CBD’s ears pricked up when we heard an item on 3AW’s Rumour File this week about a businessman buying his childhood home with ambitious plans to reno the joint and add a home theatre. Turns out the unlikely nostalgic mystery buyer was billionaire mining magnate and perennial future prime minister Clive Palmer. He bought the four-bedroom Williamstown bungalow for $4.
5 million late last year. Clive Palmer’s childhood home in Williamstown Credit: Realestate.com.
au That price, a fourfold appreciation since the block last traded in 2006, is chump change for Clive, and a far cheaper vanity project than his grandiose plans to reincarnate the Titanic, which he’s been at for more than a decade. Any day! Palmer, who lives in a Gold Coast gated community called Sovereign Islands, is a secret Victorian. In news for many that could not be less on brand, Palmer was born in Footscray and grew up in Williamstown in the 1950s in the four-bedroom, two-bathroom family home until he was aged about nine when his parents, prompted by concerns about his asthma aggravated by nearby industrial pollution, moved north.
Clive Palmer originally said his party would put the major parties “last” on how-to-vote cards. Clive is, to us, pure Gold Coast. He made his first buck as a real estate agent during the 1980s property boom, when the White Shoe Brigade of developers were active while Queensland’s Hillbilly Dictator premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen ruled the roost.
We’re not sure Palmer, on.