As the campaign approaches the halfway mark, pollsters whose projections range from a Labor landslide to a potential hung Parliament are consistent on one point: the minor party and independent vote is set to reach record heights.
The likelihood that nearly three in 10 voters will opt for either of the above adds a large band of uncertainty around the two-party preferred numbers, which is one reason among many that Labor is keeping its enthusiasm on a tight leash.
Much will depend on the balance of support among the various minor party contenders and the ultimate destination of their preferences, which pollsters often find hard to pin down.
An exception might perhaps be made for the known quantity for the Greens, whose national vote share again looks set to land somewhere around 10% and 11%, at least 80% of which will assuredly flow to Labor.
However, things are considerably murkier among the crowded market of would-be demagogues pitching for support at the rightward end of the spectrum.
One significant difference between this election and the last is that One Nation has candidates in all but two of the 151 seats, compared with 59 candidates in 2019. With polling offering no indication that its support has fundamentally changed since 2019, One Nation’s national vote should inflate from 3.1% to something more closely resembling its Senate vote of 5.4%.
If the extra comes mostly off the Coalition, and if this results in an even stronger flow of preferences than last time, the Coalition’s apparent loss of at least five points on the primary vote could prove less disastrous than it looks. But these are both big ifs.
Then there’s Clive Palmer, whose United Australia Party emerged with nothing to show for its spectacular advertising spend in 2019, but is now targeting a real constituency with messages that aren’t simply de facto Coalition attack ads.
While the polls offer no encouragement that Palmer will achieve any more than last time in terms of seats, a look beneath the surface suggests the support he has garnered among COVID liberatarians and conspiracy theorists is an unpredictable new element in the equation.
Palmer’s support base is in many ways distinct from Hanson’s: neither are popular among the university educated, but the older cohorts that continue to provide Hanson with much of her support tend to be inoculated against both COVID and the quackery promoted by Palmer in response to it.
That Palmer makes no specific appeal to nativist sentiment is also reflected in the fact that his party’s numbers are if anything stronger among non-English speakers.
Even more telling is the uneven geographic spread of Palmer’s support, which is strongest in the progressive bastion of Victoria and weakest in normally conservative Western Australia.
In Palmer’s home state of Queensland, where he will square off against Hanson in the Senate race, the most recent Newspoll breakdown had One Nation trouncing the UAP by 8% to 3%.
The unstable element of the minor party vote is weighing heavily on the campaign strategies of the major parties — particularly the Liberals, who are finding a path to victory particularly difficult to plot.
Among many other things, this explains why the Liberal brains trust has been unconcerned that so much campaign oxygen has been taken up by the Katherine Deves controversy.
The issue appears to be exacerbating the difficulty the party faces on its opposite flank from the teal independents, and all but assuring the reelection of Zali Steggall in Warringah.
But as a number of reports out of the press gallery have indicated, party strategists are convinced the issue is having an even stronger impact as a reverse virtue signal to culturally conservative supporters of minor parties, whose preferences are clearly considered up for grabs.
William Bowe is conducting paid consultancy during the federal election campaign for Climate 200, which is helping fund independent candidates who support policies to promote renewable energy and mitigate climate change.
