Terry McCrann: Palmer’s private $60m campaign is unlike anything we’ve seen

Clive Palmer’s saturation advertising with the sole purpose of making himself an ‘earworm’ is like nothing we’ve seen, writes Terry McCrann.

Two things we’ve never seen before make this election unique and also very interesting.

By far the more interesting and potentially actually significant is the massive advertising blitz — relentlessly selling a single message: Me — from Queensland character Clive Palmer.

He’s already spent over $30 million of — unlike most of the spending and certainly that of the major political parties — his own money.

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By the time the votes are being counted it will almost certainly have topped $60 million.

All of it being spent to, well, if not to make Palmer “great again” — that might stretch both credibility and credulity just a tad too far — at least make him a (another?) Senate nuisance.

We’ve never seen anything like it before: Somebody embarked on saturation advertising over many months — with the single, simple objective of making that person the visual version of an “earworm”.

Well, we’ve never seen it in Australia before. It’s broadly like a replay of Donald Trump’s campaign to, first win the Republican nomination through 2015, and then to win the actual election through 2016.

Clive Palmer paid for his own saturation advertising. Picture: Shae Beplate

The big difference of course is Trump mostly didn’t have to spend his own money.

The networks treated him like an eyeball-attracting celebrity freak show and gave him unprecedented and unequalled airtime — and first gifted him the nomination and then gave him a huge helping hand to win the election.

The other huge helping hand — it even worked in sync like two hands clapping — came of course from Hillary Clinton, who was an awful candidate running an utterly dreadful campaign.

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Indeed, candidate and campaign were so bad they even made somebody else, also running for election in 2016, look half-competent in comparison: That was our down under self-described “miserable ghost”, who’s still lurking about on the end of his Twitter feed.

Another point of interest to note from the 2016 US presidential election of indirect relevance to my comment today is that if the “fix hadn’t been in” for Hillary to “win” the Democrat nomination, we would have had a bizarre and indeed extraordinary outcome. We would have Bernie Sanders versus Donald Trump.

Hillary Clinton was an “awful candidate running a dreadful campaign”.

Why extraordinary? Because neither was of the party they were running to be the candidate of.

Sanders has never been a Democrat and still isn’t. He calls himself an “independent” or “democratic socialist” — but is actually somewhat “further left”. After all, he spent his (second) honeymoon in the (dying) Soviet Union.

And Trump wasn’t even in politics. Sure, he’d spent a life schmoozing everyone, but if anything was much more a classic New York Democrat than anything remotely “Republican”.

Anyway, we’ve had months and months of Palmer relentlessly “doing a Trump”; even down to borrowing (and amending) the Trump signature phrase: “Make Australia Great”.

Unlike Trump, he’s had to pay money to get his message out.

US President Donald Trump’s slogan has been altered for the Palmer campaign.

He particularly hasn’t had the ABC and Tony Jones to give him the sort of unlimited fawning coverage they did in 2013 — arguably, prefiguring the US networks and The Donald in 2016, helping propel him, if only briefly, into the parliament.

It will be fascinating to see what impact his spending has this time. Can it deliver him a Senate seat in Queensland — or at least enough votes to make his preferences count?

Another difference with Trump is Palmer is running candidates in all or almost all the Lower House seats.

Here the outcome is more clear-cut. There’s not a hope in hell of any of them winning. But can the money deliver individual candidates in key seats enough votes to make their preferences critical?

Pauline Hanson’s supporters to could abandon her for Clive Palmer.

More broadly, can the branding exercise — the Palmer name, the Palmer visage and the Palmer message — actually attract votes separate from him?

And if it does, where do they come from? The major parties or third parties, and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in particular, especially in Queensland?

The second thing we’ve never quite seen before is the slew of “celebrity independents” — Zali Steggall against Tony Abbott, Kerryn Phelps in Malcolm Turnbull’s old seat, Julian Burnside (although he’s running under the Greens banner) against Josh Frydenberg.

You could even throw in semi-celebrities like Julia Banks, Oliver Yates and good old Rob Oakeshott; and there’s quite probably a few more not-quite semi-celebrities I’ve overlooked.

We’ve never quite seen such a coalition of candidates in quite the circumstances which make the bluest of blue electorates vulnerable to these challenges.

Put the two together and we really have an interesting and potentially seminal “test-tube” election.

MONEY, MONEY, YOUR MONEY

A pamphlet from the local member that popped into my letterbox captures the way politics and elections have gone completely off the rails.

I won’t name the pollie because he — or she — was only doing what they all do; and what they do is entirely understandable.

My point is not about individuals but the process.

Elections used to be about differing visions about the best way to manage the country and/or about big issues. Now they are almost solely about bribes.

Vote for me and we will spend billions (of your money) or directly channel money in your direction.

Thus the pamphlet had five stories on its front page.

Three of them were about taxpayer money garnered for that electorate and one was about spending on a $3 billion-plus big policy.

Only one of the five was of general interest.