Palmer the one to keep the bastards honest?

By John Hewson

Photo: Clive Palmer seems to have timed his entry into politics perfectly. (AAP: Lukas Coch)

Clive Palmer and his Palmer United Party are in a unique position to really make a difference, writes John Hewson.

Timing is everything in politics, said British prime minister William Gladstone, and it seems the time is right for the emergence of a new political force in Australian politics. A key and immediate question is whether that new political force will be Clive Palmer and his Palmer United Party.

Looking back at Australian political history, another political figure stands out for his timing. In the run up to the 1980 election, the founder of the Australian Democrats Don Chipp coined the phrase "to keep the bastards honest." At the time, the circumstances were right for a third political force to hold the balance of power in the Federal Senate after the turmoil and disappointments of the Whitlam and early Fraser era.

I would suggest that while the circumstances were right for a new political force in the late 1970s, they are even more right today. The electorate's disenchantment with the two major political parties today is much more significant and pervasive than it was in the late 1970s.

Both the Coalition and Labor seem almost obsessed with themselves and obsessed to merely win the 24-hour media game by playing short-term, opportunistic, increasingly personal, mostly negative, point-scoring politics. It has left an increasingly disturbing policy vacuum, whereby issues and challenges are not dealt with adequately, and problems are left to drift and mount.

They increasingly pursue personal, party and short-term political interests at the expense of the national interest. Nevertheless, they satisfy themselves that they are listening to, and are in tune with, the electorate as they refine their daily media strategy of messages and sound bites based on polling and the results of focus group surveys. They are at the stage where they often generate their own evidence, and develop their own models, which they then use to validate their arguments.

As a result, the major parties are increasingly incapable of seeing issues and challenges as the majority of the electorate sees them, and subsequently fail to respond accordingly and acceptably. The recent rerun of the Senate election in Western Australia clearly emphasised the growing dislike and distrust of the major parties.

The long held view that most governments in Australia can count on getting a second term is quickly evaporating. It seems most unlikely that the Napthine Government in Victoria will get re-elected and Queensland's Campbell Newman is already in significant electoral strife. However, as a "new broom", Mike Baird will probably survive in New South Wales. Similarly, the Abbott Government has enjoyed one of the shortest honeymoons in history for a new national government.

The electorate is becoming far less tolerant of poor performance and is far less likely to be swayed by spin. Election promises actually matter.

The electorate wants to be told the truth. They want the challenges explained and the possible policy responses spelt out in detail. They want governments to pull all of this together into a vision or overarching narrative, which clearly identifies and integrates the key elements of the government's policies in response to the issues and challenges identified.

To take the mining tax and pricing carbon as examples, the electorate is now finding it hard to understand how we have ended up where we are given the strong initial support for action on climate change and the initial support from the mining industry itself for increased taxation. The result has been a pretty torturous political process that runs counter to common sense and decency, as it has with the position on asylum seekers, electoral funding/lobbying, the budget, health, education, science and inequality.

For these, and a myriad of other reasons, it seems the time is again right for the emergence of a new political force in Australian politics. Will it be Clive Palmer?

Clearly, it could be, but whether it will be will depend very much on Clive, on the strategy that he finalises and the way he then manages it. Palmer has already surprised many traditional pundits, both in terms of his success in the recent Federal election, and more recently in state and federal polling. He has already demonstrated that he can influence Senate outcomes and thereby effectively hold the Government to account. But at best, this is - to borrow from Churchill - the end of a rudimentary beginning – not yet, even the beginning of the end.

If Palmer initially focuses his strategy on the more modest objective of seeking to hold the balance of power, in both State and Federal Upper Houses, rather than attempting to win government in his own right, he can exert a substantial influence.

In time, of course, depending on his capacity and success in building his party and an electoral constituency, he may also seek to run a significant number of candidates in Lower House elections; seeking to hold the balance of power there too, even ultimately being able to succeed in forcing PUP into a coalition government.

However, it is a massive exercise to attract the right candidates and build and fund a broad-based, grass-roots movement; the challenge of which should not be underestimated. Look at the difficulty the two major parties are presently having in attracting candidates and in building and funding relevant and participatory organisations. More modest initial objectives are more likely to lay the basis for longer-tem success, especially as resources and focus will be fundamentally important as he builds.

In policy terms, the imperative would be to work from some fairly clearly defined and simple principles, against which Government/Opposition policies would be assessed. PUP should focus its own detailed policy alternatives on just a few key issues. To have credibility, the focus would need to be on long-term issues which are in the national interest. Their mission should be to drag the two major parties more into the debate and towards more sensible and defensible outcomes.

As to particular constituencies, you can't go past the "battlers" as a principal focus. Although somewhat ill defined, they are the key ignored and disenfranchised group being ravaged by cost of living pressures, job/education/health/housing insecurities, poor transport and other infrastructure failures.

So, can Clive do it? Can a wealthy, self-opinionated, sometimes polarising, sometimes volatile mining magnate with some, let's say, "whacky ideas" deliver the focus, discipline and structure needed to emerge as an effective and sustainable third political force in Australia? Can PUP be trusted to hold the balance of power?

Palmer will have his issues. His personal foibles, values and business interests will come to the fore, and they will need to be explained and managed. Some will baulk at the risk that wealth can buy power, bringing with it the worst elements of American politics.

But my guess is he will be mostly judged on outcomes and, as such, he is in a unique position to really make a difference. His timing is simply excellent.

John Hewson AM is the former federal opposition and Liberal Party leader and is a professor and chair in the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, at the Australian National University's Crawford School of Public Policy. View his full profile here.

Palmer the one to keep the bastards honest? - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)