Fairfax Radio's 2UE has hit out at Clive Palmer over alleged unpaid election advertising debts by paying a Sydney business owner $2,500 and vowing to bill Palmer directly.
Breakfast presenters John Stanley and Garry Linnell made the announcement on-air this morning speaking to Freestyle Signs owner Peter Fishlock and PUP candidate Andrew Wilcox.
The move comes after an interview with the Linnell and Stanley last week in which Palmer called the allegations of unpaid debts "bullshit" before abruptly terminating the interview.
"Well that's just bullshit, it's not true," Palmer said at the time. "There's no action against us, there's no letters of demand. It's just Rupert Murdoch and [News Limited journalist] Hedley Thomas and those boys getting together and making up another story. There's nobody owed any money by me or given me a bill that hasn't been paid. It's just bullshit."
2UE general manager Chris Parker was circumspect about whether they expected to be paid by Palmer, telling AdNews it wasn't "beyond the realms of possibility". On 2UE picking a fight with the mining magnate politician, Parker described Palmer's relationship with the media as "fairly dynamic" and said his presence was welcome on the program any time.
"We're probably the least of his worries. [The decision] was based on the fact that when challenged with this he used some fairly poor language and terminated the call abruptly, so we felt the probability of the small business owner resolving this themselves was relatively slim."
Parker denied it was a publicity stunt, calling it a "pretty minor blip" which would have been "organised a little better" if it were. "The majority of our business is done with local business, so we depend on a healthy local business sector," he said.
"We've been following the story for about a week now and we were really impressed by the way in which both the small business owner and the candidate were attempting to work through the matter together, so we made the decision to step in.
"When you invite Sydney in to be the majority of your content, you're going to get people bringing you things from time to time that you can get involved in and make a positive difference. This was one of those things where we thought we could act decisively and quickly, given it was a relatively small amount of money for us and the chance of the business owner recovering the money was slim."
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