Weary voters see through Clive Palmer’s splash of cash

Clive Palmer at his office in Brisbane. Picture: Glenn Hunt

Money can’t buy you love and on today’s Newspoll it’s not going to swing a seat in federal parliament for Clive Palmer, either.

The wonder is that he had the gall to flag his intention to run for Townsville-based Herbert, a place where he dare not show his face after the collapse of his QNI nickel refinery and the tricky excuses he used to deny most of the 800-odd sacked workers their entitlements.

The former PUP leader can huff and puff about the liquidators being to blame and the good he will do if he reopens the plant, but the numbers don’t lie. On our exclusive Newspoll, the first to zero in on Herbert since Palmer said he would go for the ultra-marginal seat, he is still in the doghouse with the locals.

As Graham Richardson points out, an 8 per cent primary vote is not in itself a bad result for Palmer’s new flagship, the United Australia Party, but it represents a very poor return on the millions he has invested in advertising to rehabilitate his battered reputation both there and nationally.

If fact, it seems to be a typically cack-handed effort by a man who has made a specialty of letting down his own side. Palmer was formerly a life member of the Queensland Nationals and purloined the constitution of the state’s Liberal National Party for the UAP. He has poached candidates off Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

Yet the upshot of his comeback bid may well be to gift Herbert to Labor and cruel what limited chances his fellow travellers on the populist Right, Hanson and Bob Katter, had of giving the major parties a run there.

Labor’s Cathy O’Toole can point to a slight rise in her base vote, but it’s hardly reassuring at a lowly 32 per cent, and affirms that the nation’s most marginal seat will again go down to the wire in a likely May general election.

The LNP primary vote, also 32 per cent, looks positively sickly, having slipped 3.5 points on what it polled when Labor snatched the seat in 2016. Yes, there are a range of local issues in play in Townsville, not least the economic fallout from the implosion of QNI.

But the implications of this Newspoll go beyond Palmer and the political equivalent of the Titanic he has launched. One in three Townsville voters pledged support to a minor party, and it would be folly to think that the vote of no-confidence in politics-as-usual stays with them.