What's he up to? Clive Palmer confounds his critics

THE tycoon says his party is the only way to get rid of the mainstream leaders.

AS usual with Clive Palmer, there is a lot of talk but tantalisingly few answers. His announcement that he will run for federal parliament, under the banner of his own political party, with the professed intention of one day becoming prime minister, is just what we've come to expect from the supersized Queenslander.

Leave it to John Elliott to provide a reality check.

"There is no way Palmer is going to succeed," says the former corporate high-flyer and ex-federal Liberal Party president, once touted as PM material. "History is not on his side, for a start. This thing is just going to cost him money and go nowhere."

Political analyst Scott Prasser, of the Australian Catholic University, says Palmer's personal wealth won't buy the votes he needs and his party has "no prospects" at the federal election on September 14.

If there is method to his apparent madness, online pollster Graham Young can't see it. "I'm not sure what he's trying to do," says Young, a past vice-president of the Queensland Liberal Party.

VIDEO: Clive Palmer's political adverts

Tony Abbott insists that Palmer is free to run for parliament and compete on the political "fringe" with fellow Queenslander Bob Katter. Ouch.

Then there's John Black, a former ALP senator who makes his living crunching demographic and polling data.

"Who cares?" he says of the Clive for Canberra campaign.

So what is Palmer up to?

"I don't get it," Prasser admits. "Where's the philosophy? What does he stand for? Who does he think will vote for him?"

Palmer answers that his constituency will be anyone who can't bring themselves to vote for Julia Gillard or the Opposition Leader, potentially a fair chunk of the electorate given the low personal numbers of the Prime Minister and her opponent in opinion polls.

"Anyone can stand for prime minister," Palmer tells Inquirer. "But the only way you can get rid of both Gillard and Abbott is to vote for me."

Among other things, he wants to make it easier for asylum-seekers to fly to Australia, saving the expense of policing the boats, and to abolish the carbon tax "retrospectively".

Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of Palmer's move to rebadge the old United Australia Party and run in the Sunshine Coast-based division of Fairfax, a reasonably solid Liberal National Party seat, was its timing.

That Palmer had become estranged from the LNP and its federal parent, the Liberal Party, was hardly news. He had brawled in public with Abbott over his pet hate of paid lobbyists occupying positions of power in the Liberal organisation, a continuing Palmer obsession that has made it on to the policy platform of his party.

Campbell Newman's state LNP government copped it after giving the nod to Indian company GVK and Gina Rinehart's Hancock Prospecting group to develop a rail corridor through the emergent Galilee coal basin in central Queensland, which Palmer was counting on to get his own mine up. Facing expulsion from the LNP, Palmer resigned his life membership last November, a week before two state LNP MPs quit to sit as independents.

Alex Douglas and Carl Judge were the first parliamentary recruits to the proposed UAP, followed by another LNP defector who lost his seat in the state election last year, Rob Messenger, who will try to go federal with Palmer in the Bundaberg-based seat of Hinkler.

The suspicion among senior figures in the LNP and the Newman government is that it's payback by Palmer over the Galilee snub, and perhaps a stunt to distract from his costly legal dispute with Chinese state-owned enterprise Citic Pacific, which has paid him $600 million to develop the vast Sino Iron project in Western Australia's Pilbara region.

The royalties due to flow to Palmer's private company, Mineralogy, with the start of iron ore exports from the new port of Cape Preston would be a key earner when another prime asset, the ageing Queensland Nickel refinery at Yabulu, north of Townsville, requires a costly upgrade and prices for the metal have flatlined.

Palmer rejects speculation that he has ulterior motives in standing for parliament. "I wouldn't care if I had nothing," he says. "I started out with nothing and we all leave this world with nothing."

As he tells it, he baulked at striking out on his own with the UAP earlier because leaving the LNP had been such a wrench.

"Politics is like a religion," he explains. "When you leave, you need a certain amount of time to think about it, you know, about 'what should I do next?'."

While he had initially ruled out starting his own party, Palmer says he reconsidered as more and more people came to him complaining they couldn't bring themselves to vote for Gillard or Abbott. The organisational work began in earnest two months ago, he says. "Just because we haven't announced all our arrangements doesn't mean they're not in place."

If so, there seems to be quite a bit left to do. Take the UAP's website. Click down, and the description of its progenitor, the party of Depression-era prime minister Joe Lyons, fellow Labor turncoat Billy Hughes and Robert Menzies in his pre-Liberal iteration, is mostly lifted from Wikipedia, word for word in places. It will be fixed, according to a spokesman. But it's a bad look that will reinforce the view that the UAP is an ill-formed Palmer thought bubble.

A more pressing task is to register the party, and he has left it desperately late.

The Australian Electoral Commission requires proof of membership of a minimum of 500 enrolled voters or an MP or senator to have signed up. Palmer must have the paperwork in by May 13 to be in time for the federal election. No problem, he says. But there's another catch.

Electoral authorities are extremely particular about the names of political parties, as Katter found out to his cost when a proposed abbreviation of Katter's Australian Party was rejected before the state election in Queensland in March last year for being generic and likely to cause confusion. (He wanted it shortened to The Australian Party).

A group in Brisbane has gone to the AEC to register the similar-sounding Uniting Australia Party, and its application is further advanced that Palmer's. He is said to have admitted privately that he may have been gazumped; publicly, he has suggested his UAP candidates would run under their own names, with no party affiliation listed on the ballot paper, should the registration fail.

John Smith, the 62-year-old electronic engineer who set up the Uniting Australia Party with friends and workmates in southside Brisbane, styles it a non-aligned grassroots organisation. The bad news for Palmer is that there will be no deal. "He could put in an application for membership ... and we would look at it very favourably, in fact," Smith says cheekily. "I have no issue with Clive and his policies."

Ironically, senior figures in the LNP had thought relations with Palmer were improving before he launched the UAP and his own candidacy, after he had toyed last year with standing for preselection to go up against his bete noire, Wayne Swan, in the Treasurer's Brisbane seat of Lilley; then in Kennedy in northwest Queensland against Katter; and finally in Fairfax, where he owns a resort.

Last month, he is believed to have stumped up $20,000 for wife Anna and daughter Emily to attend an LNP fundraiser with Abbott at the fashionable Brisbane restaurant Urbane. Newman was there and the presence of the Palmer women was seen as a peace gesture, though he disputes this. "My daughter is over 18 and if she wants to go and see Tony Abbott that's her business ... it wasn't from me," he says.

The real question is not what Palmer can achieve with the UAP, assuming it is registered, but how much damage he may cause to the conservatives and Labor. Prasser doubts whether the main parties have much to fear from Palmer or his crew, when "they are not going to get a big-enough vote to make a difference".

Young says the colourful businessman will get in the way with his antics, sucking up some of the media oxygen that Gillard, in particular, will need if Labor's woeful polling continues and she enters the campaign trailing Abbott.

Black, for his part, can't see Palmer getting "any traction with any groups", let alone the numbers to "deliver decent votes" in the race for government in the House of Representatives.

That other one-man band, Katter, is an entirely different proposition. He will cannabilise Labor's vote in the regions, and encroach on traditional Nationals support and that of bush independents, Black believes.

He says the strength and breadth of KAP's appeal is yet to be appreciated by the political establishment, making Katter a man to watch. On the basis of its performance in last year's state election, where it polled 11.5 per cent statewide and more than 20 per cent in some seats, KAP could win two House of Representative seats plus Katter's own, plus five Senate spots, mainly at Labor's expense.

"The tendency on the part of political journalists is to treat Palmer seriously and treat Bob Katter as a joke," Black says.

"I think they have got that the wrong way around."