How Clive Palmer’s pot of cash twists the political plot

By the end of this campaign, Clive Palmer will have spent more than $200m. Few realise what he’s really up to.

In 2019 Clive Palmer, above, spent $70m in effect as free election advertising for the Coalition, this time it is not nearly as clear-cut. Picture: Rohan Thomson / Getty Images

Journalists in the mainstream media and particularly those in the ABC-Nine-Guardian Axis of Idiocy are utterly clueless about Clive Palmer.

They haven’t the slightest idea of why he does what he does in the political space – something he’s been “doing” far longer than anyone else who’s still there, approaching 50 years now.

They have even less understanding of what his impact has been, most critically over the last 10 years and in particular with Scott Morrison’s 2019 “miracle”.

Like the more generic, more secular, “success”, Morrison’s “miracle” had many fathers – Opposition leader Bill Shorten and Tasmanian Dark Green Bob Brown to name but two – but Palmer’s $70m ad-spend was, arguably, the most potent.

This was because it didn’t only work in the utterly key state of Queensland, where Brown and his convoy did such sterling work, but importantly also in NSW, Victoria and WA, where Shorten did his best to re-elect Morrison.

By the conclusion of this coming election campaign, Palmer will have spent something more than $200m – just let that sink in, nearly a quarter of a billion dollars – in his three key campaigns, 2013, 2019 and now this year.

This is something utterly unprecedented in down under politics; an individual spending that sort of money in political campaigning. And on the surface, it has delivered very little reward.

He personally won a lower house seat in 2013, but that was short-lived and his party imploded as “his” three senators all went rogue, with only Jacqui Lambie reconstructing herself into a successful, separate, personal brand.

In his Covid-delayed speech to the National Press Club – in the very belly of the beltway bubble beast — Palmer unveiled three keystone policy proposals.

They were the 3 per cent cap on mortgage interest rates, the 15 per cent tax on iron ore exports, and mandating superannuation funds “bring back” $1 trillion of money they have invested overseas for reinvestment in Australia.

Were they serious policy proposals? Of course not. None of them stand even the most cursory scrutiny; but nor were they intended to.

Were they potent political gambits into an election campaign, and very specifically tuned to the Palmer dynamic and his ability to spend tens of millions of dollars in advertising? You betcha.

Each touches on raw points of irritation – both on the right and the left – and in the process hoists both of the major parties on their own petards.

Every pet shop galah, in the words of a former treasurer, is now parroting interest rate rises galore. Never have we had more housing debt. Never has the average mortgage been a greater share of an individual – and even more pungently, of a two-person pairing’s – disposable income.

Palmer has a “solution”: just wave a magic legislative wand and cap the rate at which home loans rates could rise to at 3 per cent.

How could the experts, the insiders ridicule it? After all, we’ve just had two years when the Reserve Bank has done exactly that; mandating a base rate of 0.1 per cent and so, effectively, a mortgage rate of 2 per cent?

If the RBA could “do it” for two years, in the Covid emergency, why couldn’t it be done for five years in a housing debt emergency?

Of course, two years of bad policy – the consequences of which, we are in the process of discovering – does not make a continuation into a further five years of an at least similarly bad and arguably much worse policy either justifiable or effective.

The same formula applies with the other two.

Why should our major iron ore miners wax ludicrously rich for selling our dirt, with the level of prices having nothing to do with the fundamentals of the projects themselves? Why shouldn’t our number one enemy pay 15 per cent more to get our iron ore?

In truth it wouldn’t; the cost would be split between buyer and exporter; and then only while our iron ore was so dominant that we could be price-setters up to a point; after that it could be carried by the exporter, just another tax.

Why shouldn’t super funds which get the multi-billion dollar benefit every year of compulsory super be required to invest some part of that money into Australian jobs and development?

Like all populist proposals, they have more than a kernel of validity in them. Further, pompous “elite” dismissal of them, founded in stupidity, ignorance and arrogance, just serves to make them more credible to the very voters at which they are directed.

What else are existing royalties? Doesn’t the RBA’s official – and officially manipulated – interest rate effectively cap home loan rates?

But, more relevantly, to go down this sort of analytical path is to completely miss the Palmer point. The object is not serious policy proposal, discussion and validation, but vote-harvesting – drawing from both the left and the right – leveraged by Palmer’s unique ability, and willingness, to spend big, very concentrated dollars.

No, it’s not going to elevate him into the Lodge or indeed anywhere near it; of course Palmer knows that and it’s not the point, even in the privacy of Palmer’s fantasies.

But the proposals plus the spend – plus the voter dissatisfaction with the party and the PM in power; the lack of enthusiasm and more than a dash of distrust of the fake seeking to sneak through – will impact on the election outcome just as it did very significantly in 2019.

What should be the “known unknown”, is that whereas in 2019 Palmer spent his $70m in effect as free advertising for the Coalition, this time it is not nearly as clear-cut.

That’s captured in the messiness of how the Senate vote will play out in Queensland, with four “candidates” for the third and fourth slots nominally in the gift of the right. Indeed, worse case, it could “lose” that fourth slot to the left.

Just keep watching those increasingly ubiquitous “yellow spaces”.

Originally published as How Clive Palmer’s pot of cash twists the political plot