The bi-monthly Victorian state voting intention poll for Resolve Strategic, published today in The Age, records a three point lift in the primary vote for Daniel Andrews’ Labor government to 40%, with the Coalition down one to 35% and the Greens up one to 10%. This suggests a two-party swing against Labor of about 2% compared with its landslide win in 2018, and of about 2% in its favour since the previous poll. Andrews records a lead of 50-24 over Liberal leader Michael O’Brien on the preferred premier measure, unchanged in size from his 49-23 lead in the previous poll.
As always with Resolve Strategic’s New South Wales and Victorian state polls, this combines results from the last two regular monthly polls, in this case amounting to a sample of 1106 Victorian voters. The state breakdowns from the pollster’s federal results suggest it combines a particularly bad sample for Labor with a particularly good one, from this month and last month respectively.
Can we please keep discussion on this thread specific to Victoria — the main discussion thread continues here.
Thanks William. Factor in the redistribution and, without actually checking the pendulum, I’d anticipate the expected outcome in terms of seats would be barely different than 2018. And this in the context of lockdown 6.0 and all the Murdoch induced hype around “Dictator Dan”. This may be the trigger for a move on Michael O’Brien.
The results don’t seem to gel with an opinion article by Speers this morning on the federal implications of attitudes to lockdowns. That is, people will reward Andrews for protecting them from the virus but also reward Morrison for promising “freedom”.
max
Who do they replace O’Brien with? None of them are inspiring.
Tim Smith sees himself as the future leader, but not until after the next election. He is running to a plan…. act like a dill (JoBo style) for a few years….. then mature in the role of leader.
The potential State Liberal leader “gene pool” must be right at the bottom of the barrow if Tim Smith is the possible front runner! Throughout the covid pandemic all Victorians have witnessed from the current Victorian Liberal leader Michael O’Brien is a constant whinging and whining at the efforts of the Andrews Labor government’s hard work to tackle the biggest health crisis Victoria (and Australia) has face in a hundred years. The Victorian Liberals would do themselves a favour by supporting the Andrews government in a bi-lateral approach to the pandemic – offer constructive (and not the constant ill conceived negativity) criticism. No one could seriously think an O’Brien Liberal state government in Victoria would have done any better at handling a crisis that no one alive today has ever had to face with the on-going covid 19 pandemic.
Despite all the negative press, there hasn’t yet been a single data point to suggest that “freedom” makes a jot of difference to the average person’s voting behaviour.
For the last 18 months, every data point we have has said the same thing – politicians will be rewarded for protecting people’s health and security, no matter the cost, and no matter the number of citizens locked out of the state, fined, made unemployed, bankrupted or banned from protesting (be it either BLM or the anti-lockdown brigade).
Spear’s article goes off the rails when he starts talking about “overwhelming support for a pathway to freedom”, which is both common sense and also completely meaningless. Obviously everyone would like COVID gone, but it in no way does it follow that any politician will be rewarded for plugging for lockdowns to end while we are constantly being told by medical professionals and others that it remains unsafe to do so.
Morrison’s early win in locking out the Chinese, and ultimately everyone else as well, has since been continuously undermined by his later grudgingly concealed campaign against lockdowns. There are literally no votes to be had from letting it rip, and what is most surprising is that the Coalition’s polling federally remains barely above water at all, presumably as a result of some kind of rally around the flag effect, as well as perhaps a touch for there actually being some vaccines available, even if not very many.
Most voters don’t normally travel either interstate or overseas anyhow, and will happily support Australia’s borders remaining locked down for years to come, fully vaccinated or not. Australia simply doesn’t have anywhere near enough voters moving around either the country or the world to create any significantly sized voting block. In any case, lockdowns feed really well into modern anti-immigration/anti-refugee/Brexit style parochialism without the usual racist baggage.
Doesn’t the NSW poll come out at the same time? Why hasn’t that happened this month?
You have to question the point of this poll with its odd phrasing of questions, lack of 2pp, general lack of clarity on methodology and inconsistency on releasing its full data sets.
Most voters don’t travel either interstate or overseas and will happily support Australia’s borders remaining locked down for years to come, fully vaccinated or not.
I have been thinking a lot about this question, and I wonder to what extent this is true. According to the bureau of stats, in Dec 2019 there were 2.24 million international departures. Accepting that a lot of those are international visitors leaving, that still suggests an awful lot of Australians travelling, and that is just one month.
As for travelling interstate even my never had a passport in-laws travel at least annually interstate to see family.
I don’t doubt for a second there is a bloc of people who would be happy for borders to be shut forever. I am really interested in the question of how big that bloc is. I would tend to the view that it is not “most” Australians. That is just a gut feel though, I would love to see some research.
“the efforts of the Andrews Labor government’s hard work”
Yeah I bet the 800 dead would really like to thank Dan for that hard work.
Oh wait. They can’t.
And if you don’t think Victoria is heading into another wave now, I honestly don’t know what to tell you. We’ll be catching up to Gladys in no time unfortunately and with no opposition to hold him to account the only solution the dear leader has is “follow the rules”. We’re screwed.
They alternate between NSW and Victoria. So the federal poll is monthly, but the two state polls are bi-monthly.
Any comparison with pre-COVID behaviour will be misleading anyhow, for many reasons.
Firstly, Australians have historically spent more on holidays OS than OS visitors have spent here. On balance keeping Australians home has been a net positive to the economy. Further, the fact that someone has had to shift their planned holiday to Apollo Bay from Jimbaran Bay, or even Batemans Bay, is hardly going to leave them feeling bitter for more than a few minutes. Most people have plenty of local destinations on their bucket lists, and even if they don’t there’s still bathrooms to renovate and take away lattes to drink.
Secondly, I have yet to meet anyone in any career requiring frequent interstate or international trips who claims to enjoy those trips. Most of these meetings have been replaced by Zoom, and happily so. Indeed, I can imagine that more than a few people have been breathing a sigh of relief at their easy excuse to avoid an annual interstate family reunion, birthday or Christmas holiday catch up as well.
The real problem in quantifying how large any genuinely pro-open borders voting block is, is that a lot of people will be simply ambivalent about the whole thing, and of the remainder, there’s every chance that there are as many people who have reasons to be happy about the restrictions as there are people who have reasons to be upset about them.
We do, however, have some actual data on the subject. We know that border closures have been a massive net positive in both opinion polls and actual elections for every single Australian government that has introduced one to date.
frednk says:
Thursday, August 26, 2021 at 8:23 am
max
Who do they replace O’Brien with? None of them are inspiring.
——————
Indeed frednk- any of the alternatives is the opposite of inspiring in fact. However that’s never seemed to be much of an obstacle to leadership assassinations. Matthew Guy has been making his media presence more visible lately. He probably fancies himself for another crack at it.
@ MattD
The question about the numbers for and against borders reopening is a interesting one. Here in Qld, during the last State election , eyes were on the electorates on the Gold Coast- mostly the LNP ones. There was , understandably , a strong push from traders to open-up and end lockdowns. It appears that only that bloc supported opening-up ,while the rest, including the seniors, backed AP. The election result was a walk-over for Labor. It appears from that election result that Qlders supported lockdowns. That can said also of WAs results.
Latest polling from Vic indicates Labor would be comfortably reeelected.
So I reckon Morrison’s got a tough job to push through his” freedom message” in order to win the next election. Voters in those three States like their leaders direction , and let’s face it , Morrison’s not real popular in them anyway. Add to that the image of Morrison , ” the PM for NSW” and he’s got to carry all the Lib States and hope to carry one or more of the others. I wouldn’t be laying any money down on those odds.
Surely Michael O’Brian’s leadership must be untenable by this point?
Won’t John Pesutto re-enter parliament at the next election and be elected leader? Not being a Victorian though, I could stand corrected on this.
There are a lot of John Pesutto boosters in the media, but it’s far from clear that he has the numbers. His problem is that he has a Turnbull vibe about him, in that he’s much closer to the centre politically than the average party member and therefore far more popular outside the party than inside it.
Either way, it’s hard to see what benefit might be gained by the Liberals shuffling roles at this point for the sake of it. In the current environment where the Premier is fronting daily hour long press conferences, press conferences that otherwise politically disconnected people are actually watching obsessively, any opposition leader is going to struggle with visibility short of parading down Spring Street in a clown suit.
I suspect that the Liberals will go with Pesutto eventually, even if they go through another leader or two first, as he seems to be their most electable option. He could be the difference between winning and loosing in 2026, although he could still loose or another Liberal win if the ALP really mess up.
Stuart,
Pesutto needs to find a seat.
There’s no such thing as a safe traditional Liberal seat.
He might have a go at Kew. That’ll upset the lovies at MSM.
I assume that Pesutto will run in Hawthorn again. Kennedy only won narrowly in a high watermark election and is in his mid-70s, so a decent campaign by Pesutto would be more likely than not to regain Hawthorn.