David Feeney (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This week the Senate has been debating the government’s bill to reform the law relating to campaign donations. The Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2009 would restore the transparency provisions of the Electoral Act relating to campaign donations, which the Howard government removed. Senators opposite have been resisting tooth and nail our efforts to make the facts about who is donating, and how much, to political parties more readily available to the voters.

When we look at the current election campaign in Queensland, it is easy to see why the Liberal Party and the National Party—which in Queensland have merged to form a new party, the LNP—are so afraid of laws which make big donations to political parties more transparent. The reason is that the LNP is heavily in debt, both literally and politically, to one man. That one man is Mr Clive Palmer—reputedly now Australia’s richest man.

Mr Palmer made his first fortune in the 1980s in the Gold Coast property boom. He was part of the notorious white shoe brigade, who grew rich with suspicious ease in the climate of shonky deals and secret favours that famously flourished in the good old days of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. He showed his gratitude to Sir Joh by devoting his time and a lot of his money to the disastrous 1987 ‘Joh for Canberra’ fiasco. In return for his services he was made a life member of the Queensland National Party.

In 1986 Mr Palmer moved into mining exploration. His company, Mineralogy, acquired large stakes of prime iron ore country in Western Australia. Chinese demand for iron ore has made Mr Palmer a billionaire. Along the way to becoming a billionaire, Mr Palmer did a stint as an adjunct professor of business at Deakin University’s Faculty of Business and Law. He held this untenured, non-salaried position from 2002 to 2006. On the strength of this, Mr Palmer has taken to calling himself a professor. The Mineralogy corporate website calls him Professor Clive F Palmer. The fact is that Mr Palmer is not and never has been a professor. In Australia a professor is a person who holds a chair at a university. An adjunct professorship is a temporary and honorary post only. For a former adjunct professor to go around the business community calling himself a professor is a breach of academic protocol, but it is more than that—it is a symptom of the inflated sense of importance that Mr Palmer has acquired.

Mr Palmer likes buying things, and the richer he has got the more things he has been able to buy. He bought Waratah Coal for $120 million. According to his son he gave this acquisition three minutes consideration. He bought the Gold Coast United soccer club for $6 million. He likes soccer. And he likes parties—and he has bought one of those too. And since he has always been a National Party supporter, he decided to buy the Nationals at a unique moment in history—at a time when he could buy the Liberal Party as well. So the Liberal-National Party, the LNP, is now Mr Clive Palmer’s new hobby.

Mr Palmer is by far the biggest single donor to the Liberal and National Parties in Queensland. Mr Palmer recently denied that he has ever given any money at all to the LNP, but that is a very misleading statement. Australian Electoral Commission records show that Mr Palmer’s mining company, Mineralogy, donated $412,000 to the Nationals and $147,000 to the Liberal Party in the 2007-08 financial year, before the merger between those parties came into effect in July last year.

That is a total of $559,000, which I can tell the Senate, from my personal experience as a former party state secretary and campaign director, goes a very long way indeed to running a state election campaign. But that is not the limit of Mr Palmer’s generosity to the LNP. The LNP leader, Mr Springborg, is at this very moment campaigning around Queensland in Mr Palmer’s helicopter, saving his party a lot of many in transport costs. Who knows how much more there is by way of money, goods and services that Mr Palmer has channelled, one way or another, to his friends in the LNP? Certainly the people of Queensland do not know.

Now, just a few days before the election, we learn from the Courier-Mail that Mr Palmer has made a large donation to the LNP. He has obviously timed this donation so that under Queensland law it will not have to be disclosed before the election. We can deduce from these facts that Mr Palmer’s donation is very likely to have been a large one. We are entitled to ask Mr Springborg: how big is Mr Palmer’s donation? Why has the size of this donation not been disclosed? What is Mr Palmer expecting in return from Mr Springborg and the LNP? How will a Springborg government pay off the huge political debt it will owe to Mr Palmer and his mining and other commercial interests?

Mr Palmer’s largesse comes at a vital time for Queensland conservatives. At the time of the merger, according to an article in the Australian, the Queensland Liberals were $1.5 million in debt. Their long record of political failure, culminating in their wipe-out at the 2007 federal election, caused their traditional sources of finance, small and medium business, to put away their chequebooks when the Liberals came calling. So it is just as well that a white knight turned up in the nick of time to bail the party out. The price of Mr Palmer’s bailout was pretty steep, however. The first part of that price was the shotgun marriage that formed the LNP, bringing to an end the not very glorious 64-year history of the Queensland Liberal Party, most of it spent as Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s parliamentary poodle. Mr Palmer no doubt told the Liberals he was not going to waste his hard-earned cash on such a bunch of losers. They had to surrender their identity and accept assimilation by the Borg. Resistance, he no doubt told them, was useless.

That is why the LNP is really just the old Queensland National Party under a new label. Mr Palmer is paying the bills and he is calling the tune. For example, why is the LNP opposing Labor’s plans to build an AFL stadium on the Gold Coast, which would bring new businesses and visitors to the coast? For the simple reason that Mr Palmer does not want any competition for his beloved Gold Coast soccer team, and of course Mr Springborg has had to agree to Mr Palmer’s demands. If Mr Springborg is elected Premier on Saturday, Queensland will return to the bad old days of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen and his cronies. Let everyone understand clearly that LNP is a brand name that serves as nothing more than a device to get Queenslanders to once again vote the National Party into office.

Who can forget Sir Terry Lewis, the police commissioner jailed for corruption, or the Fitzgerald inquiry, which saw National Party ministers like Don Lane, Brian Austin, Geoff Muntz and Leisha Harvey prosecuted for corruption? Who can forget the cronyism, the cosy deals and the secret payments? I am sure the people of Brisbane have not forgotten. They should remember in particular the destruction of Queensland’s natural environment under past National Party governments. If Mr Palmer has his way, those days will return under a Springborg government. Only last week Mr Palmer attacked the Western Australian Environmental Protection Authority for causing delays to his mining developments in WA and called for time limits to be placed on their ability to scrutinise mining operations. If Mr Springborg becomes Premier, Mr Palmer will be leaning on him to do the same in Queensland, no doubt reminding him of who signed all those campaign cheques.

Mr Palmer’s next demand on the LNP was a political career for his son and heir, the 18-year-old Michael Palmer, who is today the LNP candidate for the seat of Nudgee at this election. Palmer Jr has gained great media coverage for himself by repeatedly parking his dad’s gold Mercedes in the reserved car park of a Brisbane dental surgery. According to the Courier-Mail of 5 March, the dentist, Dr Matthew Voltz, called young Palmer ‘an arrogant little sod’. Such a description should ensure he goes far in the LNP. What other demands has Mr Palmer made as the price of his bounty to Queensland conservatives? We know he expects to dictate LNP policies. As he said in a radio interview: ‘Of course I’ve got influence. I’m a member of the party. You join a political party because you want influence.’

So what policies has Mr Palmer demanded that the LNP adopt? We now know part of the answer to that question. According to the Australian in June 2007, Mr Palmer is developing uranium mines in the Pilbara and scouting new uranium deposits in Queensland. So it comes as no surprise that the LNP has come out in this election as a strong supporter of developing more uranium mining in Queensland. Mr Springborg said that uranium mines would bring a jobs bonanza and royalties to Queensland. In fact, uranium mining generates very few jobs. Recent research has shown uranium mining would generate only 120 jobs over the next five years. Exporting uranium from Queensland would require building new ports away from population centres. This would mean going further into debt. In the short term, only one man would reap a bonanza from uranium mining in Queensland, and you guessed it—that would be none other than Springborg’s largest financial backer, Mr Palmer.

Mr Palmer seems to be rather sensitive to suggestions that he is the financial godfather of the LNP and that he is extracting a price for his largesse in the event that the Borg comes to power. When Premier Bligh and the state Treasurer, Andrew Fraser, had the temerity to point out that Mr Palmer had bought the LNP outright, he announced that he was suing them for $1.2 million in damages. Mr Palmer has a habit of doing this kind of thing. I note with interest that in Who’s Who he lists his hobbies as ‘reading and litigation’. It is good to see that neither Ms Bligh nor Mr Fraser has backed down in the face of this kind of intimidation.

Mr Palmer seems to have become something of an embarrassment to the LNP. According to the Courier-Mail on 3 March, Mr Palmer gave an interview in which he accurately but rather cruelly called Mr Springborg ‘uncharismatic’. He then called his own personal press conference on the very first day of the election campaign, but shortly afterwards this press conference was mysteriously called off without any reasons being given. As a result, the LNP state director, Michael O’Dwyer, was forced to issue an edict banning party members from ‘publicly criticising the party, its office bearers, parliamentary representatives or candidates’. So Mr Palmer has obviously landed the Queensland allies of senators opposite in a bit of a pickle, right in the middle of a state election campaign.

The conservative parties cannot do without business donors like Mr Palmer. In Queensland, the Liberals and particularly the Nationals have always been the agents of unscrupulous property developers, mining magnates and other sectional interests. They pay the bills for the Liberal and National parties, and in return the Queensland conservatives have given them various deals and protected them from public scrutiny. Who can doubt that a Springborg government would follow that time-honoured tradition? Premier Bligh and Mr Fraser were quite right to say that a Springborg government would be a wholly owned subsidiary of Mr Palmer’s corporate interests. If Queenslanders want to return to the bad old days of cronyism, shonky deals and undisclosed donations, they will vote for the LNP. Perhaps the good folk of Nudgee had better vote for Mr Palmer’s brilliant son too, so that they can have a nuclear power plant built on Nudgee Beach. I do not think Queenslanders want any of those things, and that is why I believe they will re-elect Anna Bligh’s government on Saturday.