Hedley Thomas features in today's Ten Questions bit of The Australian's media section - you can read the whole story here.

I’m really proud of the Australian Workers Union story. Who would have thought that the prime minister of Australia would have been so deeply embroiled in this tawdry scandal, in which witnesses are now telling a royal commission about her receiving “wads of notes” from her corrupt boyfriend to pay for her home renovations.

What did you think of ABC managing director Mark Scott choosing Palmer to sit at his table at the federal press gallery’s Midwinter Ball?

I think Mark Scott does himself and the ABC a disservice when he kicks own goals like that. What he does is he sends a message to his own staff that Mr Palmer is a friend of the ABC. When that happens against the backdrop of Mr Palmer being so prominent on the ABC’s programs, it’s a very clear message.

Which outlets have been taking Palmer on?

I don’t want to suggest that we’re the only ones who have been peering behind the mask of Clive Palmer but I think we’ve done more than other outlets. But there’s been some great work done by The Courier-Mail in particular and I think that Conor Duffy on the ABC’s 7.30 has been rigorous in a couple of strong reports. More recently, Brett McCarthy’s The West Australian has been dedicating resources to this story as well, and so has The Daily Telegraph in Sydney and other News Corp Australia papers. In my mind, there could not be a more remarkable story than one involving a man whose party now holds so much power in Canberra but has been bankrolled by the People’s Republic of China, which is now insistent that he siphoned off more than $12 million of Chinese funds. So this is not just Mr Palmer and a strained commercial relationship with an overseas company, this is Mr Palmer versus China. Who would have thought that the rise of the Palmer United Party may be traced to millions of dollars sent by Beijing for the purposes of running a port, not a political party?

Do you think Palmer poses a threat to the Australian parliament?

You only have to examine Palmer’s own businesses and his broken relationships with his partners in commerce to see how much economic damage he can wreak. If you then apply that to a national scale, with him in charge of the PUP as it controls the balance of power in the Senate, it is an unprecedented scenario. For exhibit one, just look at the once-classy Hyatt Coolum golf resort on the Sunshine Coast, which employed 650 people. More than 550 of whom, in the space of two years since Clive bought the resort, have lost their jobs, with occupancy having plummeted to a 0 per cent level at times. His behaviour towards staff and guests also appalled fair-minded Australians.

Why did you become suspicious of Palmer?

I had nothing to do with Palmer even though we’re both Queenslanders but I’ve watched his performance during his failed attempted float of his Resource House business when he blew up deluxe, accusing journalists of getting it all wrong when he had been accurately quoted. On another occasion, he made some bizarre statements in a media conference, only to acknowledge soon afterwards that he had made the comments to get attention. I thought: “This is like the chook-feeding we witnessed through the 80s in Queensland under Palmer’s hero, the National Party premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.’’ When Palmer then announced his intention to be prime minister of Australia, The Australian’s editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, and I talked about some of these concerning traits and decided to look into it.

Chris Mitchell highlights your investigative reporting on the Wivenhoe Dam as one of the best works of journalism he has seen.

That’s a huge rap. It’s actually the story I’m most proud of in my career and that’s because for a year we reported on evidence showing this flood was a man-made disaster and we were laughed at. In the end, right at the time when a royal commission-style inquiry had finished taking evidence and was set to release its final report that would make no adverse findings about the operators of this dam that had flooded thousands of people’s homes in Brisbane and Ipswich, we found more damning evidence showing that there had been a huge concealment and that they had breached their own operating manual at crucial times, resulting in this avoidable disaster.

How did you uncover evidence the inquiry couldn’t?

I stayed in touch with my sources, who found a trove of official documents and emails, and together we studied these over several days and once we had put it all into context, and to help me, I wrote about a 50-page report for my own purposes to guide me — it was like my own manual on how it all fit together. The conclusion was inescapable that this dam had been negligently operated and that the proof of that had not been brought up or tested in the inquiry, even though this $15m inquiry had access to all the material. The upshot was the inquiry went back to work, the state election was postponed and the findings were effectively overturned and now, after two years of study by Maurice Blackburn lawyers, a massive class action was filed last week, to win compensation for thousands of people, many of whom lost their most-valued possessions and were set back years financially. It showed me that if you trust your instincts — even when the so-called experts, the highly paid engineering witnesses, the legal teams and the media are all going the same way together — you can still prove the truth.

When after a year of research and reporting you finally found the evidence that the disaster had been man-made, how did you tell your bosses?

I’d spent a few days reading, rereading and analysing this new material that changed everything in terms of the evidence about Wivenhoe. I’d been out for a really early game of golf to clear my head. It was a Sunday. On the way back, I rang Clive (Mathieson, editor of The Australian) and I said: “Mate, it’s a biggie, we’ve got it. Just trust me, the evidence is damning.” From that point, we were on a roll. That came a year after the flood. In the year leading up to that call to Clive, we had been tackling the story and raising this concern and highlighting so many very concerning features of the operation of the dam but it was like yelling into a cyclone: there was this strong reluctance at the ABC and at The Courier-Mail, at that time under previous editors, to actually ask: “Well, how did this flood happen? Was it just the rain? Could the dam have been operated in a way so that it didn’t occur?’’ The atmosphere was: “Oh no, we’re Queenslanders, we get knocked down, we get back up again, let’s not ask difficult questions that might detract from this sort of media-fuelled, togetherness, mateship thing.’’ If it had been a plane that had crashed, or some other disaster, I think the approach would have been different, but in this the journalists seemed unwilling — perhaps in part due to the complexity of the hydrology — to countenance that this flood may have been Australia’s worst and most-costly man-made disaster.

Which stories are you most proud of over the course of your career? Describe some early job experiences

I’m a bit of a contrarian and an outsider and I think that’s helped me in journalism because it’s given me an opportunity to break stories that the paper can end up owning. Because while we’re going off in one direction, as long as we know it’s evidence-based, we’ll trump the pack nine times out of 10. In terms of stories that have been significant wins for me, exposing the fraudulent and dangerous doctor Jayant Patel in Queensland. He was convicted of manslaughter and the High Court intervened and he ended up being convicted of fraud. Doctor Mohamed Haneef, who was stitched up by the Australian Federal Police and the Howard government in 2007. I’ve taken on some rogue law firms, a big and dishonest property marketeering scam. Again, going against the group-think on what was really going on with Simon Overland and Victoria Police in their reliance on a lying gangster hitman to run a now thoroughly discredited operation against their own members. I’m proud of that story. And I’m really proud of the Australian Workers Union story. Who would have thought that the prime minister of Australia would have been so deeply embroiled in this tawdry scandal, in which witnesses are now telling a royal commission about her receiving “wads of notes” from her corrupt boyfriend to pay for her home renovations.