No Budget Win for Labor

It appears that Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers have made the same mistake as the Liberals: taking their traditional base for granted. Where the Liberals have deserted traditional conservatives, Labor have for even longer abandoned the blue-collar working-class. This is nowhere more apparent than in last week’s budget.

And the workers are seeing through the bullshit from “the Party of the Worker”. A government made up entirely of university graduates who’ve never worked a day outside politics delivered a budget that whacks working families with mortgages in order to pander to every leech-like class of fashionably leftist leaners. A government which campaigned on cutting the cost of living is driving the cost of living for workers through the roof.

Jim Chalmers has failed to convince Australians that Labor’s first full budget since the election will reduce inflation, with only 13 per cent of voters believing the government’s claim and only a third saying the budget overall will be good for the economy.

With the political battlelines now drawn around what the ­Coalition has labelled the “working poor”, only 20 per cent of ­voters say they will be financially better off following the budget, with the centrepiece $14bn cost-of-living package aimed at easing pressure on the most vulnerable.

The Australian

“Most vulnerable”, of course, meaning the welfare class. Tax cuts for upper-income earners are also going ahead. The working-class know whose side Labor is really on.

Jim Chalmers has missed the middle-ground target with the Albanese government’s second budget.

With cost of living the central political issue, the Treasurer has undershot the mark with a failure to convince voters that the $14.6bn spending package will do much to ease their pain […]

Only 13 per cent of all voters believe his claim that the budget would be deflationary.

Which means that 87% know that the budget will ultimately send their mortgages, already their single biggest financial burden, soaring even higher.

This would appear to reveal a failure of the government to grasp the depth of concern in the electorate over cost of living and for borrowers, the potential for further interest rate rises.

Labor’s claims that the budget, whether through energy bill subsidies, bulk-billing reforms, wages growth or childcare, was aimed at middle Australia have not resonated.

Only 33 per cent of voters believe that the budget will be good for the economy overall. This is higher than the 29 per cent who said the same of the ­October budget, but on par with the Morrison government’s last budget. These are the lowest levels of confidence in economic management of a budget since Newspoll began ­asking the question in 1999.

At the same time, Labor were elected on the lowest primary vote in a century. A vote that, even just a couple of decades ago, would have consigned them to a landslide defeat.

The budget failed to produce an electoral lift for Labor, with its primary vote of 38 per cent unchanged since the last poll in April. The Coalition lifted a point to 34 per cent while the Greens remained stable at 11 per cent and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation unchanged on 7 per cent.

The Australian

By “stable”, they mean that the Greens have steadily failed for the last decade to push their vote above 11%. I guess there just a shortage of inner-city terrace and harbourside mansion millionaires to lift the fortunes of the party representing the wealthiest voting bloc in Australia.

The question is whether it is now the beginning of the end of the government’s honeymoon […] with the only movement in the underlying numbers going the Coalition’s way – albeit by only a point – Peter Dutton will be encouraged that he may have identified the first potential chink in the Albanese government’s armour.

The Australian

And we all know what happens to Labor PMs when the party room gets spooked by a drop in opinion polls, don’t we Kevin?

If polls keep going this way, and if Albanese fails to get the “Voice” referendum past voters later this year, it’s hard to see how his leadership will survive.