The 2022 federal election came and went with Palmer spending an estimated $100 million dollars on advertising with the United Australia Party receiving 4.12 per cent of the national vote in the lower house and 3.46 per cent in the Senate. The UAP went from holding one seat in the House of Representatives, after the member for Hughes, Craig Kelly defected, to now holding one seat in the Senate, Ralph Babet from Victoria.
The party itself has vanished from view, voluntarily deregistered.
Worse still, the party was deregistered while its one and only parliamentary representative, Senator Babet appeared to be out of the loop. Or perhaps he just forgot.
Contacted by a Nine Media journalist after the Australian Electoral Commission published a notice that the UAP was “registered on 12 December 2018 and deregistered on 8 September 2022,” Senator Babet initially denied the undeniable.
“Where are you seeing that? No, it has not been voluntarily deregistered.”
But when the senator took a look for himself, it all came flooding back, claiming the death of the Queen and a busy time as a fledgling senator had clouded his memory.
“It was mentioned to me months and months ago, but because obviously, I’ve been very busy with everything that’s going on now with the Queen passing today it just escaped my mind,” Babet said.
“This has actually happened before,” Babet assured the journalist as reminiscence dawned. “We do it in between the elections to save on the administration, the party is not going anywhere. It’s staying right where it is. The UAP is here forever.”
Well, yes and no. The senator may continue to refer to himself as a UAP senator. The Senate works more on a senator’s affiliation than AEC rules.
But is it? Is this cycle of registration, deregistration and reregistration – a routine dip into an existential vortex only to return again unharmed a case of rinse and repeat?
Readers might recall the Palmer United Australia Party contesting the 2013 and 2016 federal elections. Palmer announced the creation of the United Australia Party in 2012. Trademarks were sought and obtained. Alas, there was a problem. A registered party of little note or consequence known as the Uniting Australia Party prohibited the registration of Clive’s United Australia Party and this remained the case until the former was involuntarily deregistered in 2015 due to lack of membership.
Clive was elected the member for Fairfax by just 53 votes. Former rugby league forward, ‘The Brick with Eyes’, Glenn Lazarus was elected to the senate in Queensland as was Jacqui Lambie from Tasmania under the PUP banner. Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party senator Ricky Muir joined in coalition with Lazarus and Lambie.
Three MPs in the Northern Territory parliament changed their allegiances to the PUP and two did so in Queensland.
Then it all fell apart with every elected member – state and federal – who had aligned with PUP walking out in a huff. Palmer did not contest the seat of Fairfax in 2016.
The Palmer United Party was voluntarily deregistered on 5 May 2017. This might be what Senator Babet was referring to, but it was a one off and not, as the senator indicated, a sort of party registration tap the party’s leadership could turn on and off.
Finally, we had some clues when Clive Palmer emerged with the explanation. And here at last it seems the UAP’s founder and its only elected representative were singing from the same song sheet, although the senator may have been one or two bars behind and singing off key.
Mr Palmer told the Courier Mail the UAP was deregistered because there would not be an election for three years and the party could re-register at any time.
“It just minimises the administration work in between times,” he said.
“Being registered for the next three years to the next election is an additional expense that we don’t need.”
Sadly, Clive’s explanation didn’t make a lot of sense either. It doesn’t cost anything to keep a party registered under the AEC. There are no specific administrative costs. A party must maintain a level of 1500 or more financial members. And the notion the party can simply resume registration at some point in the future is not true.
In fact, electoral laws prohibit this. The United Australia Party will almost certainly not be able to be registered as a political party under that name for the next federal election in or before 2025. Indeed, by deregistering, the word ‘united’ may now be summoned by a new political party who might see some benefit in using it, although obviously the remainder of this hypothetical political party’s name could not be the same or similar to that of the UAP.
Over the 2019 and 2022 elections, Clive Palmer spent around $170 million in what the marketers call branding only to hurl it all in the bin.
Without going into the deeply arcane nature of our electoral laws, one answer might come in the form of a kind of party name preface with an appropriately placed hyphen. Let’s say, Mining for Freedom – the United Australia Party or some such but even that might not pass muster.
For those wondering, Senator Babet has applied for registration of the UAP under Victorian state electoral laws and while that hasn’t been confirmed, there would be no reason why the party won’t appear on ballots in the Victorian state election on November 26 this year.
But at a federal level, the UAP is now kaput, cooked, done and dusted.
It’s a mystery, no doubt, and as anyone who has tried to write mystery novels will tell you, you have to start at the end and work backwards. That’s the bit we’re missing.
For now, there are questions, so many questions. Top of that list is, has Clive Palmer lost his hunger? I mean for politics. Has Clive tired of writing a virtual blank cheque every time we have a federal election campaign?
Stranger still, we now have a senator described in The Australian as “low on signal and very high on noise” and what’s more, yellow to the bootstraps, representing a party at the federal level that no longer exists.
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The big yellow billboards are gone. The uninvited SMS messages have fallen mute. The omnipresent television ads featuring the cheery face and up-turned thumbs of mining magnate Clive Palmer are all but a memory.