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OSMAN:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Osman Faruqi. This is 7am.

At the last federal election, mining billionaire Clive Palmer spent more than $80 million trying to influence the makeup of Australia’s parliament.

Now his United Australia Party is back, with a new leader - Craig Kelly.

Kelly, a former Liberal MP known for his controversial views, says that under his leadership - the United Australia Party is stronger and bigger than ever.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper, Mike Seccombe on what impact a Palmer-Kelly alliance could have on the next federal election.

It’s Monday October 25.

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OSMAN:

Mike, Clive Palmer is back. We've all been getting his annoying text messages from his party, the United Australia party. He has billboards up all over the place and ads in the major newspapers. What is he up to?

MIKE:

Well, he's gearing up for the next election. He's clearly planning to spend big, just like he did in 2019. But this time around, there's a few key differences. This time around, the party is focussing on anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination policies to try and build support.

Archival tape -- UAP Advertisement, Craig Kelly:

“Stop the lockdowns, from public health officers from destroying your life and jobs, protect freedom of speech. Choices for all Australians.”

MIKE:

And most crucially, also the party now has a new leader.

Archival tape -- UAP Advertisement, Craig Kelly:

"I am leading the United Australia party at the next federal election..."

MIKE:

Palmer has recruited the former Liberal MP Craig Kelly, one of the more controversial backbenchers in the coalition government, to head up the UAP.

Archival tape -- UAP Advertisement, Craig Kelly:

"Together, we can take our country back. Together, we can achieve a new government. We can never trust Liberal or Labor again.

Authorised by Criag Kelly, UAP, Brisbane."

OSMAN:

OK, so Palmer is gearing up for another big spending election campaign, but this time the leader of his United Australia party is Craig Kelly, a former Liberal MP. Like you said, a pretty controversial one. So can you tell me a bit more about him?

MIKE:

Well, he was elected to parliament back in 2010 for the seat of Hughes in south western Sydney. He's been on a few committees. He's never really risen through the ranks. He's a bit of a foot soldier was the best he ever was. But in recent years, he's attracted a lot of attention for some of his fringe views.

Archival tape -- Craig Kelly:

“Well, the truth of the matter is and what the scientists are telling us and what the peer reviewed reports say is that there's been a decline in wildfires.”

MIKE:

Most notably his views about climate change. He's sceptical about the role of humans in causing global warming. He's claimed that renewable energy will kill people because of rising power prices.

Archival tape -- Craig Kelly:

“The only people that are true deniers in this debate are those that make out that there's somehow or other something we could have done in the past or can do in the future that will have an effect on bushfires in Australia.”

MIKE:

He's a strong supporter of many of Donald Trump's positions, and as wacky as all of this is, it has given him a pretty significant audience on Facebook and YouTube, which he's harnessed to build this profile at the cost, I must say, of considerable tension with his own party.

Archival tape -- Craig Kelly:

“There are thousands and thousands of breakthrough cases where people are supposedly been fully vaccinated and yet are still catching the virus, still ending up in hospital and still, unfortunately dying.”

MIKE:

And ultimately, it was the COVID 19 pandemic that brought him into direct conflict with with Scott Morrison and precipitated his exit from the Liberal Party.

OSMAN:

OK, tell me more about that, Mike. What was it that ended up pushing Craig Kelly out of the Liberal Party and into the warm embrace of Clive Palmer?

MIKE:

It's a long and convoluted story But ultimately, it goes back to Donald Trump and a crackpot doctor in the United States.

Archival tape -- Dr. Vladimir Zelenko:

“My name is Dr. Vladimir Zev Zelenk0 and I'm a board certified family physician for the last 20 years.”

MIKE:

The doctor's name is Vladimir Zelinko, and most Australians would never have heard of him. But early in March last year, about a month into the pandemic, Zelinko developed an experimental treatment for Covid involving an anti-malarial drug called hydroxychloroquine, and he claimed a 100 per cent cure rate.

Archival tape -- Dr. Vladimir Zelenko:

“We could have prevented five hundred and ten thousand hospitalisations and deaths. That’s the sense of scale of what we're dealing with.”

MIKE:

He recorded a video detailing his treatment and he sent it off to Donald Trump.

Archival tape -- Donald Trump:

“I've read a lot about hydroxy. I happen to think that it has an impact.”

MIKE:

Within days, this obscure doctor became a celebrity in the far right political sphere of America,

Archival tape -- Dr. Vladimir Zelenko:

"If it's available to you, and you can take it, you do it."

MIKE:

And he gained followers in this country as well, amongst the most ardent were Clive Palmer, who ended up importing five million doses of hydroxychloroquine to Australia.

Archival tape -- Clive Palmer:

“I donated a million dollars to the trial for the hydroxychloroquine team being held in Australia through the Royal Brisbane Hospital.”

MIKE:

And, of course, Craig Kelly.

Archival tape -- Craig Kelly:

“I've said of Dr. Zelenko. Sir you are my hero. I have very few heroes in this world. Dr. Zelenko was one it your courage and strength that has inspired me, Dr. Zelenko, to say the things that I have done.”

MIKE:

Then Palmer and Kelly, of course, came together. Palmer approached Kelly and offered him money to help spread the word on hydroxychloroquine. So Kelly regularly promoted these views on his social media pages, including on Facebook, where he amassed some 86,000 followers. And he was actually frequently one of the highest performers amongst Australian politicians on Facebook before he was banned from the platform in April this year for spreading false information.

Archival tape -- Craig Kelly:

“I've taken a lot of heat for it. A lot of abuse from the Labor Party, but I'm going to be proved right on this.”

MIKE:

So Kelly was metaphorically speaking, dating Palmer while he was still married to the Liberal Party. But of course, the relationship with the Liberal Party was well and truly on the rocks by then. And when Kelly started to publicly rail against lockdown restrictions that his own party, the Liberal Party, was implementing. Scott Morrison was not happy, ticked him off publicly in Parliament and Kelly decided it was time to pull the pin on the Liberal Party.

Archival tape -- Craig Kelly:

“This is an issue to me of life and death. It's an issue of opening up our economy as quickly as we possibly can. And I'm concerned that with the advice that the government is getting from a group called the National COVID Evidence Task Force is simply not up to date.”

MIKE:

So he left, alleging that he was going to stand as an independent, but then pretty quickly joined up with Palmer's United Australia Party.

OSMAN:

That's quite the love story, Mike.

MIKE:

It is. [laughs]

OSMAN:

Craig Kelly and Clive Palmer bonding over their mutual love for hydroxychloroquine. And then Kelly ends up leaving the Liberals to be appointed by Palmer as the new leader of the UAP. How has that romance been going?

MIKE:

Well, I spoke to Kelly a couple of times, actually.

Archival tape -- Craig Kelly:

“I know in my electorate, there's over 800 members so far and that number continues to grow, they're all very keen to get an Election Day…”

MIKE:

What he told me was that the UAPs membership numbers are zooming, that the party had recently passed 65,000 members and he thought they were going to hit 70 within about a week. And he said that this made them the largest political party in the country by membership.

Archival tape -- Craig Kelly:

“Clives put in the order in for the T-shirts and hats - 160,000. So every candidate will have a target. They'll be given a thousand T-shirts and 1000 hats to hand out to the helpers on Election Day. So I believe also on Election Day we’ll have the biggest team on the ground by far.”

MIKE:

So we've got a former Liberal MP who's built a huge social media following off the back of his highly controversial views, teaming up with a billionaire willing to spend big yet again.

Archival tape -- Craig Kelly:

“This is the first time that a major third force in Australian politics will have the resources in the candidates and the issues competing at a major federal election.”

MIKE:

And I think that this is a recipe that could cause quite a deal of chaos in the upcoming federal election.

Archival tape -- Craig Kelly:

“We're hoping at an absolute minimum to have the balance of power in both houses.”

MIKE:

In fact, Kelly told me he thinks that the UAP could hold the balance of power after the election.

Archival tape -- Craig Kelly:

“I think we are going to see something we’ve never seen in Australian politics before.”

OSMAN:

We’ll be right back.

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OSMAN:

Mike, how is the United Australia party expected to perform at the upcoming federal election under the leadership of Craig Kelly? He said to you that he expects the party could hold the balance of power and win a swag of Senate seats. But how likely is that?

MIKE:

Well if we look at Kelly's claim about the UAP being the biggest political party with its 65,000 members - Liberal and Labour don't publish membership numbers, so we don't have exact or up to date numbers and the Electoral Commission won't tell us.

But here's the thing. The UAP membership is kind of rubbery. I mean, it has no membership fee. New members simply fill in an online form. And and it's it's a bit like signing an online petition, frankly.

And I'm not about to make any predictions about the balance of power. It's a tremendously complicated thing in the Senate as things stand and apart from anything else, the sort of far right fringe of politics is getting incredibly crowded. So, you know, there's a lot of variables here in relation to preference flows and things like that. But we can say with reasonable certainty, given what happened at the last election, that the UAP could have a big impact.

Last time around, Palmer and his wife and associated companies spent more than $84 million on the UAP campaign, and they made similar claims to those that they're making today that they could hold the balance of power after the election. But in 2019, of course, the UAP failed to win a single seat in either house. And yet, despite that, shortly after the election, Palmer declared himself very well pleased with the result.

OSMAN:

How come Mike? Why was Clive Palmer happy even though he didn't win any seats despite spending so much money?

MIKE:

Well, even though he didn't win anything, he was happy that he kept Bill Shorten out of office

Archival tape -- Clive Palmer:

“And we decided to polarise the electorate and put what advertising we had left that hadn't been used to explain to Australian people what the Shorten's economic plans were to the country and how they need to be worried about them.”

MIKE:

As he put it, they decided in the last weeks of the campaign to polarise the electorate. And what they did was they put all their remaining advertising budget, which was obviously extensive into telling people that Shorten's economic plans would be a disaster for the country. So the big false claim, of course, the famous one was that the Labor Party would introduce a death tax. Now this was just a lie.

Archival tape -- Clive Palmer:

“Bill Shorten wants to tax us an extra trillion dollars, tell Shifty he’s dreamin'.”

MIKE:

Nonetheless this caught on. It was leveraged by the coalition parties who ran campaigns off the back of it. Not exactly lying, but saying that Labour would tax you to death. And the Morrison government just squeaked over the line back into government.

Archival tape -- Clive Palmer:

“Of course, our Shifty Shorten ads across Australia. I think we've been very successful in suppressing the Labour vote. And after all, in the final analysis, we've saved Australia from a trillion dollars of extra taxes and costs.”

OSMAN:

Mike, this kind of feels like we could be setting up for a repeat of what we saw with Palmer back in 2019, but this time with much higher stakes. We've got his United Australia party now led by someone who promotes patently false views. I mean, to the extent that they've been banned from Facebook. But now those views are being turbocharged by a billionaire. What does this mean for the election and I guess, Australia's system of democracy more broadly?

Well, let me start with the observation that the real policy threat posed by the UAP is not about COVID vaccines or lockdowns. I mean that that's done and dusted essentially. It's about something much bigger. It's about climate policy.

Palmer has big investments in fossil fuels. He wants to build a new coal fired power station in Queensland. He wants to open up more of the Galilee Basin for coal mining. And if we look at the current chaos in the Morrison government, around climate policy, you'll notice that it mostly involves nats and some libs from Queensland.

And no doubt they are looking at Palmer's huge war chest and they're scared of what could happen in the coming election. So, you know, they're worried that they could suffer from an attack from the right. So that's the starting point. But more broadly, it highlights some big inadequacies in our election laws.

For one, there is no prohibition on false or misleading advertising in the electoral context, as there is, for example, with consumer products.

Also at the federal level. There are no limits on donations or spending by parties. Most states now have one or both of those limits, but at the federal level, the most important jurisdiction of the lot, there is no limit.

And I think this is a major threat to our democracy because a billionaire like Palmer or another one who has vastly more money than any established political party can spend big promulgating falsehoods in the ultimate interests of their business activities. And in 2019, we saw that happening.

The UAP acted essentially as an outsourced dirty tricks unit for the coalition parties to ensure that Labor lost the election.

And it worked and it could work again.

OSMAN:

Mike, thanks so much.

MIKE:

Thank you.

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OSMAN:

Also in the news today…

The Victorian government has announced that Melbourne will be reunited with the rest of the state this weekend.

Restrictions, including on travel, are set to be eased further on Friday night when the state hits its target of 80 percent of Victorians aged over 16 being fully vaccinated.

The state government also announced that on November 24 almost all restrictions would be lifted.

And the federal government has launched a new vaccination media campaign to try and combat vaccine hesitancy.

The Spread Freedom campaign will air on television, and run in newspapers and on social media.

I’m Osman Faruqi, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.