God forbid a bloke in his 20s go on a wild gap year, especially after sacrificing his youth to the Canberra bubble.
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Roy’s reference to “flying the flag” is not just the stuff of metaphor.
More recently, Roy has been taking to Saudi life like a duck to water. Literally. A recent Instagram post featured the former MP jet skiing on a device known as a wake foil across a patch of sea while waving the kingdom’s green flag – in honour of Saudi National Flag Day, of course.
Life after politics never looked like so much fun.
Court out
Clive Palmer did not provide much work for the Australian Electoral Commission’s vote counters, with his Trumpet of Patriots failing to get anywhere in this month’s poll despite a typically blustery multimillion-dollar advertising campaign across all platforms, including – full disclosure! – the one you are reading now.
But the billionaire mining magnate did provide plenty of work for the High Court, all because of the mess Palmer ended up in when he deregistered his United Australia Party after the 2022 poll, and then re-registered it last year in readiness for this year’s election.
Clive Palmer has had another loss in the High Court.Credit: Getty Images
A cute move. But no dice, said the Australian Electoral Commission, citing the Commonwealth Electoral Act, which allowed the re-registration, but barred the party from contesting an election until 2028.
Palmer and his $110 million senator Ralph Babet, elected in 2022, took the matter to the High Court, which unanimously ruled against them in February. It was Palmer’s fifth High Court loss (yes, we are counting), a decision which spawned the oddly titled Trumpet of Patriots party.
On Tuesday, the Court published its reasons for its decision. And they were lengthy, with the seven-member full bench producing six separate judgments. But each legal path reached the same destination, rejecting Palmer’s legal challenge.
And yet, after days of hearings, presumably of cash burned on Palmer’s own legal fees (plus the government’s costs he’ll have to pay) and a judgment running more than 100 pages, we are none the wiser as to why CP went through with his deregistration malarkey when the electoral laws would clearly stop a party with the same name standing at the 2025 election.
It would seem Justice Jacqueline Gleeson is in the same boat.
“There was no material before this Court to explain the circumstances of the voluntary deregistration of the United Australia Party that gave rise to this case,” she wrote.
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Although amid the arid constitutional law jargon, the judgments ponder the possibility that Palmer did so as a way of dodging transparency requirements, which force him to disclose just how many millions of dollars he was burning on the UAP vanity project.
All the judgments noted that the disclosure laws included an obligation on a political party to reveal its political donations. Justice James Edelman made a particular point of outlining the numerous donations of more than $1 million received by the UAP from Palmer’s own Mineralogy company.
Justice Robert Beech-Jones suggested the provisions of the Act existed to stop parties “gaming” the donation disclosure system by deregistering and re-registering between election cycles.
So was the whole thing a cynical, too-clever-by-half attempt to stop Palmer revealing how much money he was wasting? If so, it backfired spectacularly, with Clive forced to drop the now well-recognised UAP for the flaccid Trumpet of Patriots.
We asked the big man’s representatives about this, but heard nothing back. Much like Palmer’s obsessive love of litigation, the fate of his Palmersaurus dinosaur theme park, and the perennial question of when Titanic II will ever hit the high seas, it remains a mystery.
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