A new poll that landed on Sunday evening would – if reproduced on election day – spell grave danger for Labor.
At the 2022 election, Labor managed to scrape into majority with a 32.6% primary vote, which translated to a healthier 52.1% in two-party preferred terms. Now, a new Resolve poll has found Labor on a primary vote of 27%, a three-point slide from their last survey, with the Coalition sitting pretty on 38%.
It sounds like the sort of result that would make comforting bromides about Peter Dutton’s struggle to win back teal seats redundant, putting Coalition majority government within grasp or at least leaving the current opposition with more seats than Labor at the next election.
But despite the apparent shocker result, Labor is not panicking. Why?
First, a quick look at other polls. The Newspoll released at the same time found Labor with a much healthier 33%, in line with the 2022 election result, and the Coalition on 39%. That translates to a 50-50 two-party-preferred vote.
It’s a similar story over at Morgan, where the Coalition is ahead 51-49% on respondent-allocated preferences and 50-50 when done by how voters behaved at the last election.
Guardian’s Essential is also deadlocked, with primary votes of 35% to 32% in the Coalition’s favour, but a two-party-preferred of 48% to 47% and a further 5% undecided.
The Nine newspapers did not publish a two-party-preferred result for Resolve. Kevin Bonham, a psephologist (poll expert), has calculated that despite the eye-catching Labor primary, the poll would amount to a result of just 51-49 in the Coalition’s favour.
Bonham believes the lower Labor primary in Resolve is partly explained by the pollster offering everyone the option of “independent”, which inflates that option’s primary vote, even though not all voters will have such an option on election day. The result is a more volatile poll.
Second, the framing of the choice. Federal Labor’s view is that the polls are deadlocked and there is room for improvement because with inflation falling they can credibly tell voters that the worst is behind them, a key message at Anthony Albanese’s Adelaide rally in November.
At the 2025 election Dutton will attempt the framing of: are you better off than you were three years ago, which worked for Donald Trump in the American context.
The Resolve poll also has some concerning results for Labor here: 59% of respondents feel worse off than three years ago, 28% about the same, and just 13% better off.
But Labor’s internal polling says that 70% of voters care about which party is more likely to make them better off in the next term, with only 20% stuck in the past.
Asked about the next three years, Resolve finds 36% favouring the Coalition and Dutton to make them better off, 27% Labor and Albanese, and 38% neither or both.
So while plenty of people feel worse off than in 2022, they aren’t convinced Dutton will do any better, and it’s all still to play for in terms of persuading them who has the better plan.
Dutton shouldn’t be underestimated. As the executive director of Essential Media, Peter Lewis, and I have said repeatedly on the Guardian’s Australian Politics podcast, progressive voters should relinquish the idea that a Queensland conservative is somehow unelectable.
But that doesn’t mean the opposition leader isn’t vulnerable to a Labor campaign that voters will be worse off under Dutton, given he is yet to announce any cost-of-living relief policies, and there is ample ammunition to fire about how his policies such as on industrial relations will send pay packets backwards.
There is generally no point picking the eyes out of an individual poll – the trend is your friend.
Labor and Albanese have slid from their honeymoon heights to a losable but not necessarily losing position; Dutton and the Coalition have recovered from their once-in-a-century loss at the Aston byelection to a winnable but not necessarily winning position.
In fact, the current state of affairs might be best explained by the result in the other byelection this term: Dunkley. There Labor withstood a 3.5% swing to hold the seat with a 2.7% margin, down from 6.3%.
At the time I thought the result had something for everyone. Labor could say that revamping stage-three tax cuts meant its policies made a real difference and voters trusted it in a cost-of-living crisis. The Coalition could say they were halfway to victory and would finish the job in 2025.
The same can be said leading into the 2025 election. Either reading is available and either could still be right. It depends what the parties offer people. It depends who wins the argument.
Labor is batting on a difficult wicket after a tough three years and coming off a historically low primary vote. It didn’t need a new poll to tell it that.
