United we fall: Clive Palmer puppets cut their strings

THE steady unravelling of the Palmer United Party has exposed the depths of Clive Palmer’s dictatorial tendencies.

Palmer United Party leader Clive Palmer. Picture: Kym Smith

THE steady unravelling of the Palmer United Party has exposed the depths of Clive Palmer’s dictatorial tendencies. Clearly, he is a captain’s call, command-and-control type of leader.

The desertion of former rugby league great Glenn Lazarus from the PUP team has kneecapped Palmer’s preposterous ambitions of controlling the Senate.

His clout has been reduced from four of the eight balance-of-power crossbench votes in the upper house to just one.

The party’s parliamentary collapse also underscores that democracy in Australia is not for sale.

Palmer-linked companies bankrolled his party, and the lottery of the upper house voting system catapulted three random PUP candidates into the Senate. Palmer added a dash of the colour yellow and a voting alliance with the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party’s then naive Ricky Muir to construct a myth, Wizard of Oz-style, about his own greatness.

Some believed the folklore despite The Weekend Australian’s Hedley Thomas revealing Palmer to be a bogus professor (it is an honorary accolade), a self-interested National Living Treasure (his staff were instructed to vote online for him), and a self-funded secretary-general of the so-called World Leadership Alliance (he tipped more than $500,000 into the coffers of the sponsoring group, Club de Madrid).

Many others who should have been applying scrutiny were instead dazzled by the flim-flam of Palmer’s over-hyped PUP spectacular, and his fanciful predictions the party would be the next force in Australian politics.

Now, the curtain has been drawn back.

PUP’s power has proven to be as phony and inflated as the exhibits in Palmer’s dinosaur park.

And Palmer only has himself to blame.

A month ago, on the eve of the failed spill motion against Tony Abbott, he was gleefully lecturing the Prime Minister on the virtues of listening to colleagues.

As with most dispensers of wisdom, he failed to take his own advice.

In a round of interviews, Lazarus verbally strip-teased his way through the layers of his disenchantment with Palmer, even accusing his one-time political patron of being a bully and my-way-or-the-highway type of guy. Palmer denies the allegation.

Lazarus, a league international, knows a thing or two about teamwork and we have now learned it didn’t exist in the backrooms of PUP.

The former frontrower would wake up to announcements that he didn’t know about, saying it “wasn’t a good look and it certainly wasn’t a way that our party should be run”.

“I didn’t think I was being heard, things were dismissed, suggestions were dismissed and I just felt at the end of the day if I become an independent maybe I can go through avenues, talk with other crossbench senators or with the government on issues that I feel are very important,’’ Lazarus said.

It appears Palmer never wanted representatives of the people in PUP, he wanted puppets.