Jack the Insider: Trump is really Clive Palmer but in a better suit

There’s no mistaking that in political terms Trump, like Palmer, is a human wrecking ball. Pictures: AP, AAP

It’s often said that Australia languishes behind the United States of America. While the world clock puts us a full 17 hours ahead of the east coast of the US, we remain some months or even years behind by certain measures.

I’d argue we do very nicely by comparison and in at least one respect we’re miles ahead. And we have Clive Palmer to thank for it.

It’s only now the US is dealing with the phenomenon of a self-proclaimed billionaire anti-politician standing on the political stage as a champion of the masses, oozing policy statements that bear no relationship and indeed are often polar opposites of public utterances made years beforehand, refusing to be interviewed by particular journalists and generally treating the political process like a personal chew toy.

Whereas we’ve been dealing with that silliness for the best part of three years.

It’s almost as if we should expect a long trail of earnest American think-tank nerds turning up on our shores on study tours to poke and prod at the founder of the PUP to see if Donald Trump really is Clive Palmer - albeit in a better-fitting suit.

The US now has a billionaire who frequently says he intends to be the 45th (and arguably last) President of the United States of America.

It might seem a geological eon ago but it was only back in April 2013 that Palmer declared he would be the next prime minister of Australia, which is to say he intended parking his ample backside in Kirribilli House after the September election.

Back then, Palmer stood in front of lurid yellow posters bearing the name The United Australia Party. There was a mobile image of Sir Robert Menzies, his fiercely benevolent image twirling about on stage, garishly reanimated while Clive stood alongside with the thumbs up.

Palmer had yet to formally register as a candidate in the seat of Fairfax and his party’s name bore a trademark but was yet to register with the Australian Electoral Commission. A month later, the AEC declined the registration, citing likely confusion between Palmer’s party and a group who had previously registered the name, Uniting Australia Party.

Why anyone would want to appropriate the name of a political party that had left Australia dangerously unprepared for war and had collapsed in the parliament at the first whiff of grapeshot, is a question perhaps only Clive Palmer could answer but the chaotic nature of the party’s evolution was a portent of the disaster that was to come.

By May of that year, the party was registered instead as the Palmer United Party and Clive became almost omnipresent in the media, rendering the 2013 election campaign into some form of ghastly reality television series, with even uglier contestants.

Or as Treasurer Scott Morrison told 2GB radio last Monday: “I suppose the warning in all of this is this: at the last election Clive Palmer ran around putting about what he thought were simple answers to complex problems, and people put him on trust and they voted for him.”

Similarly, Trump has gone the full three-ring circus in his campaign, tottering out as America’s favourite buffoon with a fake bouffant hairdo to match. Mexicans are all criminals and rapists, global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive et cetera etc.

Talk about laugh.

And, like a stand-up comedian who is yet to be taken down by concerted heckling, Trump just keeps going for the doctor to the point where he said last month: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” It was credible in an odd sort of way.

Personally, I regard Trump’s strangest statement as the one he made on The View back in August last year when the 69-year-old property billionaire said of his 34-year-old daughter, Ivanka, who was sitting alongside him, “I’ve said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”

Let’s just allow that one to sink in for a minute.

There’s no mistaking that in political terms Trump, like Palmer, is an oversized human wrecking ball.

One thing Trump often receives credit for is his privately funded campaign. He doesn’t seek donations in the same way his rivals have to. This makes him able to roll with the electoral punches as the primaries unfold and keep going. He has shaken off his loss in Iowa for more fertile political ground in New Hampshire and beyond.

Yet for all his capacity to persist, Trump is a good way back — second to win the GOP nomination with the bookmakers in the US, behind Marco Rubio and sitting firmly on the fourth line of betting behind Hillary Clinton, Rubio and Bernie Sanders to become the next POTUS.

While some applaud the move for privately funded election campaigns, there remains the prospect of wealthy sociopaths foisting themselves on an unsuspecting public.

The PUP spent more on the 2013 election than any other political party, save the Liberals.

The Australian Electoral Commission’s returns from July 1 2013 to June 30 2014 show more than $15 million was donated by Queensland Nickel, which operates the Palmer Nickel and Cobalt Refinery, now in administration, leaving 270 workers without jobs and their entitlements likely to be thrown on the creditors’ pile.

More than $8 million was donated by Mineralogy Pty Ltd, Palmer’s flagship company.

More than $2 million was received from Palmer Leisure Australia Pty Ltd and Palmer’s troubled Coolum Resort, while a strapping lad by the name of Clive Frederick Palmer put his hand into his own pocket to the tune of a more modest $100,000.

Almost $3million in taxpayer funds was paid to PUP by the AEC as required by the Commonwealth Electoral Act in 2013-14.

The AEC returns for 2014-15 show Palmer’s Queensland Nickel ponied up for a further $5.95 million. For all that (and other) largesse, PUP was carrying $43,915 in debt. While Clive Frederick Palmer could only muster a couple of grand by way of private donation in the last financial year.

It says a great deal about Australian voters that despite the rivers of cash, only 5.49 per cent of voters gave the PUP the thumbs-up in the House of Reps, with slightly less doing so for the Senate.

Queenslanders were even less enthused in last year’s state election. Only 5.1 per cent of voters gave Clive their vote in what we might loosely call the PUP’s heartland state. In this year’s coming federal election, the PUP is not likely to trouble the scorers to that degree. Palmer would do well to reacquaint himself with fractions.

If we look at the polls in the US, Trump has a whole lot more than 5 per cent of the vote. Although it’s difficult to be precise at this stage of the game, Trump’s polling shows he has somewhere between 30 and 45 per cent of the vote if a presidential election is held this weekend.

This proves one thing: not only is Australia a long way ahead of the US but also we’re a lot smarter to boot.