It is close to the time, surely when the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will launch an investigation into the Palmer United Party on the grounds of misleading labelling.

United? Or even, really, party?

Hesitant though we may be about using the word shrinking when referring to anything within hurling distance of Clive Palmer, his political outfit  is suffering galloping bulimia.

First Jacqui Lambie, now Glenn Lazarus. And along the way, Ricky Muir, the motoring enthusiast who wasn't even in the party, but who was taken beneath Clive's great wing early, promising to join the Palmer voting bloc in the Senate.

With Lambie, Lazarus and Muir having since discovered the wild freedom of independence from Clive, even if he did bankroll two of them and offer sanctuary to the other, the Palmer United Party is left with a spooky silence in the Senate.

His name's Zhenya "Dio" Wang, he's from Western Australia and no one's heard a peep from him since he went on TV and said he believed everything his leader said, though he didn't know what it was, or somesuch, as if he were channeling Bill Shorten during the happy Gillard days.

Thus, the Palmer United Party's voting bloc in the Senate might require a look from the ACCC, too. Whoever heard of a bloc of one, and a mute and confused one at that?

Still, it's hardly unknown for those who have persuaded unsuspecting voters to vote them into the Senate on the basis that they belong to a particular party to suddenly transmogrify to something else altogether.

Those who study Australian politics with a microscope might recall that Victoria's John Madigan was, until some minutes ago, a Democratic Labour Party Senator, forming that party's bloc of one. He suddenly quit the party, declaring that "it has become apparent to me that the DLP's own worst enemies are within its own ranks".

Years ago a West Australian named Jo Vallentine showed how the business of political transmogrification was really done.

She won her Senate seat in the 1984 election as a Nuclear Disarmament Party candidate. She astounded all before even taking her seat, resigning from the party and serving as an independent. By 1990, she emerged as the first WA Greens senator, but resigned for health reasons before completing her term.

None of latest newly independent Senators is about to quit the Senate, of course, though each of them occupy their seats thanks to voters who imagined they might have been supporting the party these worthies represented at election time - or at least numbered boxes in such a way that preferences flowed to that party.

No indeed. That would mean giving up a base salary of $195,130, plus entitlements, and a guaranteed six years with one's bum planted upon the red cloth of the Senate benches.

If Lambie or Lazarus were to take such a selfless step, of course, the Palmer United Party would be able to argue pretty convincingly that their seats should be occupied by the party those seats were supposed to represent, give or take a spot of miraculous preference whispering.

The Palmer United Party would have a bloc again.

Far too equitable, of course. It could put the ACCC out of business, and make a lie of Paul Keating's reflection that the Senate is an unrepresentative swill.

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