Crikey for PM tells a lie on a giant billboard* about Clive Palmer

We went back and forth in the bunker about what lie to tell in our political campaign ad.

“Clive Palmer hunted down the last Tasmanian tiger”, “Clive Palmer is a secret member of the Greens”, “Clive Palmer spent all his money on renewable energy”, or perhaps “Clive Palmer wants to introduce a death tax“.

Each of these is demonstrably untrue, but, hell, who’s gonna do anything about that? There is no body that regulates truth in political advertising, beyond very narrow bounds, so it’s all fair game.

Anyway, here’s what we opted for*:

It is a persistent source of wonder to many people who don’t follow politics obsessively: as long as a political ad isn’t actively deceiving someone about the process of voting — i.e. telling voters that the teal candidate is actually the Greens candidate — there is nothing that requires you to be honest. Companies can’t outright lie about their products, but parties can about their policies and, more importantly, their opponents.

Even if you’re running advertising that has been found to be deceitful about the process of voting, just run it for as long as you can before the election is called, and there’s simply eff all the AEC can do about it!

So, after all that spam we sent him, why are we picking on old mate Clive again?

As with the last election in 2022, you’d have to be living under a rock to have missed Palmer’s retina-staining yellow ads. About as good for your eyes and brain as staring directly at the sun, and this time around presented under the achingly unclever name of “Trumpet of Patriots”, Palmer’s yellow branding has infected billboards, banner ads, and, this week, got all up inside your phone. It’s perhaps the most egregious and blatant example of what money can buy you in an election campaign. It doesn’t necessarily guarantee a decent font, image resolution or any kind of comprehensible sentence structure, but it can buy you ad space, and it can buy you lies.

For example, his party spent nearly $200,000 earlier this year promoting a video showing clips from an old anti-climate change documentary from 2004, which a climate scientist told the ABC contained “misinformation and disinformation“. So, lies. Palmer was also accused of trying to “scare the elderly” during the 2020 Queensland election by claiming Labor would introduce a “death tax“. His adverts proclaimed “stop Labor’s death tax”, a myth then cabinet minister Kate Jones called “bullshit”.

When it comes to advertising lies during elections, Palmer is by no means alone in the room. In fact, it’s cramped, sweaty, and with faces pressed up against the glass, and includes corkers like:

• Advance Australia paraded a billboard around Perth in 2022 reading “CCP says vote Labor“. Needless to say, this is not the CCP’s position.
• Facebook ads from the Liberals in 2019 claimed Bill Shorten wanted to “tax your ute“. In fact, there was no car tax in his electric vehicle policy.
• Advance also ran an advert in February of this year showing independent Alex Dyson wearing a Greens t-shirt under his suit. Dyson is not a Greens member, and the party has never endorsed him — Advance got around AEC rules here by running the ad before the election was called.
• Labor ran an advert in South Australia in 2022 claiming ambulance “ramping is worse than ever”. It wasn’t true, and thanks to the state’s unique political advertising laws, it was taken down after being deemed “inaccurate and misleading“.

In terms of the adverts themselves, Palmer was also at the table earlier in the campaign when Nine had a full patisserie’s worth of cakes, and ate them too. Nine Entertainment, which owns Melbourne’s The Age, decided to run a Trump-aping, transphobic dogwhistle of an ad on the front page of its March 12, 2025, edition — the very same edition that ran an editorial describing Palmer as “a persistent wart on the foot of Australian politics”.

“The claim in the advertisement, made without context or nuance, is simplistic and hurtful to many,” The Age‘s editorial read. Bringing this hurt to as wide an audience as possible — incurring the outrage of its staff and readers in the process — netted the paper $20,000. And of course, Palmer’s ongoing business, should they opt to run more of his messages, as they did at the height of the pandemic.

Palmer eventually apologised for the ad content, but not before the paper had stressed it was not about the money, but the principle of the thing; to reject an ad, any political ad, would imply — to a hypothetical reader who had, presumably, drunk an entire bathtub full of poison river water — endorsement of any of the ads it *does* publish. It is duty-bound, as a news organisation, to accept money from literally anyone with a political point to make (that said, we know there are SOME adverts Nine would prefer not to run).

They’ve carried out that duty admirably this election by continuing to run Palmer ads on the front page, but this time with the much catchier tag line: “We don’t need to be welcomed to our own country.” Because we know that running that kind of material doesn’t lead to anything much of consequence.

Maybe it’s the principle of the thing, maybe it’s the $20,000 price tag. Because make no mistake, elections are a bonanza for the advertising industry. First, there are the tens of thousands of dollars newspapers can make from political advertising — according to Nine’s rate card from 2022, a full-page, one-off ad in The Australian Financial Review (like, to pick a random example, this?) could cost as much as $42,000. Then, there are (again, see Palmer’s) billboards.

Crikey understands that billboard advertisers are able to charge political parties rates that no private company would ever accept, thanks to an industry-wide policy that denies any kind of discount for political advertising. Anyone who owns roadside billboard space can book a nice holiday if they get a call from Palmer’s people — he’s likely to have spent something in the region of a million bucks on billboards alone.

This inflated cost has a couple of effects: there’s no chance an agency can be accused of any kind of anti-democratic bias towards helping any one candidate (while conveniently guaranteeing a serious payday every three years). And of course, it more or less guarantees the smaller players simply can’t compete with the majors or the likes of Palmer.

As for the lies, the crossbench has been pushing for action on this for a while, and indeed, this is one of the conditions for support the teals have pushed for in the case of a minority government. Labor had included some (still seemingly quite hard to breach) provisions against electoral lies in its completely friendless and ultimately ditched misinformation bill. The subject is often shouted down with (defensible) constitutional concerns, and (perhaps more overcooked) threats to free speech.

Of course, at state level, South Australia has had truth in political advertising laws for nearly 40 years without turning into North Korea. However, much like the hermit kingdom, no-one has entered or left that state in many years, so how could we know for sure?

As for Palmer being broke? Clearly, that’s a ridiculous assertion. The man is worth $3.4 billion, splashed $70 million on beachfront properties in Queensland in just six months, and is opening his own car museum for Christ’s sake.

But when it comes to savvy political spends, Palmer is supremely good at hemorrhaging money. He spent $120 million last election and only managed to nab one seat, and is on track to blow that spend this time round with similar results. That has to sting. A savvy businessman? Maybe. A clever politician? Don’t even think about tooting that horn, Clive.

*Oh, you didn’t actually think we could afford a billboard, did you? Not at these election-time rates! This is a fantasy mock-up.

Which lies from elections past stick in your memory?

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