Updated
Clive Palmer's fear of espionage and betrayal is so great that he prefers to hire childhood friends as his political staff, and refuses to let them use Parliament House's computer network.
The controversial businessman and Palmer United Party leader confirmed that when he became an MP last year, he had his staff go out and buy computers rather than use the parliamentary mainframe.
"We know that if we go back to inquiries in ASIO in the late '80s in the Senate that ASIO constantly monitors the top hundred wealthiest Australians. It was said in testimony in the Senate," Mr Palmer told ABC TV's Kitchen Cabinet in a season finale to air tonight.
"So I'm monitored, my phones are tapped every day."
Mr Palmer regularly hires old friends to undertake major professional or political projects on his behalf - chief of staff Phil Collins, a primary schoolmate, was deputed to establish Mr Palmer's political office after a stint running Mr Palmer's Queensland nickel refinery.
Mr Palmer said loyalty was more important to him than technical expertise.
"If you look at what happened to new parties or other parties in Australia, the major parties try to infiltrate them, take them to court, wind them up, do anything," he said.
"They can't do that if you've got people that have known you for 30, 40 years.
"That's a very important aspect, I think."
In the program filmed at one of his six homes - a large house adjacent to the Coolum resort Mr Palmer enhanced with 166 animatronic dinosaurs after purchasing it in 2011 - Mr Palmer talks about his childhood travels in China with his parents.
He spent several months there in the early 1960s, but was unwilling to say what his parents were doing there.
"As an eight or nine-year-old, you know, I saw it differently than them, but they were there for other reasons I can't talk about - but it was interesting," he said.
When asked why he could not talk about it, Mr Palmer replied: "Because I haven't got their permission and I'm a good son. I've never I don't know what they were doing when they were in China. But I know what they were doing."
Mr Palmer was a late addition to the Kitchen Cabinet series, having initially refused to participate.
He changed his mind when he viewed the show's season premiere with former prime minister Bob Hawke, in which Mr Hawke mused that he would like to cook the Palmer United Party leader on his seven-burner gas cooktop.
Mr Palmer then requested the right of reply, noting that he would only require one burner to cook Mr Hawke, whom he described as "'narrow".
In the program, Mr Palmer also discussed the sales techniques that earned him his first fortune as a Gold Coast property agent in the 1970s.
He briefly retired in his late 20s, and in 1981 published a slim volume of verse entitled Dreams, Hopes and Reflections, which he claimed to have written in 45 minutes.
He reads aloud during the program. His favourite poem, Take A Woman, enjoins the reader to:
Take a woman
And give her
Children in the night
She will be the torch
And you the light.
Topics:clive-palmer,government-and-politics,political-parties,australia
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Clive Palmer talks loyalty, spies, politics and poetry on ...
Clive Palmer's fear of espionage and betrayal is so great that he prefers to hire childhood friends as his political staff, and refuses to let them use Parliament
Clive Palmer talks loyalty, spies, politics and poetry on ...
Clive Palmer talks loyalty, spies, politics and poetry on Kitchen Cabinet
Clive Palmer talks loyalty, spies, politics and poetry on ...
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Clive Palmer talks loyalty, spies, politics and poetry during a Kitchen Cabinet encounter with Annabel Crabb.
Palmer talks loyalty, spies, politics and poetry on ...
Clive Palmer's fear of espionage and betrayal is so great that he prefers to hire childhood friends as his political staff, and refuses to let them use Parliament
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Palmer talks loyalty, spies, politics and poetry on Kitchen Cabinet. Clive Palmer's fear of espionage and betrayal is so great that he prefers to hire childhood
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Palmer talks loyalty, spies, politics and poetry on Kitchen Cabinet. By political writer Annabel Crabb. ABC Australia Monday 1 December 2014 09:35:49 PM
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Clive Palmer talks loyalty, spies, politics and poetry on Kitchen Cabinet www.abc.net.au - Tue 02 Dec 2014 . Summary: Clive Palmer's fear of espionage and betrayal is
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