> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://goodoil.news/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Only Way Is Down - URL: https://goodoil.news/the-only-way-is-down/ - Published: 2026-11-03T03:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-11-03T02:59:59.000Z - Description: One Nation take the lead as Labor and the coalition slump further in the polls. - Author: Lushington Brady - Tags: AUS Politics, Polls “The only way is up,” went a chirpy ’80s pop song. Australian PM **Anthony Albanese** must be fervently hoping that’s true. Unfortunately for him (but a ray of hope for the Australian voter), it doesn’t look like his barrel-scraping nosedive is anywhere near done yet. His twin head on the uniparty hydra, coalition leader **Angus Taylor** is playing the same sad tune on the same, ever-smaller violin. Both major parties continue to slide in the polls, while One Nation now leads what has become a three-party race. Australian homeowners and buyers are looking at a similar, precipitous downward spiral, as house prices decline faster than they have in nearly half a century, which might sound like good news for aspiring homeowners – except that it isn’t. New homeowners are staring down the barrel of negative equity. Investors are bailing, causing a spike in rents (meaning aspiring buyers will be even less able to afford a deposit). The only people likely to benefit from Labor’s disastrous meddling in housing is existing owners looking to upsize. Voters know who to blame: not just the PM, but his sidekick, Treasurer **Jim Chalmers**. The treasurer is traditionally seen as in the waiting-line for PM, but if Sunny Jim is nursing any plans of capitalising on his Dear Leader’s unpopularity, he might want to think again. The latest polling shows voters like him every bit as much as Albanese. As for the rest of the cabinet, voters’ collective responses can be summed in one word: *who?* The latest numbers from Pyxis Polling & Insights read less like a statistical analysis and more like an obituary for the Albanese government. The primary vote for the ALP has slumped further, impossible as that might seem. On the other hand, despite months of relentless attempted legacy media hitjobs, **Pauline Hanson**’s personal ratings have barely shifted. Even with the benefit of incumbency, Albanese could only wish he had such luck. [“Labor’s primary vote](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/newspoll-labor-slumps-as-voters-mark-down-jim-chalmers/news-story/7b4064ac2f0cb1bb1944e6409216eae9?ref=goodoil.news) has fallen to its equal-lowest level since Anthony Albanese won the 2022 election, as Jim Chalmers claimed the mantle of the government’s worst-performing senior minister and 54 per cent of voters say they’ve never heard of Acting Prime Minister **Richard Marles** or Health Minister **Mark Butler**.” *Plus ça change*: Labor is still the party of the Faceless Men. When more than half the electorate cannot identify the men who ostensibly govern them, one must wonder if the government is even present at all, or if it is merely a collection of apparatchiks operating on autopilot while the country descends into the abyss. Treasurer Jim Chalmers, of course, is busy attempting to project gravitas, not realising he’s the punchline of a very cruel, very expensive joke. His net approval rating is a dismal minus 16\. Even his cabinet colleague, **Tanya Plibersek**, has been forced to trot out the tired, shopworn defence of the ‘tough decisions’ narrative. It is the classic political sidestep: blame the inevitable, feign the burden of stewardship and hope the voters are too distracted to notice that their bank accounts are haemorrhaging value. > [“There’s been no](https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics-latest-tanya-plibersek-defends-jim-chalmers-amid-newspoll-slump/live-coverage/03d1c325b59e411ec28dfcbc72ca0132?ref=goodoil.news) reforming treasurer in Australian history that hasn’t copped it when they’ve made big changes. We all support Jim. We all make decisions together. They are tough decisions. And yet, when the government makes the tough decisions, you know, the treasurer is the one who has to lose skin on it.” While Plibersek wonders what the poors are doing today, the rest of us are left to wonder just how much ‘skin’ the average Australian family has left to lose. Plibbers’s assessment of the property market as merely ‘moderating’ is the sort of patronising detachment that typically precedes a landslide election defeat. She might airily witter that “housing will be affordable for my kids and my grandkids one day”, but with a net worth in the millions, and investment properties across the globe, Plibber’s offspring are not exactly going to be the average young Australians trying to break into the property market. The reality, as always, is far less whimsical. The property market isn’t merely ‘moderating’: it is in a state of rapid, undignified collapse. The data, courtesy of the property researchers at Cotality, makes for grim reading. > [National house prices](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-11-02/house-prices-fall-in-october-biggest-downturn-40-years-cotality/107325214?ref=goodoil.news) have fallen for a seventh consecutive month, with the speed of the decline in home values tracking at the fastest pace seen over the past 40 years, according to property research group Cotality. This is not, as the Canberra bubble might suggest, a simple fluctuation, much less a milestone of ‘generational equity’. It is a demand-led disaster responding to a central-planning idiocy. Households, crushed by interest rates and the government’s meddlesome budgetary vandalism, are retreating in droves. Borrowing capacity has evaporated, and for those still holding their breath in the auction arena, the air is thin. The median Australian dwelling has shed over $63,000 in value, and with the Reserve Bank seemingly deaf to the cries of the populace, further interest rate hikes loom on the horizon like a storm front that refuses to break. We are witnessing the slow-motion deconstruction of the Australian dream. The ‘Great Australian Dream’ of property ownership is being replaced by a ‘Great Australian Nightmare’ of negative equity and rental instability. Investors are fleeing, spooked by the very tax settings designed to squeeze them and, in their place, we find a void of buyer confidence. As the major parties continue their desperate, internecine squabbling, the voters have begun to look elsewhere. The polls suggest a sea change is coming and it will be a reckoning for those who thought the Australian people would be content to subsidise their vanity while the foundations of the nation crumbled. --- 💡 ****If you enjoyed this article please share it using the share buttons at the top or bottom of the article.**