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Despite his best efforts, the Federal Court of Australia has ruled Clive Palmer unfit for anonymity, revealing him to be the money behind a discontinued class action against Telstra’s 2021 vaccine mandates.

Crikey outlines what the case was about, and why Palmer wanted his name out of it.

What’s the class action about?

The class action was first filed in March last year and hinged on Telstra breaching its enterprise agreements and workplace health and safety laws by mandating its employees in people-facing positions be vaccinated.

Applicants informally aborted the action in March and formally discontinued proceedings on August 7. The five-month delay between request to discontinue and discontinuance owed to the solicitors’ failure to adhere to due legal process and provide the court with relevant documents.

“Evidently, the parties’ solicitors did not understand that … discontinuance of a representative proceeding requires court approval,” Justice Bernard Murphy wrote.

What’s this got to do with Clive Palmer?

Palmer — referred to in proceedings as “the Funder” — agreed to fund the applicants’ case in January 2022 and entered into a funding agreement with them a month later.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Palmer ran a coordinated misinformation campaign about the virus and vaccinations. He distributed material at odds with formal advice from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), went to court to battle out border closures, took the Western Australian and federal governments to task, and campaigned for the 2022 federal election with a promise to do away with vaccine mandates.

By December 2022, Palmer decided to put a stop to the case’s cash flow. Consultations were held with applicants in February to workshop how to keep the case going without Palmer’s money, but in March it was deemed untenable and the applicants attempted to pull the plug on all proceedings.

Despite a Telstra sign-off, the application was rejected by the court due to solicitors failing to provide the court with a copy of the funding agreement. It was not until this was filed to the court in April that Palmer’s identity was disclosed. A day later, his lawyers emailed through a request to keep a lid on his name.  

Why didn’t Palmer want to be named?

Palmer’s lawyer Sam Iskander pitched his client’s “great wealth”, notoriety and political leanings as reasons to conceal his identity as funder, but Murphy declared these traits to have “little significance” in the case for confidentiality: “The significant matter was that the applicants no longer had funding to bring the proceeding, not the identity of the former funder.”

“[The funder’s] wealth is well-publicised in the media and his name is synonymous with great wealth and other political ideologies throughout the country,” Iskander wrote.

“By revealing the name of the funder, it ultimately invokes a mindset of an endless pecuniary ‘war chest’ and other types of conspiracies, connotations and prejudices, which may be prejudicial for the applicants’ cause of action should it continue.”

Murphy rejected this as grounds to keep Palmer’s name out of things.

Where’s the case at now?

Murphy did, however, approve termination of proceedings, reiterating that despite funding falling flat, applicants “have not lost their rights to bring another proceeding making the same claims, either in individual proceedings or in another class action”.

Neither Palmer nor Iskander responded to Crikey’s requests for comment.