BEN HARVEY: Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots’ anti-China scare campaign

The Chinese could be about to invade Australia, according to the latest conspiracy theory promoted by the Trumpet of Patriots.

A ToP political advertisement doing the rounds has highlighted Australia’s military vulnerability in the North West.

“Chinese communist-owned companies, with the help of the Labor Party, built and constructed a private jet airport located close to the coast,” the voice over in the ad says as ominous music plays in the background.

“A superior military air force could, in effect, control all of WA’s resources in the Pilbara and the North West Shelf gas reserves.”

And it is not just a threat from the air, we’re told.

“Cape Preston in the Pilbara in WA is a deep water port. It has the facilities necessary to support and sustain large-scale naval operations in the Indian Ocean.

“The power generation and water desalination plant, together with the bunker fuel capacity, provide the necessary logistics to support a large ground force equipped with heavy equipment.”

The Trumpet of Patriots reckons Australia is facing its own Red Dawn moment.

We’re in danger of a land and sea invasion by communist forces and Patrick Swayze’s not around to protect us.

WHAT THE TRUMPETERS AREN’T TELLING YOU

The ToP is right to say there is an airstrip and port in the North West that’s owned by the Chinese.

But let’s chase this rabbit a little further down the burrow.

The company that owns the assets is an iron ore miner called CITIC Pacific.

CITIC built them as part of an iron ore project on sub-leased tenements in the Pilbara.

Those tenements are owned by an Australian company called Mineralogy.

Mineralogy is owned by a chap named Clive Palmer.

The same Clive Palmer who is the founder and bankroller of the Trumpet of Patriots.

We’ll get to the inherent irrationality and hypocrisy of the ToP scare campaign but first a little history lesson about Palmer in the Pilbara.

HOW TO GET RICH DOING NOTHING

Clive snapped up mining tenements near Cape Preston in the mid-1980s.

He did precisely bugger all mining because it costs a bomb to turn the iron ore there — magnetite — into something usable.

In its pure form, magnetite has a higher iron content than the hematite ore mined by Rio and BHP but you need to process a hell of a lot of chaff to get the wheat.

Palmer needed a partner who was desperate and had deep pockets. In 2006 he found one in China Inc.

CITIC Pacific had watched Rio and BHP make mad bank as iron ore prices surged in the early noughties and it wanted a piece of the action.

In its exuberant rush to get a foothold in the fast-growing and ever-more profitable iron ore industry, CITIC eschewed China Inc’s reputation for driving a hard bargain.

It was the deal of the century for Clive. CITIC agreed to pay him a royalty on every tonne of iron ore dug up plus every tonne sold.

It was a lucrative double dip that made the Queenslander one of the wealthiest men in Australia and nearly sent CITIC to the wall.

After discovering you can’t buy a greenfields iron ore mine on Temu, the Chinese set about building one from scratch.

Using Australian labour.

As a result, the Sino Iron project cost billions more and took years longer than expected.

The first export wasn’t shipped until the end of 2013 — which was just in time for the iron ore price slump from more than $US150 a tonne to under $US40.

CITIC endured the next few years of lacklustre prices and started making tidy profits during the post-COVID commodities boom.

THE WORLD’S MOST IRRATIONAL COCKBLOCK

Most people who have a contract under which they get paid for every tonne dug up and every tonne sold would do everything in their power to maximise the number of tonnes dug up and sold.

Not Clive.

He has made a hobby out of cock-blocking the company that made him rich.

He’s refused permission to expand a tailings dam, which CITIC says is causing them to restrict production.

That’s been the subject of a long-running court case.

Clive isn’t sweating the lawyers’ bills because CITIC has been paying him between $400 million and $500 million a year in royalties.

A big slab of that money is being ploughed into advertising for the Trumpet of Patriots.

When the ToP invasion ad laments that the Cape Preston port facilitates the export of “over 16 million tonnes of products to China each year” it is referring to the iron ore that is making Clive rich enough to create a political party for funsies.

It’s quite the existential problem.

Does the Trumpet of Patriots hate foreigners so much it’s willing to put itself out of business?