You couldn’t invent Clive Palmer. Well that’s not quite true, you could invent Clive Palmer, but you’d be told to go back and come up with something that was less of a caricature for a mining boss.
The Queensland mining magnate billionaire is quickly becoming the chief vioce of industry opposition to the Government’s Resource Super Profits Tax, and the Government love it.
Palmer is an easy target for the Government, epitomising every stereotype of a self-interested fat cat capitalist, a mere monocle and waistcoat away from being a cartoon character. As one Labor strategist said of Palmer “he’s our Joe McDonald.”
That’s a reference to the Coalition’s 2007 election ads, featuring the Western Australian CFMEU official who became the touch stone of the Coalition’s attempt to stoke fears of a militant union revival in Australia.
It didn’t work, but its ability to crystallize and stream everything people feared and disliked about unions through a single individual, is the kind of thing begrudgingly respected by Labor ad men.
Kevin Rudd told caucus yesterday that he welcomed the fact Palmer was out there fighting the tax, labelling him the Opposition’s “pin-up boy” and calling the Tony Abbott a “mouthpiece” for Palmer.
It’s happened again today with Martin Ferguson saying “you can’t take Mr Palmer or the leader of the Opposition seriously”, continued attacks on Palmer’s real estate dealings, said Palmer was “throwing his weight around Australia” (not subtle) and accused the Coalition of “selling its soul” to Palmer.
Palmer’s appearance and demeanour maybe cheap easy pickings, but it’s only made possible by his continued ravings against the government and the mining tax.
He was in good form during a debate with AWU secretary Paul Howes at the national press club today.
Palmer compared Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan to Marx and Engels (having previously called them the Chavezs of Nambour) and basically painted the mining tax as the end of the Australian mining industry.
His position on negotiations for changes to the tax was this:
“Real negotiation is should we have a tax or shouldn’t we have a tax”.
So the man leading the charge for miners against the tax has a position on negotiations which is to scrap the tax all together.
Palmer makes no claim to be the official spokesman for miners, saying today: “when speaking about this tax I’m speaking for nobody else than myself as a citizen of Australia.” But the problem for miners is that thus far he is the loudest, and a major LNP donor to boot.
At the annual minerals council dinner tonight some of Mr Palmer’s colleagues could take him aside and ask him to take a step back in the debate, perhaps for a calmer, and ultimately more damaging, voice of a more Labor friendly figure like Twiggy Forrest.
Still I don’t much like the chances of that happening, you get the feeling that nobody tells Clive Palmer what to do.
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