Older Speccie readers would have smiled at the vinyl revival. And some would have laughed out loud at the reappearance of platform shoes and flared trousers. But now Australians of a younger vintage must brace themselves for what must be the most counterintuitive comeback since the invention of the boomerang: the return of yellow pages.

No, not the shrink-wrapped slab of recycled rainforest that used to set off your car alarm when it landed on your driveway. Not the analog precursor to Google which introduced us to the Goggomobil and told us that Jan’s boss wasn’t happy. Not the Yellow Pages which encouraged Australia’s swollen generation to keep its burgeoning bottom on its La-Z-Boy recliner and let its sausage fingers do the walking. No, the yellow pages I’m talking about are single tabloid and broadsheet ones. The yellow pages which, last time they spoilt your breakfast and interrupted your commute, were advertisements for Clive Palmer’s United Australia party.

Three years later, with not much more than a change of logo, those same garish spreads have been pressed into the service of Mr Palmer’s latest bid for the hearts and minds of middle Australia; the much more interestingly named Trumpet of Patriots party.

It’s too soon to say whether Mr Palmer has learnt anything about effective political campaigning since 2022 – notwithstanding its Nato-sized budget, his last Canberra crusade won him precisely one seat. He clearly isn’t investing any more of his current budget in creativity – Trumpet of Patriots’ first ads are no catchier or more compelling than UAP’s were. But he cannot be accused of underestimating the role that colour consistency plays in the building of a brand. Just as Mr Trump has made Americans see red when they think Maga, Mr Palmer has made it hard for Australians to think about him without seeing yellow.

Which makes Trumpet of Patriots not just a new political party, but also something of a challenger brand; the only other conspicuously yellow major Australian advertiser being our biggest bank. So complete was CommBank’s chromatic monopoly for so long that its marketing department must have let out a gasp of ‘there goes the neighbourhood’ horror in 2022 when the bottomlessness of UAP’s war chest first became public knowledge.

We must assume those same people are now experiencing an especially unpleasant kind of déjà vu. Knowing, as they must, that Mr Palmer is even wealthier now than he was three years ago. And knowing, therefore, that it’s not just newspapers which will be engulfed by a tide of jaundiced jingoism in the weeks and months ahead. But that soon every second billboard people drive past will be yellow, and every second bus side they see will be yellow, and every second radio ad they hear will paint yellow pictures in their heads. And that the message framed by the froth of this saffron tsunami will not be that CBA home, personal or business loans CAN make Australians’ lives better but that Trumpet of Patriots policies WILL MAKE AUSTRALIA GREAT. And that some of the opprobrium which Mr Palmer’s new campaign will undoubtedly generate will make people hostile to anything yellow for months and perhaps years afterwards (a phenomenon about which entire marketing PhDs have been written).

Given how openly and unashamedly Mr Palmer has tapped into the ‘Vibe shift’ supposedly triggered by the US election result (for the benefit of the hard-of-thinking he explained the provenance of ‘Trumpet’ in his first press conference) it is remarkable that his campaign slogan stops two syllables short of an actionable copy of The Donald’s. What can we deduce from the deliberate and conspicuous omission of the word ‘AGAIN’? Can it mean that notwithstanding the Great Barrier Reef, the Great Dividing Range, the Great Sandy Desert, the Great Ocean Road and the Great Australian Bight, Mr Palmer does not consider Australia ever to have been what anyone would call a ‘great’ country? If so, I fear he may have kicked off his new campaign by offending his conservative base.