It’s a bit over a year since Australia voted for its 44th Parliament, voting in a new conservative government lead by our 28th Prime Minister Tony Abbott, along with the usual collection of all sorts in the House of Representatives, and the Senate, but mostly Coalition and Labor Party members, nothing unusual in all that.
The real change was that over 700,000 people voted for the first time in a federal election for the Palmer United Party, and at the time they were very much an unknown quantity, not ever having a member in Australia’s Parliament. The consequence of this vote was that the larger than life party leader ‘Big’ Clive Palmer was elected in the seat of Fairfax in Queensland by the narrowest of margins, along with three of what we can assume are the best of the parties members to the Senate, Glen Lazarus, (Party leader in the Senate), Dio Wang (Party whip in the Senate) and Jacquie Lambie (Party deputy everything in the Senate).
Big Clive’s performance over the past year has been well documented in the popular press, along with the general antics of Jacquie Lambie, but little reported about Lazarus and Wang. My questions are, has Australia and those 700,000 voters been sold nothing but a pup, is The Palmer United Party proving to be up to the task of representing a constituency and what is the long term prospects of the party in politics? What is the party’s future in Australia, or is that something only to be determined by the whims of ‘Big’ Clive.

The PUP has self imploded in Queensland; there's no one left but Glen and Clive.

It has been a fascinating reflection of the dysfunctional nature of our political system, has it not.

The most obvious characteristic, that Palmer has demonstrated in full colour, is that there are no longer any principles underpinning party politics in Australia. Policies are made and changed on a whim - and I'm not just talking PUP here, please note - while the only goal, of every politician and would-be-politician, is to find a way to be re-elected into the gravy train that we continue to suffer to exist.

PUP itself has shown that money can buy influence in our parliament when applied to the process of becoming elected, in just the same manner that myriad politicians of all flavours have corrupted individual projects with money accepted in brown paper bags.

The votes for PUP have therefore been valuable, in the sense that a vote for Palmer has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that we need to introduce some radical changes into our electoral system. Changes that reward honesty, rather than manipulation and deceit, and community service rather than self-enrichment at the taxpayer's expense.

Fat chance though, eh?

A wise old Melbourne lady I knew, declaring her opposition to a change from three-year to four-year terms in Victoria when it was just a gleam in polies' eyes, proclaimed: "What nonsense. A politician who can't feather his nest in three years is incompetent!"

Whether he was worth voting for I couldn't say, because I don't know why the people who voted for him did.

However I can safely conclude that his decision to found the PUP was worth it.

The PUP policies aren't awful, a greater emphasis on federalism, regionalism, de-regulation and de-centralisation, family first etc, I'd call them Libertarian populists but they're also pro union and pro immigration.
There's a lot in their policy statement which is appealing to working class people;
http://palmerunited.com//wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Palmer-United-Party-National-Policy-16MAY2013.pdf