Clive Palmer has warned he will hold the government's legislative agenda to ransom until he gets extra staff, despite having more allocated than the larger Greens Party.
Mr Palmer said his party was a special case, after Fairfax Media alerted him to the generosity of his staffing allocation - the most of any party of its size in the past decade.
Clive Palmer wants extra staff from Prime Minister Tony Abbott.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
''It's not really my problem, it's Tony's problem,'' Mr Palmer said, adding that the Palmer United Party would hold up Parliament for days at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars if he did not have enough staff to understand the legislation.
''We want a team of people with the right classifications so we can recruit the experts necessary … to help us understand.''
Prime Minister Tony Abbott is giving Mr Palmer and his three senators the standard four electorate employees each, plus two extra personal staff apiece for the crossbench senators and one extra personal staffer for Mr Palmer.
That equates to a combined 23 electorate and personal staff, with salary and allowances costs to taxpayers reaching as high as $1,998,494 a year.
The 10 Greens in the Parliament have just 13 personal aides between them, compared with seven personal staff for the four PUP parliamentarians.
Mr Palmer wants Mr Abbott to award the PUP minority party status, despite the party failing to meet the minimum requirement of five MPs and senators to qualify.