“[Clive Palmer has been] a member of the National Party, then the LNP, for many, many years and he is a conservative, so you’d think that it would be in his interests to have a strong and successful conservative government.”
You’d think. But with Clive, sometimes it seems there’s not a whole lot of thinking going on.
That quote was Tony Abbott’s rather optimistic hopes for the new Parliament, where regardless of whether the Queensland mining magnate secures a seat in the lower house (the recount continues) three of his already vocal mouthpieces will be sitting on the red benches in the Senate next year. That means the government will need PUP to get any bills through, if Labor and the Greens vote “no”. That’s power.
As Stephen Bartos wrote this week, Palmer steams into uncharted territory. How he’ll manage his various conflicts — and how he’ll direct his senators — will be a real test of Palmer and of the Parliament.
And for Abbott — who complained incessantly about the dysfunctionality of the previous Parliament — how he wrangles a disgruntled party member and his Senate puppets could be his biggest test.
Will he have the same negotiating ability of the previous PM?
It’s going to be interesting what those Senate votes cost?
I have read that Clive Palmer is a mining “magnet”/magnate for more years than I care to think about and I think it’s high time people in the media both MSM and proper media (including Crikey), referred to him properly as a wealthy real estate entrepreneur.
The Queensland nickel mine does not make him a mining magnate, and I don’t believe his efforts actually attract much in the way of mining enough to be referred to as a magnet.
The fact that he claims to be paid $500 million a year by some Chinese government company or other doesn’t make that terribly true either, and I really don’t think there is any benefit to a news-starved Australian population, being constantly fed this rubbish, on the basis that constantly saying something is a particular thing even when it isn’t, does not make that particular thing, that particular something, though quite possibly it could be something else.
Can I please request, that as a reasonable media outlet you reshape or reframe perhaps this dialogue and refer to him more properly as a real estate agent and sometimes perhaps member of Parliament.
In my view this would be far more accurate and since he runs around calling himself “professor”, which he also most definitely is not, he shouldn’t have any problems with sorting out this ongoing discussion about his impact on Australia.
In the future can we think in terms of “dinosaur park proprietor” until such times as he actually has a seat in the house at which time he can properly be called a member of Parliament, and those of us who did not vote for him (in Fairfax) can just refer to him as the member for Fairfax and raise our eyebrows knowingly about the type of bloke who did vote for him.
These would be the same folk who kept Joh Bjelke-Petersen in power for all those years, and because of new medical technology are able to be kept alive and voting. Sadly enough.