One of the great misnomers in society is because you are rich, you must also be intelligent. The logic being, you became rich because of your intelligence. Not so, and Clive Palmer proves the lie. What wealth has bought Clive is a public voice. Formed his own political party, PUP, interesting its not the Peoples United Party, its the Palmer United Party, note the word "Palmer" in the name and what that implies. The Palmer Party is based on the Palmer, so important the word is in the name. Just like all political parties, the name tries to reflect in a word what the party stands for Labor, Liberal Greens etc etc and then there is "Palmer". You may ask, what is a "Palmer"? I answer a big fat turkey.
Under our democratic system even a mega rich Palmer can not occupy more than one seat in parliament, if he did there would be no party, united or otherwise. Being mega rich you can form you own political party, and splash around the cash and get others elected, there is your party. Its obvious Big Clive has been successful in getting other like minder people elected, Jacqui Lambie for one. Of course Jacqui could have easily been one of the girls down at the tennis club, same crackpot ideas, but no one would have heard of her, waffling on about what she thinks of that hunk Roger the A grade coach, and what she could do with dear Roger given half a chance, despite his misses and the 20 year age difference! But Jacqui is not at the tennis club, but in the Australian Senate and been given a platform to spruik her crazy thoughts in public.
As a footnote, When Jacqui went on about her ideal man I though she would have meant Big Clive, Clive is big, but I don't think that is the kind of big that Jacqui wants! Well not physically.

I listened to Alan Jones at length yesterday.

He went on and on about something dear to my heart: the in-bed relationship of government and big business, or in particular; big miners.

This is particularly blatant in the relationship between political donations and political decisions concerning operations at Wandoan in Queensland and in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales.

This sordid business has reached a major level of corruption.

He then said that Clive Palmer is calling for a senate inquiry into the Newman Government, of which this sort of thing is just one part.

Well, that puts Big Clive in my good books well and truly.

The lack of independence of government from the big end of town is one of the most fundamentally important things in our whole political system and indeed in the whole of our society that needs to be FIXED.

I applaud anyone who works towards achieving that.

Ludwig, I think that might have more to do with Palmer's dislike of Newman, a former political friend than anything else.
Politically I am opposed to the likes of Newman, but to demand an inquire more based on personal dislike than any altruistic reasons is rather cynical and costly to the ordinary Australians. Maybe the mega rich Clive should foot the bill.

Yes Paul, and there in lies the problem, big Clive has an axe to grind and, while he is focusing on the two issues at foot, Campble and Chineese partner, it makes you wonder just how much of his publicly funded time is actualy spend serving the public.

After all, he has missed many of the meetings he fought hard to be an attendee of and one can only assume this is due to non parlimenty commitments and distractions.

I also recall him openly saying before the election that if elected he would forego his business involvement.

Yea right!

Luddy, mate that is garbage I'm afraid.

The whole reason for Palmer united is that the LNP, & Newman would not give Palmer what he wanted, after they got into power. He had expected that as a large donor he would get whatever he wanted. This whole fiasco is proof that he did not.

You should be singing their praises for resisting his demands, & others, rather than complaining about them.

When we had Labor governments there was never any resistance to giving unions & academia everything their little hearts desired, just as the federal labor lot gave the greens everything they wanted, meekly asking if there was anything else they desired.

Palmer is in politics because he couldn't get what he wanted. It's now time for his revenge. That's the depth of it. Nobody should believe a single word that Palmer says. Politics on all sides is about manipulation.