(Images: AAP)

On Monday, two of the most blustering forces in Australian politics combined to contest the next federal election. Former Liberal MP Craig Kelly announced that he was joining Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party as its parliamentary leader. The party, the pair said, would contest every seat in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

It’s a match made in heaven — if your idea of heaven is two loudmouthed buffoons who have spent the pandemic undermining Australians’ belief in the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines and spruiking unproved or disproved treatments.  

Politically there’s not much to suggest that their union will be anything but a political fizzer. Regardless of whether Palmer’s spend sank Labor in the 2019 election, the mining magnate’s unprecedented $80 million election spend was unable to achieve its primary goal of electing even a single candidate. 

Kelly’s electoral future is dim, too. His seat of Hughes has gone back and forth between the two major parties since it was established in 1955, but has been held by the Liberal Party since 1996. That combined with an organised grassroots campaign to elect an independent other than Kelly makes his reelection a tall order. 

Where the pair is more likely to be effective is in encouraging people to take action that puts them in danger during a pandemic.

Kelly posted that Palmer had pledged to spend $60 million to support the party’s campaign: “We have a huge war chest, we can run television commercials, ads, we can finance a proper campaign that no other minor party or independent can.”

This war chest will promote the party’s policies in the homes of millions of Australians. The main messages? Opposing lockdowns and and promoting vaccine scepticism.

Also on Monday, Australia’s medical regulator the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) reported it had detected rising levels of importing and prescribing ivermectin to treat COVID, an unproved treatment favoured by anti-vaxxers.

“The TGA strongly discourages self-medication and self-dosing with Ivermectin for COVID-19 as it may be dangerous to your health. There is insufficient evidence to validate the use of Ivermectin in patients with COVID-19,” it said.

State health departments in the United States have warned they had noticed rising numbers of hospitalisation from people poisoning themselves with ivermectin. The medical regulator, the Food and Drugs Administration, put out a similar warning. 

The use of this unproved and dangerous treatment is linked to Kelly, who has been promoting it non-stop on social media and in Parliament. Palmer promoted hydroxychloroquine (also beloved by Kelly) and donated millions of doses to the Australian government. 

The two have a track record to telling people to use experimental treatments, putting themselves and others at risk.

The legacy of the pairing of Kelly and Palmer is unlikely to be one of political success. It’s more likely to be remembered as an expensive effort to convince Australians to put themselves at risk, rather than trusting the tools that have been proved to keep them safe.