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Palmer v McGowan, day three

Welcome back to our live coverage of the defamation suit between WA Premier Mark McGowan and Queensland billionaire Clive Palmer.

It’s an early start for those of us in WA – 6am our time, or 9am in Sydney – which is to avoid a scheduling conflict raised early in yesterday’s proceedings.

A big day today; Mr Palmer is due to take the stand and is scheduled to give about four to five hours of evidence and undergo cross-examination.

Yesterday saw Mr McGowan’s lawyers delve into the Premier’s cross-claims, where it’s alleged Mr Palmer defamed him on several occasions via media interviews.

In an interview on Sky News on August 12, 2020, Mr McGowan’s lawyers claimed Mr Palmer implied the Premier was abusing the parliamentary system through the ‘anti-Palmer’ legislation used to block the billionaire’s damages claim over a proposed iron ore mine in the state’s Pilbara.

The Premier’s lawyer, Clarissa Amato, said in another Sky News interview – this one on September 1, 2020 – Mr Palmer implied Mr McGowan was open to taking multimillion-dollar bribes from Chinese interests, citing stories he had heard of heads of state travelling to China with the lure of millions of dollars.

Mr Palmer’s lawyer Peter Gray said that was only meant to be a judgment of the Chinese government, not Mr McGowan.

Justice Michael Lee has now finished hearing arguments from both Mr McGowan’s and Mr Palmer’s legal teams about the meanings implied in the statements at the centre of this defamation case, with the rest of the trial to hinge on his rulings.

Palmer trial revisits a moment in COVID history

It’s calling to mind a time that now seems long ago to us, when people were still contemplating anti-malarial drugs to treat COVID-19, and innocent West Australians had no idea their recently closed border would be closed for the next two years or that one day they’d have to show a vaccine passport to go and buy a bottle of wine.

Clive Palmer outside court on Monday.Credit:Brook Mitchell

But it shows the fear circulating in the community, when McGowan’s “Churchillian” wartime rhetoric was welcomed.

And it shows how strange it was (and still is) that a Premier and a mining magnate would have a fight that might have been more appropriate to have on one day, by phone or indoors.

But instead it played out in public, via press conferences and media interviews with reporters relaying each comment to each party, pens poised to hear the retaliation, and maybe that artificial environment was why it escalated as far as it did (or I don’t know – was this a product of the time or is Palmer always going to do this, is this simply how he does business?) but surely it’s not how the Premier always does business.

And now it’s playing out in the no-less-strange and stilted fashion of a courtroom with lawyers taking part in the tit-for-tat rather than reporters.

Palmer v McGowan – a timeline

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