clive palmer

http://www.goldcoast.com.au/article/2008/06/07/12153_more-gossip-news.html


Clive Palmer

Peter Gleeson

07Jun08

Clive Palmer sits at his boardroom table, surrounded by a laptop computer, his mobile phone and a plain folder which contains briefing notes from his top lieutenants.

He didn't get to bed until late the night before, having watched Australia beat Iraq 1-0 at Suncorp Stadium in a World Cup soccer qualifier.

It has taken a month to organise this interview, between his flying visits to mining projects in Western Australia and a rushed flight to the US to see his long-time friend, Democrat Senator Ted Kennedy, who three weeks ago had a stroke.

Despite the late night, Mr Palmer has been at his Brisbane office since 7am, a ritual he has religiously abided by since he dropped out of university and started working as a real estate agent, aged 21.

Mr Palmer motions for Gold Coast lawyer, Geoff Smith, now his senior legal man, to stick around and listen into the interview. He does so, leaving 15 minutes later to take a phone call.

It's a Monday morning and it's pouring rain outside, but Clive Palmer, the Gold Coast's richest man, is now having his day in the sun.

After painstakingly securing 160 billion tonnes of iron ore deposits in the Pilbara Ranges in Western Australia over the past 15 years, his chickens are literally coming home to roost.

But it's not the fact that he has a bank account balance with 10 numbers that is putting a smile on his face these days.

Mr Palmer, aged 54, is the proud father of a three-month-old baby girl, Mary. It has given him a fresh perspective on life.

After the death of his first wife Sue to cancer four years ago, Mr Palmer re-married, to Anna and is happy and in love again.

It's a busy life, juggling a toddler and making multibillion-dollar deals with the Chinese.

In fact, he is so busy he needs three private jets and two heli-copters to get around the world, with homes in Beijing, Perth, Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

A private man, Mr Palmer visibly starts to relax when he begins to talk about his life and what has shaped him into the man he is today.

It's a fascinating script with key players including former Queensland premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen and National Party heavyweight Sir Robert Sparkes.

But like so many successful people, it was his father George Palmer, a successful silent movie star of the 1920s and radio pioneer, who had the greatest influence.

He taught his son to treat people with respect and it's one of the reasons he believes he has been so successful in dealing with the Chinese.

Mr Palmer declares he never thought he'd one day become a billionaire.

"It's not my fault that I've unfortunately got so much money," he says.

"It's just that we've had big projects and we've applied ourselves as best we can and they've worked. That's not such a bad thing."

Mineralogy Pty Ltd, of which Mr Palmer is chairman, holds 160 billion tonnes of iron ore reserves in the Pilbara Ranges.

Compare that with Australia's richest man, another mining goliath Twiggy Forrest, with a personal fortune of $8 billion, who has two billion tonnes of iron ore in WA.

If you do the maths it's not hard to imagine Mr Palmer may one day, in the not too distant future, enjoy the same kudos.

Clive Palmer was a skinny kid from Surfers Paradise who, as a schoolboy, could run like the wind -- an above-average scholar who was quiet and reserved but popular among his schoolmates.

Forty-five years on, he's now playing a pivotal role in what many consider to be the greatest economic renaissance since the Industrial Revolution -- the modernisation of China, which hosts a quarter of the world's population.

Last month, Mr Palmer popped into the BRW rich list ranked as Queensland's richest man.

But materialism doesn't drive him, he says.

"You still have to eat one meal at a time, sleep in the same bed and dress yourself each morning," he says.

"People ask me when I started out in business, did I expect to earn all this money. The answer is no. I started out, worked hard, did my best and this followed."

Born in Melbourne in 1954, Mr Palmer remembers his dad George talking about how he had made silent movies in the 1920s, before setting up the first commercial radio stations in the country, 3AK in Melbourne and 7UV in Tasmania.

"That was a big thing to do in those days ... setting up radio stations like that," he says.

"Dad worked with the then Prime Minister Billy Lyons when he was in power, advising him on media stuff. He was probably the first of the spin doctors.

"He also set up train and buslines for transportation. He broke that monopoly that the state railways had. He was quite an amazing guy."

The Palmer clan, including his three sisters, moved to the Gold Coast in 1963, 'like salmon swimming upstream'.

George Palmer had married and divorced, having a son and daughter from his first marriage.

He met his second wife Nancy (Clive's mother) in 1940 when she was working at a munitions factory in Melbourne, having left Tasmania to help with the war effort.

As a nine-year-old, Clive Palmer was enrolled at St Vincents Primary School, Surfers Paradise, and it was in Grade Four he met Geoff Smith, who today is among his chief advisers.

"From there I went to Aquinas College and I left there in Year 8 after one of the Christian brothers threw a bible at a boy during a religion class and knocked him out," says Mr Palmer.

"The boy was sitting there with his head against the brick wall and this bible soared through the air and literally knocked him unconscious, knocked him out.

"I thought 'geez, that's not a Christian way to behave' and so I just walked straight out of the classroom and enrolled at Southport High.

"I got a sporting scholarship to Toowoomba Grammar but I didn't go. I'd set records in the 100m, 200m and 400m, and I played on the wing with the Southport Tigers rugby league club."

It was during his footy years that Mr Palmer learned about toughness and discipline, lessons that would stand him in good stead later in life as a businessman.

After finishing his secondary schooling at Southport High, he went to the University of Queensland to study arts, law and journalism.

He became political correspondent for UQ's student newspaper when former Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was in power.

Mr Palmer vividly remembers the ALP's national convention at Wrest Point Casino, Hobart, in 1972, and how he covered the event for the student newspaper.

"I certainly remember the bikini girls," he says.

Mr Palmer also remembers a conversation he had with a taxi driver about taking risks and it stuck with him.

"The cabbie said he wouldn't go across to the (Australian) mainland because the plane could crash or the boat could sink," says Palmer.

"I just thought it was an odd way to live. The guy was too scared to spread his wings and broaden his horizons.

"I thought then and there that I didn't want to be like that."

During his university years, Mr Palmer decided he wanted to give something back to the community and spent a year helping the Salvation Army at Alkira, based at Indooroopilly.

He would look after kids under care and protection. He says it taught him about discipline and being honest.

"There was a couple who would look after them during the week and then I stayed weekends," he says.

"There was one boy who kept throwing stuff at the family he was being fostered with and the question you need to ask yourself is: Would you ask that guy home for dinner with your wife and kids? And a lot of people wouldn't, but the Salvos did it all the time.

"It helps to bring down crime and gives them a second chance. I have a lot of respect and time for the Salvos."

Midway through his university degree, Mr Palmer wanted to take a fellow student out on a date -- her name was Sue and he later married her -- but realised he had no money.

He decided it was time to take the plunge and chased a job in real estate, figuring the Gold Coast was on the verge of 'going to a new level' as a city.

"I rang a few real estate firms and they told me at 21 I was too young," he says.

"So I rang another place and told them who I was and when they asked how old I was I told them I was 31 and I got the job."

He joined N and K Projects and quickly became the firm's top marketing consultant, before embarking upon his own property enterprise, GSS Property Sales.

It was during the halcyon property period between 1975-83, when the Gold Coast's skyscrapers went up and the city changed dramatically, particularly in areas such as Main Beach, Surfers Paradise and Broadbeach.

He worked hard, quickly became successful and at the ripe old age of 29, had amassed a personal fortune of about $40 million, deciding to put his feet upand retire.

He travelled extensively, married his sweetheart Sue and says he 'got fatter and more boring as time went by'.

"After two years of doing nothing I realised it was such a blessing to be able to work and in 1986 I went back into business, setting up a company and buying iron ore deposits and a chemical company, which traded oil," he says.

At the same time, Mr Palmer's thirst for politics came to the fore, and he became close to Sir Joh and Sir Robert, becoming a fund-raiser for the National Party and one of its key powerbrokers.

"I knew Sir Joh very well," says Mr Palmer.

"I think people underestimated him.

"You have to remember a few things about the man. When he was elected in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson was president of the US and the world was a very different place.

"Back then we didn't have ports in Gladstone, we didn't have private railways and and we couldn't mine coal.

"Sir Joh fought the bureaucracy which was arguing we shouldn't export coal, that we should be saving it for our own use.

"He had to be tough and controversial to get it done and now Queensland is the biggest exporter of coal in the world."

Mr Palmer recalls a conversation he had with Sir Joh after the Bjelke-Petersen Government had 'called in' a high-rise development on the Gold Coast, over-riding the city council, causing angst among locals who saw it as political interference.

"I asked him why did he did that, because it didn't win votes and allowed the Labor Party to attack us," says Mr Palmer.

"He told me his government had decided the Gold Coast was where the action was going to be in tourism and he had a responsibility to make it work.

"He said every high-rise development created 7000 jobs and often the developers went broke, which happened in that particular case, and when the receivers came in the units were sold off relatively cheaply and that's exactly what happened."

Mr Palmer's interest in mining was triggered by a media report in the mid 1980s about how the Russians were keen to do joint venture deals with other countries on iron ore.

"I took a team of 20 over there and we had a meeting with (former Russian president) Mikhail Gorbachov," he says.

"That relationship endures today. I had dinner with (Russian leader) Vladimir Putin a few months ago."

And the multibillion-dollar deals now being secured with the Chinese were two decades in the making.

The BRW rich list states he has amassed a personal fortune of $1.5 billion, but Mr Palmer, matter of factly, says that figure is flawed. He's actually worth a lot more.

"The royalty clauses we have with the Chinese are worth $5 billion and that's not factored into that BRW assessment," he says. "But we, as a family, don't enjoy that luxurious lifestyle that you'd equate with being worth that much.

"I haven't got time. I work 15 hours a day. It's an interesting life and full of change.

"Change is what keeps people thinking. Change is so important to the way people develop."

Mr Palmer was also told earlier in his business career not to worry about how much money he was making.

"If you put an emphasis on money, people know how they can control you," he says.

"My motto is to do your best and put the fundamentals in place and everything else will follow."

Mr Palmer also says persistence is the key to running a successful business.

"One person's persistence is another person's pig-headedness," he says.

Mr Palmer has two children from his first marriage, Michael, 18, and Emily, 13.

A year ago, he married Anna, who he had known as the wife of a former school frined, who had died around the same time as his first wife.

"I see Mary every day and some people say I'm a bit old to have another baby but I say why not?," he says.

"A friend of mine asked his wife the other day why we as humans get married? He told her we get married so we have someone to share all the conversations of life.

"You get married to someone who is interested in your past, interested in your future and cares about you."

Mr Palmer says contemplation is the key to running a good business.

"Not rushing ahead too quickly is important, as is the ability to stay calm," he says.

"I am a calm person, and others may not think so, but I have to be, because I've got a lot of things happening all the time."

His relationship with the Chinese has been both prosperous and rewarding, albeit a long and painstaking process, which suited the Chinese way of thinking.

"China represents a quarter of the world," says Mr Palmer.

"Are they going to be kept down, stricken with poverty in so many areas, forever? I don't think so. It's better to talk than have them come here and fight us for our resources.

"China is focused on China ... it's not thinking to invade other countries.

"They want to develop China and provide their kids with a better standard of living than what they have. Everybody wants that, whether you live in China, Australia or anywhere else for that matter.

"Believe me, the Chinese have more economic muscle than America."

Mr Palmer has learned to deal with the Chinese, traditionally known as tough negotiators at the boardroom table.

"We in the western world structure our companies very bureaucratically but under their collective decision-making process the person in middle management sometimes has more power than the managing director," he says.

"I learned about this -- how you must treat every person in the organisation with respect, during the late 1980s when a friend of mine, a man in the lower management of a company, introduced me to the then premier and the premier came up and kissed him on both cheeks.

"It turns out my friend's wife was a top Communist Party official and he relied on her to get back in. The lesson was to treat everyone fairly."

It's been an eventful journey for Mr Palmer from his days as a skinny schoolboy who loved to play sports.

Mr Palmer was a nippy winger who played first grade with the Southport Tigers, a club he continues to support today with lucrative sponsorship.

He has a passion for sport, also owning a string of pacers, and he's now got his sights set on establishing a Gold Coast A-League soccer club.

Mr Palmer appears to have trumped rival bids by agreeing to sign the cheque for $6 million which guarantees the A-League licence.

In typical Clive Palmer style, players will be ferried to matches on his own specially configured private jet.

"Having the jet at the players' disposal will be good for team bonding," he says

For Clive Palmer, one gets the impression the game has just begun.