A $60 MILLION SPEND WILL BUY GRATENESS

Question asked and answered. Plenty. Yesterday, I asked whether the likely $60 million – more than $30 million already spent and perhaps as much as that again through the actual campaign – Clive Palmer was spending of his own money on advertising, well, Clive Palmer, would buy him a lot of votes.

Unbeknown to me, my colleagues at our sister paper The Australian had set out to find the answer to exactly that question, at least with some specific polling in four keys seats in Queensland, NSW, Victoria and WA.

So as I was posing the question, The Aus was answering it: that the money has – so far – bought Palmer somewhere between 5 per cent (Victoria) and 14 per cent (home-town Queensland) of the vote.

Now a poll is just a poll; as many have noted, the only Poll, with a capital-P, that matters is the election. But the evidence is unambiguous: engaging in the sort of saturation advertising – critically, I would argue, done precisely the way Palmer has done it – does pay off big time.

Before detailing the technique, let me make a couple of big points on what The Aus polling is probably telling us (the probably relates to that caution about what actually ends up happening on May 18).

First, in Queensland – the home of our two rightwing mavericks (Palmer and Pauline), or three if you add Bob Katter – Palmer has broadened that vote to the right of the Coalition and would all-but certainly deliver Senate seats to himself and Hanson’s Malcolm Roberts (she’s already there for six years).

In Herbert, the maverick trio scooped up an extraordinary 33 per cent of the vote compared to the actual 20.4 per cent Hanson and Katter got in 2016 (when Palmer had other, well, business matters to think about).

In ultra-lefty Victoria Palmer will probably get votes that Hanson couldn’t – and while probably nowhere near enough to win a Senate seat, possibly enough to deliver a couple of individual lower house seats on his preferences and also be a big factor in electing someone to the Senate.

WA and NSW fall somewhere between the two extremes, and where Palmer and Pauline could guarantee one Senate seat in each state between them and their preferences could deliver quite a few lower house seats to the Coalition.

That over-riding message is crystal clear: Scott Morrison has to lock in Hanson and Palmer preferences and ignore the howls of outrage from the Fake News leftist ABC and Nine media.

The ultimate bottom line is that Palmer’s $3060 million has actually created a pathway – indeed the only pathway and still a very narrow one – for the Coalition Government to win re-election.

If it chooses to seize it. Morrison’s mauling on the ABC yesterday should resolve that – there’s utterly no point pandering to ABC bias, distortion and simple stupidity.

At the very least, The Aus’s Palmer polling will further rattle an already badly-rattled Labor opposition, after last week told not only them but anyone who was watching, that Labor had a leader who quite frankly ain’t going to cut it in prime time.

And they still have more than three long, long weeks to go. That’s a long, long time to have to try to keep your leader at least wrapped in cotton wool and preferably right out of the media spotlight completely.