There was the time he chastised his own government for flying survivors of the Christmas Island boat disaster to their family members' funerals, and the time he equated gay marriage with bestiality. ("There are some creepy people out there," he observed.)  An observant Catholic, he has argued that anyone who supports abortion is "pro-death".

On Friday night he was set to address a fundraiser for the anti-Islamic Q Society which is being sued for defamation for its rhetoric against halal certification, and he has described Islam as a "totalitarian, political and religious ideology".

After being sacked from the front bench, Bernardi's most significant parliamentary achievements pertained to things he has prevented from happening rather than those he has advocated for. More recently he was a leader of the insurgency against the government's tentative suggestion that, perhaps, a carbon tax should be reconsidered as part of a suite of climate change mitigation measures, given the strong support of the relevant experts.

He has been a champion of the conservative push against allowing for a free vote on marriage equality in Parliament, despite polling suggesting overwhelming public support for gay marriage.

Time and again Turnbull sought to appease Bernardi, time and again Bernardi demanded more. Now, finally, Bernardi has left the Liberal Party after 31 years to forge his own path leading the Australian Conservatives. Bernardi plans to turn the movement into a party, until he does he will remain in Parliament as an independent.

Bernardi's abandonment of the Liberal Party comes as no surprise – he has been telegraphing his plan for months. But because it comes at a time when right-wing populists are on the march around the Western world, it has sent shudders through the political establishment.

When you look at the numbers there is little reason to believe Bernardi's movement will amount to much, but in the wake of Brexit and Trump, no one feels quite certain about these things anymore.

Could Bernardi be the one to unite the splinter groups on the right of the political spectrum and change the Australian political landscape?

As the sitting week ended on Thursday evening, Bernardi sat down to a beer at his desk and explained to Fairfax Media that he did not believe that he had left the Liberal Party so much as that it had abandoned its conservative heritage and its principles.

"My heart and my belief system is enshrined with Sir Robert Menzies," he said, speaking of the Liberal Party founder who forged a party dedicated to free markets and personal responsibility.

He was dismayed that under Turnbull the Coalition had appeared willing to countenance compromise on issues of governance (which should be little), taxation (low), renewable energy targets (scrapped) and gay marriage (banned).

He was particularly dismayed that the party had dumped Tony Abbott, a cultural warrior after his own heart, and emphasised that in his view Australians were abandoning the major parties because they failed to stand firm for anything much at all.

Bernardi was also inspired by a long visit to America as Donald Trump fought his way to an unlikely victory.

Bernardi was dispatched by the government to spend three months as an observer at the UN. (These observer seats are a sought-after parliamentary privilege, though whether Turnbull was seeking to mollify or banish him is not clear.) While there Bernardi took to using Trump slogans – Drain the swamp, Crooked Hillary – in his social media. On election day he tweeted out a picture of himself wearing a Trumpian "Make Australia Great Again" hat.

Bernardi confirms his time in New York did contribute to his decision to leave the Liberal Party, but he says he was inspired as much by the general atmosphere of a city built by people willing to take big risks for big rewards as he was by Trump's victory.

According to Bernardi, due to their fear of offending interest groups, the major parties  are ignoring the concerns of mainstream Australia, such as opposition to large-scale immigration. His party, once registered, would offer a "safe" conservative alternative, at least in the senate.

By safe, he means that he will stand by his beliefs in free-market economics and resist the populism of protectionist policies espoused by the current star of the right-wing crossbench, Pauline Hanson, even as he shares her distrust of Islam and opposition to large-scale immigration. Hanson, he said, is an "utterly charming, tenacious, remarkable Australian".

This divergence over protectionism would appear, so far, to be enough to prevent a merger between the two groups. Similarly it marks a significant gulf between Bernardi and George Christensen, another right-wing Liberal who has flirted with defection.

Another theory kicking around conservative circles is that both men – and others on the right fringe – don't believe that Hanson has the organisational skill to keep her party together, and that despite her recent successes and surging polling in Western Australia, Bernardi and others are positioning themselves to absorb her support should One Nation again collapse.

Asked what he would consider to be a success, Bernardi said he would either like to build an enduring political movement, or use whatever leverage he garnered in the shorter term to reshape national politics.

In practical terms, that would mean winning his own seat in South Australia – which comes up in 2022 – and a handful of senate seats around the nation. He claims to have already built an impressive email list of 50,000 and secured donations from 700 supporters to that end.

The South Australian Senator Nick Xenophon, whose protectionist NXT has secured real power on the current crossbench, does not doubt those claims. But he believes that if Bernardi is to enjoy success in South Australia, let alone the rest of the nation, he will need to soak up the vote of Family First, the Christian right party that had Bob Day elected in South Australia in the last election.

Day has been forced to resign and the High Court is yet to decide whether he is to be replaced by a member of his own party or the Labor Party. In the interim, Bernardi has hired Day's chief of staff, Rikki Lambert, to join his own staff. Lambert has previously declared he would nominate to fill Day's vacant seat.

Otherwise, Xenophon believes Bernardi presents a greater challenge to the Liberal Party than he does to Xenophon's NXT. There is a simple logic to his argument. Many South Australians are concerned about the decline of manufacturing in a state that some call an Australian rust belt.

Xenophon supports government intervention to protect Australian manufacturing jobs, while Bernardi remains a free marketeer in line with the Coalition. Thus protest votes would, Xenophon suggests, continue to flow his way.

Do enough Australians care about preventing gay marriage to see Bernardi gather a national populist vote? "I'd say a minority care about that, a decreasing minority," says Xenophon.

Bernardi says he doesn't have much faith in polls that suggest Xenophon's analysis is right. According to a recent Essential poll, 59 per cent of Australians now believe in marriage equality compared with 30 per cent who do not. Even 50 per cent of Coalition voters now support gay marriage. Bernardi is unimpressed. Having spoken with voters about his ideas, he believes his instincts are right.

You can see why too. One of the first people to celebrate Bernardi's defection on the Australian Conservative's  Facebook page was Graham Souter, a wood machinist from the NSW north coast who was abandoning the Liberal Party with Bernardi. He was not a homophobe, he said, but agreed that marriage should be between a man and woman, and like Bernardi he believed political parties should stick to principles. The mainstream parties no longer listened to people like him, he said.

At a dinner held on Thursday night by the anti-Islamic Q Society in Sydney, speaker after speaker talked of Bernardi's defection in the same breath as they did Brexit and the Trump victory.

But Monash University political scientist Nick Economou believes that Bernardi's instincts are way off. "He must be mad if he thinks there is a conservative groundswell," he told Fairfax Media.

Dr Economou agrees that the vote for the major parties is fragmenting. He notes that in 2007, 80 per cent of voters backed either the Coalition or Labor in the senate, and that the number had declined each election since. Last year, just 64.9 per cent cast a vote for the majors. But he said each year the number of minor parties appearing to mop up that vote kept growing. That is, he says, the conservative vote is remaining relatively stable, it is simply fragmenting.

He believes that the Trump victory was less anomalous that it appears to be, because Trump was the endorsed candidate of a major party. Had he been a true outsider, he would have been destroyed at the polls, he says. Economou believes it may well be true that voters are seeking to punish the major parties out of a sense of frustration but, he says, in such circumstances they rarely turn to someone like Bernardi, who is promising to maintain most of the policies of the party he is abandoning.

Instead, he says, they look for the biggest troublemaker in town. So far, that looks more like Hanson than Bernardi.

Given the scale of the task ahead of him then, Bernardi seems confident enough to be accused of either chutzpah or hubris. The second charge he has faced before.

"Cory is deluded," an unnamed Liberal Party colleague was quoted as saying in a profile in The Monthly in 2011. "He is one of the least effective or important members of the parliamentary team. Cory is a person without any intellect, without any base, and he should really never have risen above the position of branch president. His right-wing macho-man act is just his way of looking as though he stands for something."

When I ask him why some of his colleagues might consider him arrogant, I can almost hear him smiling down the phone line.

"Sometimes having the courage of your convictions makes other people feel inadequate," he says.