#clivepalmer

CLIVE PALMER Titanic II

            Australian billionaire Clive Palmer has been teasing us with building a replica of the Titanic (called the ‘Titanic II’) for years and years. But since then he’s been busy making political television advertisements and politics and more politic and I thought he forgot all about the Titanic II, well apparently not because he’s back! Yes!

            Today (13 March 2024) at the Sydney Opera House he announced that the design plans for the new Titanic have been finalised and should be built well hopefully soon before we all die.

            Palmer is a huge Titanic fan and announced in New York in 2013 his plan to build a replica of the RMS Titanic called Titanic II. He wants to recreate the Titanic as closely as possible to its previous appearance but this Titanic II will be safer and ‘far, far superior to the original Titanic’ - meaning it won’t sink and have people drowning etc.  

In the lead up to the 2019 federal election, Clive Palmer, leader of the United Australia Party, spent a grand total of $60 million in advertising for his election campaign. That is the focus of this PR activity. 

Clive Palmer had advertisements in all forms of media to get his message across, simultaneously tearing apart the Australian Labor Party (ALP) while making a claim to ‘Make Australia Great Again’ in the process. 

The ad above appeared on TV regularly in the lead up the federal election, with a catchy parody of the chorus of We’re Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister. Other tools used in the campaign included billboard advertisements such as:

Short clips and posts also appeared on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, absolutely saturating all forms of media to spread the campaign’s key messages.

Personally, I saw many of the television ads, as well as posts on social media too. One could say there were ‘hard to escape’ because of the sheer volume of ads across as many mediums as possible. 

There is nothing better on a Sunday morning than starting your day the lazy way: a slow roll out of bed without bothering to change into ‘day clothes’, a cup of coffee, and, for myself at least, a scroll through ‘my socials’ to begin building a picture of the day ahead. My Facebook feed is filled (if we pretend the relentless product advertising and viral posts don’t pop up) with sentimental birthday posts for family and friends, snapshots of holidays somewhere far sunnier than here, and comments that are only understood by those included in the inside joke.

Perhaps the politicians of Australia can provide a trustworthy resources for today’s topics of interest... and lo and behold, former Liberal politician Clive Palmer has delivered. A personal favourite of mine was the morning he shared a Star Wars meme, only the scene depicted was that of Greens party members screaming in fear at a self-help book ‘Economics for Dummies.’ As usual, this post was well received, with one social media user describing it as “another high-tier Palmer meme.” But Palmer’s social media activity poses the question of his level of genuine engagement with his audiences, and hence his interest in genuine connections. His position as former politician may cut him some slack, but the change in his social reputation, obvious by a quick Google search of his name and the resulting hundred of discussions of his hilarity, is sure to precede him. We know Palmer loves his memes, but do we know anything at all about Palmer on a personal level? Do we even have the right to expect this type of connection?

Author Greg Jericho suggests politicians and parties are “only able to overcome the... nature of social media when they forego the need to completely control the debate,” (2012, pp.302). That is, the risks involved in opening discussion in such a public arena are unavoidable if one wants to create real connections on social media platforms. Gone are the days of gatherings in the town square, where your comments may spread via hearsay and gossip for weeks to come. Now, our comments and opinions are forever embedded in data, to be analysed and picked apart by users irrespective of time and space. Whilst this social media data can serve as an invaluable resource for building a “profile of voters,” the flow of communication travels both ways, an affordance of social media that forces vulnerability on its users (Jericho, 2012, pp.308).

Social media is not only engaging as a means of direct communication, but also as a platform for news and current affairs dissemination. Activist Eli Pariser argues, however, that the effects of platform algorithms, such as the process by which a Google Search returns results to a user, can create what is known as a ‘filter bubble;’ an invisible internet bubble that shows users content it already knows the user is looking for or supports. The filter bubble theory rejects the idea of an unbiased Internet, however many users engage with social media as a tool for sourcing political information because of the perceived freedoms of platforms for information sharing.

Professor Gunn Enli uses data statistics to illustrate the influence of social media use when compared to traditional media use; during the 2016 presidential election campaign, Republican candidate Donald Trump (well known for his controversial tweets and posts) boasted 17.6 million Twitter followers, whilst The New York Times paled in comparison with their 1.2 million online subscribers (2017, pp.53). With Trump’s audience dominating that of the Times, it really is no surprise his campaign garnered a tremendous amount of both online support and loathing. I wonder if Clive Palmer will ever hit those kinds of numbers...

References

Enli, G 2017. ‘Twitter as an arena for the authentic outsider: Exploring the social media campaigns of Trump and Clinton in the 2016 presidential election,’ European Journal of Communication, 32:1.

I WAS THE FIRST DATE!!! THAT WAS ME!!!!