In December, the US Buzzfeed editor, Ben Smith, sent a memo to staff about the appropriate way to refer to Donald Trump in stories or on social media.



He said that because Trump was operating so “far outside” the political campaigns to which the company’s guidelines usually applied, and because he was saying things so obviously false, or overtly anti-Muslim, it was quite factual for reporters to call him, for example, a “mendacious racist” even though they wouldn’t normally use those kinds of terms about a candidate.

Using the same logic, it seems quite reasonable to say Clive Palmer – our own allegedly mega-rich and megalomaniac anti-politician – has taken the entire political system for a ride.

The latest example of how we are all being played for fools is the fact that his Palmer United Party sucked $21m in political donations from his 100% owned Queensland Yabulu nickel refinery before going into administration. The federal government has offered $500,000 to help 237 workers have been sacked but if the company cannot trade out of its problems and goes into liquidation then the rest of the workforce would almost certainly be able to access the federal government’s fair entitlements guarantee program and cost the government millions more. Oh, and he didn’t have to provide a bond for rehabilitating the polluted tailing dams and that could cost the Queensland government many more millions. This equation really doesn’t work out so well for us taxpayers.

Which shouldn’t be surprisingly really since the whole Palmer juggernaut has always been about Clive.

He effectively bought the balance of power in the Senate, spending $28.9m on the 2013 election and the Western Australian Senate rerun, most of which went on saturation advertising which in some cases promised things he would never have had the power to deliver, like getting WA voters more revenue from the GST. And despite poor polling though the campaign, those ads, in the final weeks, made the difference. He won his lower house seat and three spots in the Senate.

As well as promising things he couldn’t do, he didn’t do some of the few things he had coherently promised. His election platform, for example, said he opposed offshore processing of asylum seekers. But he (and the two senators he had at a time) provided the deciding votes to pass a bill that dramatically increased the powers of the government to implement its offshore processing policy while avoiding the reach of the UN convention on refugees.

He was the anti-politician who would protect the “little guy”. Which is hard to reconcile with his party’s support for things like axing the government contribution of $500 a year to the superannuation accounts of the lowest income earners, from 2017.

And his position and rationale on other things changed according to political convenience.

His senators provided the necessary votes for the abolition of the carbon and mining taxes, an obvious conflict of interest for a would-be miner and owner of a high-emitting nickel refinery that for a long time had an outstanding $8m carbon tax debt. He also provided the votes to pass the Coalition’s alternative Direct Action scheme, which as it stands is demonstrably inadequate to meet Australia’s greenhouse gas reduction promises while imposing no restrictions or costs on polluting industries, like, say, his Yabulu nickel refinery.

At the time, he also claimed he was some kind of born-again climate crusader – memorably appearing beside Al Gore – by “forcing” the government to ask the Climate Change Authority (a body it wanted to abolish) to prepare a report on alternative emissions reductions schemes, which it will deliver this year. To be fair, he did make tangible contributions, from an environmental point of view, by refusing to abolish the CCA and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which did at least preserve some institutional common sense.

But for the most part, in those days before his Senate voting bloc fell apart and all but one of the senators he had bankrolled went their own way, he engaged in last minute, high drama, chaotic negotiations, which maximised his publicity but mostly delivered “concessions” that were bad public policy or contradictory to the message he had given voters. I called it the Palmer pattern.

And as for representing the voters of his Queensland seat of Fairfax, for his own part in the lower house he hardly voted at all. He cast a vote in just 6.8% of divisions according to the OpenAustralia Foundation.

His whole tactic was to play the media, and the system, in a similar but slightly less spectacular way to Trump – luring journalists with all manner of publicity seeking stunts and then attacking them as part of the biased Canberra elite when they tried to hold him to account or point out the many things about his campaign that made no sense. And then, holding the Senate votes that could make or break legislation, the government and the opposition were also forced to pay due deference to the will of the electorate, as expressed through Palmer’s semi-coherent positions.

And – as well as many reports of his publicity seeking antics – there were also many attempts to hold him to account. Hedley Thomas in the Australian, in particular wrote numerous articles about his business interests and other questionable claims. Many journalists, myself included, called out his conflicts of interest, his inconsistent behaviour and his confused policy pronouncements, after he entered politics.

And while he never quite stooped to Trump’s treatment of the media, Palmer used the same tactics of attacking critics in order to ignore them. In the case of the Australian, he alleged a campaign motivated by things he had said about Rupert Murdoch’s former wife Wendy Deng. In the case of other interviewers he famously stormed out when the questioning got too hard, including from a 7.30 interview with Sarah Ferguson and another with Lateline’s Emma Alberici. In my own case he became belligerent and declared that I was a “naive girl” when I pressed him on a policy.

Palmer is by no means Australia’s first populist politician. And he didn’t go nearly as far as Trump in mocking the idea of accountability and truthfulness and threatening and abusing critics, which is forcing media and politicians in the US into the kind of assessments in the Buzzfeed memo.

US academic Jay Rosen, in this thought provoking blog on the topic, argues part of the answer is for political journalism to reconsider its sense of purpose and focus, which could reduce the coverage of the entertainingly outrageous that kickstarts the populist politician.

David Roberts in Vox argues that Trump is causing such consternation because he has broken the “accepted rules of lying” which have for a while condoned, or reported as a he said/she said story the really big policy lies, while calling out smaller, personal or trivial untruths.

That would fit with the Australian experience of the Coalition’s anti-carbon tax campaign or its reasoning that its 2014 budget broke no election promises – both arguments replete with obvious falsehoods.

Australia now has a prime minister who says he wants to respect the electorate’s intelligence and Palmer’s influence is on the wane, so maybe our election year won’t be like the US primary season.

But if we don’t give some thought to the consequences of allowing political discourse to drift away even from the expectation that it is grounded in fact, and the reasons that might be happening, we really are mugs.