It’s just over two years since I posed the question, has Morrison screwed the PR pooch? Two years later, he appears to be going all-out to drown the pups, too. The latest Newspoll suggests that the Coalition is at its lowest federal level since ousting Malcolm Turnbull.
When I first questioned Scott Morrison’s ham-fisted leadership, he had taken a bruising — largely unfairly — for supposedly mishandling the 2020 bushfire crisis. This was mostly a result of blatant media and state political lying and blame-shifting: both forestry (the root cause of the fires) and emergency management are state government responsibilities. Responsibilities they universally shirked. Rather than man up and shoulder the blame, of course, they pointed the finger at Canberra. The feral, Morrison-deranged media were only too willing to play along.
But the mess was only compounded by Morrison’s incomprehensibly foolish decision to take an overseas holiday during the crisis.
Similarly, Morrison is now paying for his foolish decision to give state premiers a free rein during the Wuhan pandemic.
Popular support for the federal Coalition has slumped to the lowest levels since the 2018 Liberal leadership spill, with Scott Morrison’s approval ratings also tumbling as the government prepares to face an election in less than four months.
The first Newspoll of 2022, commissioned exclusively for The Australian, shows the Coalition also falling behind Labor for the first time as the party deemed better at leading Australia’s recovery out of Covid-19.
With Anthony Albanese closing the gap to just two points on Mr Morrison as preferred prime minister, the poll results will ring alarm bells within Coalition ranks, with the election expected to be held in May.
Morrison is a victim of his own, bungled efforts at political expediency.
Once again, the fact that public health is almost entirely a state responsibility is conveniently overlooked by the feral media. But Morrison bears his share of blame for not at least taking the lead on quarantine (a federal responsibility), leading to the Victorian disaster for which Daniel Andrews has shamefully evaded responsibility. Morrison also gutlessly abdicated the federal government’s traditional obligation to take an interest in Clive Palmer’s High Court challenge against WA’s hard border closure.
Morrison seems to have thought that taking on power-deranged premiers was too great a political risk, and that letting them run amok with covid restrictions would ultimately blow back on them. Instead, premiers have (at least until now) made political capital, while Morrison is wearing the blame, for being seen to be a do-nothing PM.
Contrary to many pundits’ (including mine) expectations, dissatisfied Coalition voters do not seem to be turning to minor parties.
Labor’s primary vote lifted three points to 41 per cent, equalling its highest result from the same period.
The Greens lifted a point to 11 per cent while Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party remains stable on 3 per cent.
With a two-point fall in primary vote support for independents and minor parties to 11 per cent, the poll produced a two-party-preferred lead for Labor of 56-44 – the largest margin for the opposition since September 2018 – and a six-point blowout on the 53-47 recorded in the final poll of 2021 published on December 6.
The polling numbers suggests Labor would win with a sizeable majority if replicated at a general election, with the potential loss of up to 25 seats for the Coalition on an assumed uniform swing of almost 7 per cent on the 2019 election outcome.
The Australian
This is perhaps not so surprising when you consider that a large portion of Morrison’s 2019 sweep was due to voters in the resources states of WA and Queensland — traditional Labor strongholds — rejecting Bill Shorten’s anti-mining policies. Morrison has done precious little to keep those voters by parroting the “Net Zero” rhetoric of Labor and the Greens.
Morrison pulled off an unexpected miracle in 2019, winning an election that the polls and the pundits unanimously agreed Bill Shorten had in the bag. Anthony Albanese is no more appealing than Bill Shorten, but this time, Morrison has no magic rabbit to pull out of his hat. He’s painted himself into a corner on nearly every domestic issue. Foreign policy has been a very different story, but, barring an actual war, Australians never vote on foreign policy — however critical it might be.
The only small comfort for Morrison might be that the Newspoll’s questions on “key issues” were clearly slanted: instead of allowing respondents to nominate their own issues, they presented a curated selection. Notably, on key issues of economy and China, the Coalition clearly leads.
As Australia moves on from the pandemic, Morrison needs to work hard to differentiate from the premiers still hammering the panic button, and himself hammering the themes of economic recovery and the threat of China.
Whether Scotty from Marketing is up to that challenge remains to be seen.
