Strewth: Clive wire

As a video game version of himself stomped on Bill Shorten shaped cockroaches, Clive Palmer wanted to make one thing clear.

You can’t complain about the price tag: Electro Clive v the Bill roach in a scene from the new Palmer video game.

As a video game version of himself stomped on hordes of cockroaches bearing the face of the federal Opposition Leader in a Sydney hotel conference room yesterday, Clive Palmer wanted to make something clear: “I don’t really want to step on Bill Shorten’s head.” For the journalists (and former One Nation senator Brian Burston) gathered for the launch of Clive Palmer: Humble Meme Merchant — the freebie “retro-style arcade game” created in Palmer’s own image — this instruction to not take it literally came as some relief. As candidate Palmer went on, the little electro-Clive kept busy on the screen behind him, leaping for Tim Tams, squashing foes along the way, among them former Palmer United Party senator Jacqui Lambie (equipped with a second head, a clear pitch for the Tasmanian vote), flocks of ibis, and broadcaster Ray Hadley, who arrives with a hectoring “nya nya nya” and is dispatched with a “hurggh !” “Ray Hadley, is he there?” Palmer inquired in an approximation of surprise. “We should put Alan Jones in there, to be fair.” The game is larded with Palmer’s preoccupations. There’s a plane trailing a “Fake News Corp” banner, and the home screen features a dinosaur and the as-yet unrealised dream of Titanic II — but there aren’t any unhappy nickel workers, so it’s not yet comprehensive. Players can choose from a range of backdrops, each one bathed in the rays from a golden sun bearing the face of a canine Palmer has previously introduced as Grog Dog. Ominously Palmer, whose yellow billboards are achieving an omnipresence matched only by his spam texts, insisted he hadn’t started campaigning yet. Indeed, there will be more unsolicited text messages, as they are a way of “stimulating debate”. But the arc of this event was always going to bend back towards the cockroach, and Palmer volunteered (without much more in the way of explanation) that the role was originally to have been played by Waleed Aly. “My wife likes him, so she told me I couldn’t have him as a cockroach,” Palmer said, making it sound like a perfectly normal sentence. Still, all good things must come to an end and in that spirit, with the clock perilously close to hitting noon, Palmer requested release: “Can I go now and have my lunch?”

A new receptacle

The game did at least prompt a novel question at Bill Shorten’s Kakadu press conference.

Journo: “Clive Palmer has a new computer game that shows you as a cockroach getting squashed. Do you want to comment on that?”

Shorten: “I find that all I would like Clive Palmer to do is pay the workers the money he owes and repay the Australian taxpayers the money they have had to pay to pay the workers he won’t pay … He owes them a cheque before he starts playing his other silly games which actually put Australian politics into the ridicule bin.”

Apart from the rest, we now have the phrase “ridicule bin”.

A bit from column A …

Shorten’s press conference also featured proper bipartisanship in a lovely moment from Mirrar traditional owner Corben Nabanardi: “First of all, I would like to thank the Liberal Party for supporting … the Labor Party, sorry. Just ignore that.” (Laughter.) “I would like to thank them for supporting us.”

The quiet typo

Scott Morrison, who recently wore one of the loudest pairs of shorts in existence, was yesterday extolling the virtues of “quiet Australians”. Curiously, if you Google “quiet Australians”, you come to this on the website of the Order of Australia Association: “Quiet Australians. The Order of Asutalia (sic) Assocaition (sic) is comiling (sic) a database of all its members. This is in the process of being developed.” True story.

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