Popular outsider gathering posse to shake up the mainstream parties

Trademark white 10-gallon R.M. Williams hat perched on his head, Bob Katter is heading back into town with a new posse at his back.

The former maverick independent from north Queensland - one of the three who held Prime Minister Julia Gillard's fate in their hands after last year's election - is now the sole member of the new Australian Party in the federal Parliament.

By the time Queensland goes to the polls Katter is hoping to have a parcel of candidates to shake the power of the major parties.

Katter is unique in Australian politics, a man who has ditched former allegiances to speak his own mind with a character and lexicon that is fully Outback, and policies that cross ideological gulfs.

His political home is the vast federal seat of Kennedy he has represented since 1993, ranging across almost 570,000sq km and which his father held for 34 years before him. Katter once cracked that with only about 90,000 inhabitants, an atomic bomb could be dropped in the middle without anyone noticing. Now he has dropped his own bomb.

He registered the Australia Party at the Australian Electoral Commission in Brisbane on Friday, and yesterday held a media conference to outline its aims, values and policies.

Most commentators at this early stage do not think the party will have the same impact as the One Nation Party led by another radically conservative Queenslander, Pauline Hanson, who shook up both state and federal politics before imploding.

History shows that minor parties of either the right or left tend to have short - if sometimes spectacular - lives. Polls indicate the impending Queensland election will be dominated by a resurgent Liberal National Party led by former Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman, tipped to trash Premier Anna Bligh's Labor Government. But in both state and federal elections the party could split the conservative vote in some sensitive regional seats, especially with rural dissatisfaction with major parties.

Katter is hugely popular in Kennedy, and is admired throughout regional Australia as a man who will stand up for views that many share.

He quit the rural-based National Party after serving as a minister in the late Joh Bjelke-Petersen's National Government and has regularly slammed his former party - along with Labor and the Liberals - as an independent.

Katter opposed decriminalising homosexuality - once famously claiming there were no gays in north Queensland - campaigned against tougher gun laws, and fears that immigration is turning Australians into a "vanishing race".

After last year's federal election, he split from fellow independents Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor to back Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.

But he also supports giving land rights to Aboriginals and supporting successful claims with title deeds acceptable to banks, and has joined with the Victorian Electrical Trades Union to oppose state asset sales.

Based heavily on personal freedoms, Australia Party MPs will be required to vote "in the interests of their electorate, consistent with their conscience", except for a small group of core values, such as the party's policy against monopolies.

"If they don't vote against Coles and Woolies, they will get their bloody toes cut off with a rusty razor blade," Katter told the Courier Mail.

The party's website says it was founded on Christian values "that define the culture of the nation", demands that governments be accountable to the people, promote a modern mixed economy, defend freedom of speech and expression and of collective bargaining, and attain self-sufficiency in defence and food production.

The party insists on weakening the market power of Woolworths and Coles to ensure fair prices for farmers and consumers, opposes a carbon tax, and wants to end the "madness" of free trade agreements that have sent tens of thousands of jobs offshore.

Katter expects a fight. "When you stand up and say things that go against the tide, the powers-that-be have a vested interest in knocking us out."