Strewth: PUP must die

Clive Palmer shocked the nation yesterday with the news he is disbanding his Palmer United Party. OK, people were more shocked PUP still existed at all, but a shock is a shock. But if you can’t imagine public life without that colourful businessman, poet and JFK obsessive, fear not. There may be a way for the PUP to survive.

Its registered officer Clive Mensink — Palmer’s equally colourful nephew — applied for deregistration in Queensland last September but the party was still on the Australian Electoral Commission’s federal party list as of yesterday. We don’t know how Mensink will find the time to deregister federal PUP. He has been overseas for months after he snubbed court orders to testify on the collapse of his business, and two international warrants have been issued for his arrest. It would take only the party secretary and two other PUP members to apply for voluntary deregistration. But the 315 people who voted for PUP last year will get one last say.

The Two Clives: Palmer with his nephew Mensink.

An AEC spokesman says there would be a period of one month after the application to deregister to allow appeals against the PUP being put down.

Lip and mind-readers

South Australia’s top political combatants — the Libs’ Simon Birmingham, Labor’s Mark Butler and the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young — put down their arms and gathered at the ABC Adelaide studios yesterday.

It was a good opportunity for the trio to chat with ABC Adelaide’s Matthew Abraham and David Bevan about their new SA Senate colleague, Family First’s Lucy Gichuhi. Labor challenged Gichuhi’s eligibility due to her past Kenyan citizenship, which Gichuhi says she had renounced (yes, it’s all a bit Barack Obama), and the court ruled in her favour. After Butler defended the challenge, Abraham and Bevan told their ALP guest: “You have to read your lips when a politician says it is a matter of principle, no offence to you in particular.”

“With the greatest respect,” Butler replied.

“With the greatest respect,” his hosts promised.

“I’m reading your lips,” Butler retorted.

“You’re reading my mind,” one of the hosts replied.

The issue of “reading lips” should be avoided by politicians at all costs after saying “Read my lips, no new taxes” helped George HW Bush lose the White House in 1992. But what’s with the mind-reading? Guess the croweaters have lots of time to explore the potential of their brains during the blackouts.

Spoiled for choice

France, Germany and Britain are all having national elections this year, the first time Europe’s big three powers have held votes in the same year since 1924. British Prime Minister Theresa May didn’t have to go to the polls until 2020 but she clearly can’t wait to obliterate Jeremy Corbyn. (I know you’re not supposed to predict elections any more, but come on, it’s “Britain can learn from Karl Marx” Corbyn). In the 1924 British general election another Tory prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, won in a landslide against the Labour Party’s Ramsay MacDonald. On the continent that year, centrist Wilhelm Marx survived two German elections as chancellor and Radical Party leader Edouard Herriot rose to power in France. Things have changed somewhat in the 93 years, not least because all three countries could be led by women (May, Angela Merkel and Marine Le Pen) by the end of this mega-election season. But even in 1924, the Brits who brought you Brexit were trying to keep a separate identity from their European brothers. Baldwin was clean-shaven, while Marx and Herriot had moustaches worthy of great nations.

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