How Clive Palmer’s $60 million spend won him nothing

He spent $60 million on advertising and annoyed Australians by any means possible during the campaign. But Clive Palmer won nothing.

Forget how Clive Palmer tries to spin it, he won nothing for the $60 million he spent during the election campaign.

For months, Mr Palmer has annoyed millions of Australians with text messages, billboards and advertising trumping his United Australia Party.

He is also being accused of hiring models to man polling booths yesterday.

But as the dust settles on an election result no one saw coming, Mr Palmer has come up with nothing.

His party is set to miss out on a Senate seat, even in Queensland where his vote was expected to be the highest.

In the lower house, his candidates won 3.4 per cent of the vote nationally. In Queensland, his party was easily outvoted by One Nation, which received 8.4 per cent of the vote compared to Mr Palmer’s 3.5 per cent.

His party didn’t contest the 2016 election, but in 2013 they polled 5.49 per cent nationally and 9.89 per cent in Queensland.

This election he has won 389,888 votes across Australia, at basically $150 per vote.

But in better news he’ll get $2.75 per vote back from the Australian Electorate Commission — just under $1 million all up.

Of course that isn’t how Mr Palmer is seeing it.

United Australia Party volunteers at the Freshwater State School polling booth in Cairns could not name any of Clive Palmer's policies.

The mining magnate released a statement last night saying his United Australia Party’s primary result “significantly helped” Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

“The goal for the United Australia Party was to ensure the Labor Government did not get into power, introducing more than $1 trillion of new taxes,” Mr Palmer said.

“This has been achieved with the collective effort from the United Australia Party.”

There were seats in Queensland where the Coalition benefited from UAP preferences, but One Nation had a much bigger say in this election in the state’s north.

Regardless, Mr Palmer was still a big talking point last night, especially among Labor members.

Labor’s Brendan O’Connor told the ABC that Queensland was where his party had “great difficulty”.

“I think that’s in part due to the massive spend by Clive Palmer and One Nation on preferencing to the Government, to the Liberal Party,” he said.

“Clearly, the impact of the combination of those minor parties were, you know, preferencing to the Liberals has meant that we haven’t been able to pick up seats, and indeed have lost seats.”

Labor’s Penny Wong echoed Mr O’Connor’s comments.

“The public polling at least had us in a different place,” she said.

One of Palmer’s ads seen in newspapers across Australia.

“I think that the LNP in Queensland has done well as a consequence, in part, of what’s occurred with the Palmer and One Nation deals which have been done and Australians, I think, will need to think about what that means for our country if there are substantial numbers of seats which end up going to a particular party because there’s a deal with a man like Mr Palmer or Pauline Hanson.”

Mr Palmer ran one of the most expensive advertising campaigns in Aussie history, with his party spending an estimated $60 million.

He previously said he’d budgeted to spend $80 million on his campaign if he had to.

Mr O’Connor again told Nine Mr Palmer’s spend attacking Labor had worked.

“That is a real shame,” he said.

A senior Labor figure told news.com.au she believed that it was the deal that made the difference.

“It obviously really hurt us,” she said.

“We will have to take a look at the influence that One Nation and Clive Palmer had on this.”