what he was willing to compromise on with the government involved issues and policies peripheral to his philosophy. His rapid deal-making, a legacy of his real-estate and mining-lease years and his ability to package and repackage sets of options at a rapid pace seemed to bamboozle people, to convince them that anything was up for grabs. Yet this was nothing more than the horse-trading that is a necessary part of politics everywhere else, but that has been lessened by the lock-step nature of the Australian party system. One layer down is a set of core values, which are close to the centre of Australian politics.

QE 56: Cliveosaurus Photograph: Quarterly Essay

Whether Palmer advances those values because he genuinely thinks about the single mum who wouldn’t be able to take her kids to the doctor, and feels that we have a social obligation to her, or whether he imagines himself on the prow of a boat with cheering crowds garlanding him with flowers, as said single mum kisses him chastely and says, “Thank you for saving my baby’s life,” or some point in between the two, is of little moment. To ask what it is that a political figure believes him or herself to be is not to take that belief as true, or even seriously felt. But it is to presume that an idea about past formation will be a useful predictor of future action.

In the first half of the year we saw Tony Abbott treated with deference to his values and beliefs, as his chaotic and lying government slid from one side of the ring to the other, while Clive Palmer, ploughing a steady course on a range of key issues, was treated as the inconstant one. No wonder no one could tell what he was going to do next – they weren’t even bothering to look at where he had come from. As Abbott moved out of the centre-right ground he had claimed in the election campaign, and Labor – infested with free-marketeers who would love the Coalition to introduce co-payments, higher university fees and welfare tightening so that they can continue them in a “progressive” fashion – refused to move into it, Palmer claimed it by default.

Doubtless it would be possible to over-interpret the man, but since there has been so little interpretation of him to date, the danger is slight. What would be an error, however, would be to seek to find in Palmer’s life the key to his current hold on the political process. That hold came about not from any internal drive, but from external processes. Clive is not a cause of our current fractured politics: he is one of its most spectacular effects.