Australia’s sweatiest billionaire Clive Palmer is apparently the country’s least liked politician, which is… hardly surprising, if I’m being honest.
A survey conducted for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age by The Resolve Political Monitor showed in November just 8 per cent of Australians liked Palmer, the founder of the Palmer United Party, and 59 per cent didn’t. That’s a net result of negative 51 per cent.
That’s probably what you’d expect if you spammed thousands of people across the country with annoying political texts, supported anti-vaxxers and generally had a bad vibe.
Speaking of which, Palmer’s sole MP Craig Kelly is the next least liked politician in the country. You may remember Kelly from the aforementioned texts, some really annoying YouTube ads or when he spectacularly crashed out of the Liberal party because he wouldn’t stop sharing COVID-19 misinformation on his Facebook page.
Kelly’s at 9 per cent liked and 34 per cent disliked, which makes for a net of negative 25 per cent. Ouch.
Noted racist Pauline Hanson is level with Kelly, which is great to see. He had to work hard for his rating, but Hanson is just doing her. You go, girl!
Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce also appears to be widely disliked — the Nine papers didn’t say how many people liked or disliked him, but he has a net result of negative 30 per cent which is worse than Craig and Pauline. It could simply be more people know him though, because both Kelly and Hanson have a large proportion of responses that say they don’t know or care about them.
Joyce’s rating is pretty bad and probably isn’t what you want if you were the 2IC of the country. It could have something to do with how he’s reportedly treated women, Joyce’s shocking international reputation or the regular histrionics the National party puts on about who should be its leader, but who could tell. Probably nothing to worry about!
Who knew that doing bad shit constantly would get most of the country to dislike you? Hopefully this translates into most of these people losing or not winning their seats in future elections, but somehow I doubt it.
