The last of Palmer: A quarter billion dollars of political dilettantism

Over 12 years and five federal elections, Clive Palmer spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to influence Australian politics. With the mining magnate appearing to call time on his political forays after his latest $60 million effort for the “Trumpet of Patriots” party, we can tote up what Palmer got for his money: four senators, two of whom quickly deserted him, and a one-term stint for Palmer himself in the seat of Fairfax from 2013-16.

Nearly all of Palmer’s success, such as it was, came early, in that 2013 election that brought Tony Abbott to power and in which Palmer unveiled his campaigning model. Having long pumped millions into the Liberal-National Party and its predecessors in Queensland, Palmer switched tack, established his own party, rapidly recruited potential candidates — often from the ranks of former football players — and then carpetbombed voters with advertising in the last days of the campaign, back before pre-poll voting had become the bane of parties’ election campaigns.

As with all small parties, the limited success of 2013 only led to bad blood and division. Jacqui Lambie from Tasmania, who still graces us with her eloquence in the Senate (though perhaps not for much longer), quit the party just months after taking up her spot in 2014. Former league player Glenn Lazarus lasted longer, but bailed on Clive in a dispute over his wife’s employment. Only Dio Wang from WA — who only arrived after the Australian Electoral Commission was forced to rerun the WA Senate ballot — lasted all the way to the 2016 double dissolution election, when he was swept away.

Still, for an expenditure of around $28 million, four politicians wasn’t bad (Ricky Muir briefly said he’d vote in line with the Palmer senators, but ended up forging his own path), and Palmer got around 5% of the vote in both the Reps and the Senate. But thereafter, it was diminishing returns. He abandoned Fairfax in 2016 and didn’t spend much in the election that Malcolm Turnbull almost lost, delivering little more than an asterisk for the party that year.

In 2019, he spent nearly $90 million to achieve less than 4% of the vote in either house — with no wins — but justified his effort by insisting he had stopped Labor from winning. This was a claim quite a few in Labor preferred to believe, ahead of the reality that Bill Shorten’s large-scale reform proposals painted a huge target on Labor’s back, and every vested interest and pack of rorters in the country, allied with the media, came after them.

Palmer tried and failed to repeat the trick in 2022, spending nearly $120 million and succeeding only in electing weird conspiracy theorist Ralph Babet. He’d got back to 5% of the vote, but spent more than four times the money as in 2013 to get a quarter of the results.

At the moment, his new outfit, “Trumpet of Patriots” (the organisation was established in 2021 and taken over by Palmer when his previous party let its registration lapse), sits on less than 2% of the weekend vote despite Palmer blowing another $60 million — though he managed more than 3% in his home state of Queensland.

All up, Palmer has spent $260 million-odd since 2013, but will be prevented from deploying his billions on mass advertising — the only real winner from Palmer’s time in politics has been the media — and spam texts by new campaign spending laws next election. Pending, of course, Palmer’s inevitable High Court challenge.

As “Trumpet of Patriots” suggested, Palmer this time wanted to channel MAGA Republicanism, running ads aimed at trans people, climate science, migrants, and Welcome to Country ceremonies. But to pigeonhole Palmer as a Trumpian is to ignore his political history.

The man now campaigning against migration, for example, went to the 2013 election calling Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers “disgraceful” and promising “to inject some empathy and common sense into the asylum seeker issue” by allowing asylum seekers to fly directly to Australia to claim asylum, with processing of their claims to be done “at the country’s borders”.

He even forced then migration minister Scott Morrison to establish a new pathway to permanent residency with a temporary visa for asylum seekers willing to work in regional areas.

And his warnings about “exposing” the climate change “truth” are decidedly at odds with his behaviour when the Abbott government moved to repeal Labor’s carbon price. Although his party went to the 2013 election backing abolition, according to Lenore Taylor, Palmer baulked and could have derailed the repeal, before deciding on a compromise in which he demanded the retention of several features of Labor’s climate policy and a promise to re-introduce a carbon pricing scheme later.

Famously, in one of the weirder moments in Australian political history, Palmer convinced Al Gore to join him in the announcement that he’d be backing a repeal.

The through-line on Palmer’s political career wasn’t any ideology, and certainly not consistency. It was always Palmer himself. That promise to try to reintroduce a carbon price was forgotten virtually the moment he made it — Palmer was never one for dwelling on issues for too long. He moved incessantly from issue to issue, like a bee hovering over flowers, alighting for a second, then moving on, collecting the attention he revelled in. Individual issues were merely a platform for Palmer to enjoy the spotlight, the gaze of the press gallery, and the wider media, who inevitably labelled him “mercurial”.

Some labelled him a threat to democracy, but it seems that voters, even in Queensland, slowly wised up to his tactic of pummelling them into submission with relentless advertising. His avalanche of millions of spam texts this year only infuriated people. Palmer himself, occupying that special space exclusive to billionaires in which shame — along with any need for self-reflection — is wholly unnecessary, couldn’t care less. But perhaps, in the same way that his exorbitant spending encouraged Labor to crack down on campaign spending, the major parties will be moved to end the spam text loophole they themselves love to exploit.

For now, Palmer will have to find another outlet for his hundreds of millions of dollars, preferably something that will keep his name in the limelight where he likes it.

Where to next for Clive Palmer?

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