Voters Are Speaking: Pauline for PM

It’s the one question pollsters have shied away from asking for months. Now, Resolve Political Monitor has gritted its teeth and taken the plunge – and the result surpassed their darkest fears.

The question in question is: Is Pauline Hanson Australian voters’ preferred prime minister? Even as the two-party system dies a long, agonising and well-deserved death, pollsters have tried their best to keep it on life support, by restricting the preferred PM question to just the two major parties, even as both parties sink to record-low votes. Pauline Hanson, leader of what is now the most popular party in the nation, was rigorously excluded from that key question. Until now.

Pauline Hanson has rocketed past Anthony Albanese as Australians’ first choice to be prime minister, while One Nation has edged out Labor and now leads both major parties on primary vote […]

For the first time, One Nation leads after a whopping five-percentage-point rise in its primary vote to 29 per cent.

Preferred PM is a key indicator because, despite nominally running a Westminster system, Australian politics has become increasingly ‘presidentialised’. Voters talk of ‘voting for [party leader], not their local representative, who is whom they actually get to vote for. So, when polls show whom voters would prefer as PM, it’s a good indicator of which party they’ll vote for. While 29 per cent would once have been minor party numbers, the fracturing of the two-party system makes it the leading vote. Both major parties have crashed to even lower primary votes.

The coalition has crashed to a record low primary vote of just 20 per cent in the latest Resolve Political Monitor, conducted for this masthead, while Labor recorded a primary vote of 28 per cent.

While both major parties saw their primary vote dip, the coalition’s drop of three percentage points from last month is more significant as it is outside the poll’s margin of error. Labor’s score fell by just one point.

The coalition is fast descending to the level of the Greens. Labor is just a few per cent from it’s lowest-ever primary vote, which saw the Scullin government wiped out in 1931.

But the preferred PM result is the biggest story of this poll.

For the first time, voters were given a choice of three candidates as preferred prime minister – Albanese, Hanson or Angus Taylor – and Hanson took first spot, with 33 per cent of voters nominating her as preferred prime minister while 29 per cent nominated Albanese and 22 per cent were undecided.

The results were dire for Liberal leader Taylor: 16 per cent of voters overall nominated him as their preferred PM. Even among coalition voters, 20 per cent preferred Hanson and 47 per cent preferred Taylor.

It’s about to get a whole lot worse for Albanese. One Nation’s funding drive racked up an incredible near-$4m in public donations in just days. It’s money the party are planning to spend wisely: hammering the PM where he hurts.

Pauline Hanson will use millions of dollars in donations to unleash a political advertising campaign during one of Australia’s premier sporting events and fly helicopter banners over major cities.

One Nation’s leader has revealed a heatmap of the party’s mammoth “fire the liar” donation drive, vowing to launch TV commercials during State of Origin Game Two on Wednesday […]

The party’s heatmap showed significant donation hotspots in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth with smaller contributions scattered across regional NSW, Victoria and Queensland.

The heatmap shows that One Nation has well and truly broken out of its heartland in rural Queensland. All the major cities are heavily represented, while Victoria is almost uniformly ‘on fire’ for One Nation, a result which must surely have Jacinta Allan’s Labor government quaking – and sharpening the knives.

More coalition MPs, meanwhile, are preparing to swallow the bitterest pill of all: that they may well end up a junior partner to the woman they threw out of the party 30 years ago.

Opposition defence industry spokesman Phil Thompson has supported preference deals with One Nation, declaring his party should work with “everyone” to topple the Albanese government.

And more and more Nationals are preparing to abandon a sinking, rotting, dinghy for the One Nation speedboat.

It’s one of the most discussed numbers this budget week: how many of the 18 members of the federal Nationals caucus will defect to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation by the next election?

Nats member for the central Queensland seat of Flynn Colin Boyce is giving every indication he intends to follow Barnaby Joyce into the One Nation tent.

In the end, it’s all about keeping their arses on the velvet, after all. If the polls are even half right, the Nationals will likely cease to exist at the next election. Stand by to watch more and more Nats MPs try to save their parliamentary careers by jumping on the winning waka over the next 12–18 months.