Confusion, chaos and buffoonery

CLIVE Palmer’s buffoonish presence in federal parliament is a continuing indictment of the voters in the Queensland seat of Fairfax. Whatever could they have been thinking last September when they elected the erratic twerker to represent them?

Canberra has seen its share of eccentrics in the past 113 years but Palmer is a stand-out, much like the animated dinosaurs that infest his troubled golf resort. Unreliable and inconsistent, Palmer now says he will hold the Abbott government’s efforts to repeal the economically-damaging, job destroying mining tax to ransom unless it reverses its plan to end a bonus welfare payment to the children of dead or injured war veterans, including orphans. Before anyone from that community gets too lathered up, it is beyond question that the sacrifices made by those in our armed services must be recognised and not just on Anzac Day. But the welfare payment in question, which has been paid only once, was without doubt a bonus (something paid in addition to what was usual or expected), it was labelled the income support bonus and it was tied to Labor’s notoriously underperforming mining tax. This financial year, the mining tax which originally was forecast to produce $4 billion in revenue, will yield an estimated $232 million. Anyone working on the family budget would realise the mining tax is a dud and as such can’t provide the cash promised by Labor to fund extravagant promises. As it is, those who received the bonus remain eligible or are already receiving the living allowance, austudy, exceptional circumstances payment, newstart allowance, parenting payment, sickness allowance, special benefit, transitional farm family payment and youth allowance. It may seem harsh, hard-hearted even, when the promised payments from the repellent mining tax were to go to such emotionally-charged causes as the children of injured veterans and orphans, but if Labor genuinely had the interests of these deserving families at heart, it would have based its funding promise on a realistic source, not its flawed mining tax. Palmer, who seems to live in a confused twilight zone where he and his party are being stalked by imagined conspirators, is at least consistently irrational. After forecasting he would be prime minister after the 2013 election, he has had to settle for the realisation that he was the only member of his party to win a lower house seat and will probably be the last. Despite his forecast of a thundering victory in Tasmania in the recent state election, more reliable polling than that relied on by the Palmer United Party would suggest that the PUP vote plummeted after its leader’s visits to the island state. PUP will be lucky to win one seat in the local parliament, if Palmer had made another visit that chance would have evaporated too. Wherever he lands, chaos and confusion reign. His strategy is one of bluster. Policies he dislikes, such as the government’s very focused Commission of Audit, are “bullshit”. Hang on. In the aftermath of PUP’s Tasmanian poll debacle, past and present members of Palmer’s own party are accusing their leader of being responsible for “bullshit and razzamatazz” and say he undermined their party’s effort. PUP candidate for the seat of Lyons, Chris Lester, a Derwent Valley councillor, walked away from the PUP campaign just before he was to be endorsed because he believed the campaign was “talking too much crap”. ‘‘My view is that unless Clive steps down as the head of the party and they actually run it as a political party, it won’t go anywhere — I think it will fizzle out.” Those who voted for a PUP candidate last year should rethink their choice before giving this party further semblance of credibility.