There are two political truisms that should be borne in mind when considering the latest Newspoll numbers and the state election in WA. The first is: voters rarely vote a new government in, they chuck the old one out. The second is: All politics are local. In Australian terms, this is usually translated to mean that state polls rarely have any relevance to the federal government.
Which may be cold comfort to the WA Liberal party as it’s handed yet another thumping at the hands of Roger Cook. On paper, the Liberals won a 14 per cent swing, which in normal circumstances would unseat most incumbents. The problem, though, is the low base they started from. In some seats, the swing against Labor was as high as 20 per cent, yet Labor retained the seat. In Fremantle, there was a whopping 30 per cent swing against the ALP. Tellingly, not one seat swung to the government.
Still, seats are seats, and Cook is sitting high on 41 seats (out of 30 needed to win) against the Lib-National Coalition’s nine. So, it’s not exactly the rebuilding the Liberals were hoping for, but Cook may be in big trouble, come next election. Recent history is littered with Labor state governments who charged to sweeping victory, only to be turfed out or in diabolical trouble by the next election.
But that’s three years and almost certainly a new Liberal state leader away. The focus now is on what the WA result portends for the looming federal poll. Excitable pundits have worked themselves into a lather that this is a sure sign the Albanese government in Canberra can bank on holding seats in WA. Is this so, though? Remember that Anthony Albanese is so on the nose with voters in WA (and elsewhere) that he was more or less barred from the state during its election campaign. Taken with the massive swings against Labor in the state poll, WA seems far from safe ground for federal Labor next month.
Immediately following the WA state election, a new Newspoll landed. While it’s hardly a stellar result for the coalition, there’s no sign of any real improvement for Albanese’s government. Remember: voters almost always chuck governments out. Labor has far more to worry about from the poll than the coalition.
Support for Anthony Albanese’s performance as prime minister has lifted but not enough to carry Labor to a winnable position, with a hung parliament still looming as the most likely outcome of the federal election now scheduled for May.
An exclusive Newspoll conducted for the Australian also shows a majority of voters don’t believe the coalition is ready to govern after a single term in opposition, despite the Liberal/Nationals maintaining a seven-point primary vote lead over Labor.
The results suggest Labor remains short of being able to form majority government, with the election likely to be a race between the two major parties over who could form a minority government with support of independents and minor parties.
Preferred prime minister is always the incumbent’s to win. Kevin Rudd led Tony Abbott in the preferred PM stakes right up to losing the election by a landslide.
What is more interesting in the poll is that voters appear to be firming behind the two major parties.
Primary support for both major parties has lifted, with Labor on 32 per cent and the coalition on 39 per cent. This is in line with Labor’s result at the last election, but represents gains of more than three percentage points for the coalition.
The Greens remain on 12 per cent, while there was no movement in support either way for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (seven per cent).
The lift in primary vote for the major parties has come at the expense of independents and other minor parties, including the teals, with a two-point fall in support to 10 per cent. This is 4.5 percentage points below the last election result, when eight teal independents were elected to parliament.
This is where things get interesting. The Teal wins were all in what were up ’til then blue-ribbon Liberal seats. The Teals are essentially the ‘Doctor’s Wives’ party: the party of people rich enough and idle enough to virtue-signal their wokeness at the ballot box. But nothing sharpens the minds of the woke rich than money, and with the Albanese-Chalmers economy in such dire straits, many may be having second thoughts. As well, at least two Teal seats are heavily Jewish, and, with the Teals’ at best ambivalence on anti-Jewish violence, a voter backlash may well be looming.
That Labor’s position is indeed as dire as it looks is belied by nothing if not the desperate flailing at opposition leader Peter Dutton by the left media. The Age’s senior columnist (and, quelle surprise! former Gillard and Rudd adviser) Sean Kelly makes ludicrous mountains out of inconsequential molehills, to try and claim Dutton is making poll-deadly gaffes.
Dutton has just had four of those events.
The first two – Dutton’s long ago share trading, and attending a fundraiser during a mild squib of a tropical storm – were such non-scandals that nobody even cares. The rest of Dutton’s so-called ‘gaffes’ only serve to underscore how ridiculously out of touch the mainstream media really are.
[Albanese criticised] the coalition’s edict that public servants would have to stop working from home, which he said Dutton had copied from America. This policy was the third of the moments that, in a campaign, could have derailed the coalition.
How? Does Kelly really think that the average working Australian frets for a single moment that a clique of elite insiders hauling in grotesque salaries, funded by working people’s taxes, might actually have to show up for work for once?
As for the ‘copied from America’ sneer: that’s pretty rich from a wing of politics who’ve slavishly aped every idiocy of the American loony left, from BLM to anti-Semitism. Spare me.
If that’s the worst Dutton has to worry about, he can be pretty confident about the election campaign.
