The Poll Bludger

Three new federal polls produce a range of movements for the leading parties, partly but not entirely due to their different time scales (weekly for one poll, fortnightly for another, monthly for a third). The fortnightly Sky News Pulse poll by YouGov, which was an outlier last time in failing to show a drop for One Nation, comes good this time with a four-point drop to 26%, while Labor is down a point to 28%, the Coalition are up three to 20% and the Greens are down one to 12%. Respondent-allocated two-party preferred measures have Labor’s lead out from 54-46 to 56-44 against One Nation, and in from 54-46 to 53-47 against the Coalition. Pauline Hanson also takes a hit on preferred prime minister against Anthony Albanese, whose lead is out from 49-40 to 54-35. Albanese is up two on approval to 38% and down one on disapproval to 56%, while Angus Taylor is down three to 33% and up two to 49%, and Albanese’s lead over Taylor as preferred prime minister is out from 44-35 to 45-34. The poll was conducted last Tuesday to this Tuesday from a sample of 1468.

The monthly DemosAU poll for Capital Brief has Labor down one to 26%, One Nation down one to 29%, the Coalition up three to 21% and the Greens up one to 14%. Anthony Albanese’s personal ratings are down one for positive to 25%, up two for neutral to 27% and and down one for negative to 48%; Angus Taylor is up two on positive to 24%, down one for neutral to 49% and down one for negative to 27%; and Pauline Hanson is down three on positive to 34%, steady on 23% neutral and up three on negative to 43%. A three-way preferred prime minister question has Albanese steady on 35%, Taylor up three to 22% and Hanson down two to 26%. Head-to-head ratings, which weren’t included last time, have Albanese and Taylor tied at 38-all, and Albanese leading Hanson 42-37. The poll was conducted July 3 to 8 from a sample of 2694.

As with the weekend’s Resolve Strategic poll, respondents were queried about their views on a range of statements advanced by Pauline Hanson during her National Press Club speech, with distinctly less favourable results – the most obvious explanation being that Resolve Strategic’s question specifically identified the views with Hanson whereas DemosAU did not. Resolve had 33% in favour and 39% opposed on the question of whether Australia “should be monocultural, rather than multicultural”, while an all but identically worded proposition from DemosAU has 25% in favour and 51% opposed. Hanson’s proposal for the ABC had 31% in favour and 40% opposed from Resolve, while DemosAU respectively has it at 21% and 54%. Where Resolve had 32% in favour and 36% against the contention that “it should be easier for companies to sack people”, DemosAU had 32% in favour and 43% opposed to the seemingly more gently worded “employers should have more flexibility to dismiss workers”.

After recording a nine-point slump for One Nation over its two previous polls, the weekly Roy Morgan series has them bouncing back five-and-a-half points to 28%, with Labor down half a point to 27.5%, the Coalition down one-and-a-half to 20% and the Greens down one-and-a-half to 12.5%. Labor’s respondent-allocated two-party lead over One Nation has duly narrowed, from 56-44 to 52.5-47.5, and its leads over the Coalition have narrowed from 55-45 to 54-46 on respondent-allocated preferences and from 54-46 to 52.5-47.5 on previous election preferences. The poll was conducted last Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1612.

The monthly Resolve Strategic poll for Nine Newspapers is the latest to record a decline in support for One Nation, though the three-point drop on last month to 26% still leaves them ahead of the 24% recorded in the post-budget poll in May. The Coalition is up three to 23%, with Labor and the Greens steady on 28% and 12% respectively.

Movement on the three-way preferred prime minister question, which was posed for the first time last month, is yet more pronounced: Pauline Hanson slumps eight points to 25% with Anthony Albanese up four to 33% and Angus Taylor up five to 21%. Albanese’s combined very good plus good rating is up four points to 39%, his best since December, while poor and very poor are down two to 53%. Angus Taylor is respectively up three to 41% and up two to 34%. The question was posed of Pauline Hanson for the first time, who recorded a positive rating of 45%, but the negative rating is not provided in the report.

Responses were gauged to 13 propositions advanced by Hanson in her National Press Club speech, including some that polled favourably because they were unobjectionable. Of interest was that 39% agreed with Hanson that zero should be dropped and fossil fuels favoured over renewables in future, compared with 33% who were neutral and 27% who disagreed, a distinctly more climate-skeptical result than is usual from such questions. Hanson scored predictably well on immigration, but less so on cutting public broadcasting and withdrawing from the United Nations.

The poll had an unusually large sample of 2252, with around 1800 being the norm. I believe this is because its Victorian samples are being beefed up from now until the November state election to allow for monthly state poll results from samples of around 1000, as compared with the pollster’s normal practice of publishing bi-monthly results combining samples of around 500 from two national polls (as it will continue to do for New South Wales).

With nearly every pollster in the game having pitched in last week, a quiet period looms. The weekly Roy Morgan should be along later today as always, and DemosAU is about due for one of its big-sample MRP projections. On the broader electoral front, there is the following to report:

• The Weekend Australian had the quarterly Newspoll detailed breakdowns from its four polls conducted in April, May and June. The state results show movement towards One Nation and away from Labor clearly evident in Victoria and South Australia, less evident in New South Wales, and not at all evident in Queensland and Western Australia, with Labor gaining three points in the former case. Breakdowns by education are distinctive in that One Nation is up six among those with technical qualifications, but effectively unchanged for everyone else. Voting intention is barely changed among 18-to-34s, whereas One Nation are up significantly among the older cohorts. Presumably inspired by the budget tax measures, the breakdowns now include housing tenure, as commonly featured by other pollsters. To commemorate the occasion, I have added tabs for these results to the BludgerTrack poll data features (keep clicking the “more” tab until you see them).

• The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has published an interim report from its routine inquiry into the last election, which notably focuses on aggressive behaviour at polling booths. The majority report cites data on public complaints received by the AEC, and recommended that “election participants” be required to register and observe a code of conduct. The AEC, whose bailiwick currently ends six metres from the entrance, would enforce this code within a “campaign zone” around the polling place, in which signage limits would also apply. The report argued that much of the offending behaviour “seemed to involve third parties”, and while it didn’t name names, committee chair Jerome Laxale told parliament while tabling the report of “an assault by third parties identified in submissions like the Plymouth Brethren and Advance”.

• Certainly the Plymouth Brethren angle had been divined by the committee’s Coalition members, who headlined their dissenting report “less inquiry, more hyperpartisan witch hunt” – the latter having been directed against “Australians based on their religious faith”. While acknowledging aggressive behaviour was an issue, their own volunteers having been “targets for intimidation by unions and other third party organisations on polling booths for many elections”, the Coalition members forcefully rejected the recommendations as burdensome, open to abuse and possibly unconstitutional. Also in the Coalition report was a call for the early voting period, already truncated from three weeks to two before the 2022 election, to be reduced to one week, and for the AEC to be “more strident on ensuring that people accessing pre-poll are doing so for one of the reasons prescribed in the Act”.

• The official determination of how many seats each state and territory will be entitled to at the next election, which is calculated a year into each parliamentary term, will be made later this month. Antony Green has done their work for them based on the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics population data, and concludes there will be no change from the status quo, Queensland having recorded not quite enough growth to get it over the line for a thirty-first seat. Queensland will nonetheless get a redistribution under the seven-year rule, which is now overdue after being twice delayed: first because of the election, and then because there was no point commencing the process until it was clear how many seats the state would have. Proposed boundaries were published in March for South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory, final boundaries for which are expected later this month.

• Wendy Askew has brought forward the retirement she recently announced for the end of her term in mid-2028, now to take effect in a “few weeks”. This means two vacancies are now available for Tasmanian Liberal Senate seats, together with that created by Jonathan Duniam’s surprise retirement announcement last month.

It’s been a particularly busy few days on the poll front, with Newspoll’s three-week cycle coinciding with YouGov’s fortnightly cycle and Essential Research’s monthly cycle and RedBridge Group thrown in for good measure. The fortnightly Sky News Pulse poll by YouGov parts company with the others in finding One Nation continuing to rise, at the expense of the hapless Coalition rather than Labor. Labor is up three to 29% and One Nation two to 30%, the latter a new record for the party from YouGov. The Coalition is down four to 17%, two points below its previous nadir around the time of the February leadership change, while the Greens are steady on 13%. Anthony Albanese is up one on approval to 38% and down three on disapproval to 55%, while Angus Taylor is down one to 36% and steady on 47%. Albanese’s leads on preferred prime minister are out from 43-38 to 44-35 against Taylor, and from 48-41 to 49-40 against Pauline Hanson. The poll was conducted last Tuesday to this Tuesday from a sample of 1502.

The Guardian reports on the monthly Essential Research poll, with which the pollster’s data feature has been updated, though its full report with all its attitudinal questions will come later today. Inclusive of a steady uncommitted result of 5%, it has Labor up a point to 30%, One Nation down two to 26% and the Greens down one to 10%. The drop for One Nation might be thought especially significant coming from a monthly series, since the BludgerTrack trend measure records them gaining two-and-a-half points over this period.

The pollster’s 2PP+ continues to be unusually strong for the Coalition, who recover a 48-46 lead with the balance undecided, after Labor gained a 48-47 lead last month – my rough measure based on 2025 election flows has Labor ahead 51.3-48.7, out from 50.6-49.4. Anthony Albanese is up a point on approval to 38% and down three on disapproval to 51%. Contrary to other recent polling, Angus Taylor is up three on approval to 36% and steady on disapproval at 37%.

The Guardian report relates negative responses to various One Nation positions: 15% in favour of privatising the ABC, 11% for shutting down SBS, 20% for ending multiculturalism, 18% for withdrawing from the United Nations, 18% for revising workplace laws in favour of employers, and 25% for stopping the renewables transition and focusing on fossil fuels. Only 26% were in favour of the party’s position on banning abortion after 20 weeks, but results were somewhat more conservative than when the question was last posed in November 2024: the 72% supporting abortion being legal in some or all cases was down seven points, and the 28% holding it should be illegal in some or all cases was up seven. Fifty per cent said they were concerned about One Nation being backed by Gina Rinehart, and 45% were concerned the party would “turn Australians against each other”. The poll was presumably conducted Wednesday to Monday from a sample that will have been a bit over 1000.

The weekly Roy Morgan poll has the biggest hit to One Nation of them all, down five-and-a-half points to 26%, with Labor up one to 28%, the Coalition up four to 21.5% and the Greens down half to 13%. Labor’s two-party lead over One Nation on a measure based on respondent-allocated preferences is out from 51-49 to 53-47, while its leads over the Coalition are in from 54-46 to 53.5-46.5 on respondent-allocated preferences and unchanged at 52.5-47.5 on previous election preference flows. The poll was conducted last Sunday to Monday from a sample of 1639.