The Age reports the bi-monthly reading of state voting intention in Victoria from Resolve Strategic has Labor down two points to 30%, the Coalition steady at 33% and the Greens steady at 12%. Despite the accompanying report’s prognostications of doom for the Liberal Party, this in fact points to a tight result on two-party preferred, though a great deal would depend on the composition and preference flows of an imposing 25% vote for other parties and independents. Brad Battin’s lead over Jacinta Allan as preferred premier has narrowed from 32-24 to 33-27.
Further questions relate to “personal safety and trust in law”, with 53% reporting they feel safe walking around their local area with 28% disagreeing, 63% reporting feeling safe in their own home and 24% disagreeing, but only 31% expressing faith in courts and the justice system with 50% disagreeing. The poll combines the Victorian results from the last two national Resolve Strategic monthly surveys.
UPDATE: Saturday’s Financial Review has a further finding from RedBridge Group that Labor leads 52-48, unchanged from the previous result in September, from primary votes of Labor 32% (steady), Coalition 37% (down one) and Greens 13% (steady). The accompanying paywalled report has breakdowns by generation, region and gender. The poll was conducted October 8 to 14 from a sample of 1501.
Developments relevant to the election to be held in November next year:
• Alex White of the Herald Sun today reports that Amelia Hamer, who was narrowly unsuccessful in her bid to recover Kooyong for the Liberals from teal independent Monique Ryan at the May federal election, will seek preselection in Malvern. The incumbent, former party leader Michael O’Brien, announced in September that he would retire at the election. The report says the preselection will also be contested by Jacqueline Blackwell, chair of the Liberal Women’s Council, but makes no mention of commercial litigator and barrister Lana Collaris, whom The Age reported had confirmed her intention to run last month.
• Chip Le Grand of The Age reports local lawyer Grant Hutchinson has emerged as the “leading conservative candidate” for the Liberal preselection in Croydon, where sitting member David Hodgett announced his retirement in August. In Rowville, which will be vacated with the retirement of Kim Wells, the “early front-runner” is said to be Irene Ling, a fundraiser for Southern Cross Kids Camps, who has the support of conservative former federal Deakin MP Michael Sukkar. However, Tahnee Wells, 28-year-old project co-ordinator at the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and daughter of Kim Wells, is a “potential wildcard”.
• Two Labor retirement announces a fortnight ago: Emma Vulin, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 2024, in Pakenham; and Jordan Crugnale, who since 2018 has had a precarious hold on the seat of Bass.
• Anthony Galloway of The Australian reported last week the Liberals were considering given the Nationals a clear run against Jacinta Allan in her seat of Bendigo East, which would make sense given the Nationals’ remarkable near-success in the federal seat of Bendigo at the May federal election.
• The Herald Sun’s Backroom Baz column notes that no incumbent Liberals face preselection challenges, positing that “perhaps the new $5000 fee to nominate proved a hurdle too high for some”.
*done deal. Not a good thing.
He’s now known as Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. He should also be stripped of the royal title of prince, which Charles could do by Letters Patent. Andrew is a cad. I blame his mother. The former Duchess of York is now known as Sarah Ferguson. They deserve each other.
Kirksdarke Wednesday October 15 8:05pm.
Labour (Anti-Communist) won a Lower House (Assembly) seat at the Victoria State General Election 1955. Richmond – Frank Scully.
1955 Federal General election was closest call in a HoR seat, in Yarra, with Jim Cairns winning 51% 2PP against Labour (Anti-Communist).
Yarra covered Richmond and Hawthorn.
I blame him.
I’m no fan of the royals, but I’m not sure the former Queen can really be held responsible for her child being a nonce. (Now, the palace’s role in covering up his misdeeds, that’s another story.) Plenty of spoiled nepo-babies manage to go their whole lives without ever diddling any kids. Anne, Charles and Edward all had the same charmed life, and – as far as we know – they have never been rock spiders.
While that’s true about Labor (Anti-Communist) winning Richmond and coming close in Yarra in 1955, the DLP didn’t win anything in 1958 after Bolte re-redistributed the seats, or in 1961 either when their primary vote was at its highest.
Probably their closest seat in 1961 was Brunswick West, where they got Labor down to 52% of the vote and they came second, but it never went to preferences.
The stench of labor leftie loserville wafts from Victoria.
Pied Piper:
And yet they still seem to be on track to be comfortable reelected come 2026.
Says something about your side, doesn’t it?
I wonder how much money Advance will spend on the Victorian election. Or maybe they will decide the Coalition are a lost cause and cut their losses?
Also, I wonder whether the Liberals will again recruit the Exclusive Brethren (or whatever they are called by the end of next year) to supply swathes of aggressive polling booth workers. Because that worked out so well in May!
If Labor wins in 2026, they run a big risk of mirroring what happened in NSW after Labor won in 2007.
In 2007, NSW Labor was looking tired – they were on their 2nd premier – and probably shouldn’t of won but the opposition was a shambles. After that, they went through another premier and ended up with an unelectable person leading them in 2011 when the coalition finally got it together enough to win an election in a cantor.
The likelihood of the Victorian Liberals getting their stuff together is probably more remote but there is a big risk that in 2030, there is a landslide electing a very right wing Liberal government who are extremely chaotic.
Elections are there to be won. Things change in 4 years, issues evolve. Liberals could become even more of a basket case.
Liberal Party should become less of a basket case if Deeming is dropped from the upper house, and the next term could be harder for Labor as it moves away from big spending projects and starts to fix the budget.
After the 2026 election, Labor will still have both SRL Airport (extremely popular) and SRL East (more popular than the media portrays) in the pipeline, as well as North East Link (marginal benefit to that one honestly but might lock up some support in the critical outer eastern suburbs) being completed during that 2026-30 term.
Meanwhile, with Metro Tunnel & West Gate Tunnel both completed, the budget is forecast to at least return to an operating surplus next year even with those remaining projects already factored into it. So the whole argument of “We can’t afford SRL” – which right now with Metro Tunnel & WGT still finishing and the budget still in deficit may resonate a bit more – won’t really hold as much weight when the budget is in surplus even with the SRL in it.
I do think Labor should expedite SRL West and bring it forward. It is the easiest, quickest and cheapest to build, much of the route is undeveloped or barely developed, very little property acquisition required, minimal disruption, it can be elevated rather than tunnelled, and will service the most under-serviced area of Melbourne.
And while SRL East makes sense from the perspective that it’s where the population density already is; building SRL West early is a good opportunity to reverse the mistake which has been made for decades of infrastructure ‘catching up’ to population needs, rather than being built first and then developing around the infrastructure.
SRL North is by far the lowest priority but once SRL East, Airport & West are completed, it becomes the missing link so therefore that also becomes more justified. Building SRL North before West is a mistake, in my opinion. Steve Bracks wrote a great article recently arguing similar too.
Trent
The city loop didn’t save the Liberal Party in 1982. We have seen this before, a government runs up debt on rail projects, then the debt and rail projects suck the air out of the state. Victoria has rising unemployment, deteriorating roads and the government is already cutting spending and will find it harder to balance its budget without making bigger budget cuts and government won’t get points for making big budget cuts.
SRL literally helped Andrews win 2 elections. It’s only disgruntled public servants briefing the Fairfax media that gave opposition to it any legs.
Assuming Labor win and the contracts continue the line will reaching practical completion and early testing by the 2030 election and there will be nothing left to cancel.
Landlord funny you mention the city loop, it was many percent over budget and very late when delivered but who cares or even remembers now?
And the Sydney Harbour Bridge nearly bankrupted nsw but again who condemns Lang for it? The media are selective.
Corleone
SRL wasn’t a factor in 2018, much of Andrews success was down to the removal of railway crossing, his handling of covid and government’s big spending on services, and let’s not forget the hopeless opposition.
If the result is 52-48, Labor is down 5% from 2018 as it heads into toucher economic and budget conditions than anything Andrews had to deal with. Labor people are enjoying the sight of the Liberal Party thinking Abbott’s 2013 anti-net zero will work, but they could be making the same mistake if they think it’s all about SRL. Trent isn’t a Labor person and understand where he is coming from, but this government has reached the age where it doesn’t have the same wiggle room.
I definitely don’t disagree that Labor are in a more vulnerable position now than in 2018 & 2022, and if they (likely) win again in 2026 will probably be in a more precarious position again during the next term, and don’t have anywhere near the same political capital that Dan Andrews had during that 2018-22 term (especially pre-Covid).
There is an element of relying on an unelectable opposition which they shouldn’t take for granted, and need to be very disciplined and focused. I think for the most part though, they are being smarter and more focused than the hostile media landscape conveys, and we all know Vic Labor are a well-oiled election-winning campaign machine when it matters, with a lot more resources than the Victorian Liberals have, but they definitely shouldn’t be complacent.
Some points for Trent (and others) to consider regarding SRL:
– Digging starts next year. Even if the Libs win they won’t be stopping it (Brad Battin has admitted as much).
– SRL West isn’t really a thing. It’s just rebranding the tracks that are already there (the Tarneit loop currently used by Geelong trains), and presumably electrifying.
– It’s not really about “where people already are”, it’s an urban renewal project. Clayton and Monash especially will become big development zones.
Oh yeah I definitely know all that.
The 2026 election is too late to cancel or even pause the project which is great because I think it absolutely has to go ahead. And the fact that most of the infrastructure is already in place for the section called ‘SRL West’ is even more reason it should be prioritised. With both ‘SRL Airport’ and the Sunshine super-hub due to be completed by around 2033, the ‘SRL West’ section linking Werribee directly to both would have massive benefits.
And I’ve been arguing the same about your last point for a long time now. Every time I see people say “How many people really need to get a train from Cheltenham to Box Hill”, my very point is that it’s not about that, it’s a much larger project about spurring transport-oriented development to make Melbourne a less car-dependent city.
Edited to fix spacing…
Yeah I just don’t get why the media discount that Labor has been the better campaigners before and during elections, and why would that not continue in 2026? This is setting aside the electorate’s assessment of policy and delivery, just focusing on the campaign teams.
Also a lot of SRL antipathy is full blown anti-Chinese racism directed at the Box Hill end of the line. The Libs will enjoy harvesting that, as they also do with anti-Indian racism.
As the early calcs suggested, with the airport, 3 major university campuses Monash, Deakin and Latrobe outside the CBD, retail centres like Southland, Box Hill, Glen Waverley, Doncaster Shoppingtown, the Austin Hospital Heidelberg, and a connection to 9 or 10 of the radial rail lines, SRL stands to be the busiest single line on the system.
And provide mobility when roads like Warrigal, Springvale, Tram Rd, Bell St and so on have ground to a standstill in a Melbourne Metropolitan Area with 8 million people.
Re the current PHON vote, how much of that is merely parked with PHON as a protest and will return to the L/NP during the actual election campaign?
Even if the PHON vote holds up, to what extent will it spray all over the place and end up benefiting Labor?
Corleone @ #120 Monday, October 20th, 2025 – 4:54 pm
I think it’s because they managed to take out John Brumby’s government in 2010 with vicious media campaigning. I remember how hard they went after Lynne Kosky in 2009 until she resigned and soon died a few years later.
They’ve been acting the same ever since, but have failed to notice that Labor has since learned to deal with them, especially when they have half-rate hacks left in the Liberal party, most of whom are focused more on fighting each other than with Labor.
@Trent
The point that gets made along the lines of “how many people need to go from Cheltenham to Box Hill” shows how little people understand about public transport planning… The vast majority of people using the SRL will be either switching between lines, or going to places like Monash or Deakin Uni. Almost no one goes end-to-end on trams or metro services in any city around the world.
Same as people assuming that the orbital bus from Frankston to the Airport is actually for people from Frankston to get to the Airport (which would take 4 hours or something), when it’s there essentially to connect train lines.
I have told the story on PB before of meeting Liberals doing how to votes etc at the Federal election and them saying they were actually going to vote Labor at the State election purely to ensure the SRL happened (this is still at the time the Libs were declaring they would cancel it).
The SRL is hugely popular in the electorate despite what Big Potato in The Age wants to believe.
Anyway, long story short, anyone here arguing about the SRL not being a big positive for Labor is talking out their arse and either doesn’t live anywhere near the area or doesn’t talk to people or both. Even Battin knows it is a winner, that’s why he backed out of attacking it and backed out of cancelling it. He’s heard what I’ve heard, and almost certainly has polling on it to boot as does Labor.
@ExPat – precisely.
The hub and spokes model of Melbourne’s current train system means that journeys in the middle and outer suburbs that take like 10-15 minutes by car are hour long sagas involving trains all the way into Richmond on one line and then back out another line. The SRL is the radial connection between the lines, so someone going from a Frankston line suburb or a Belgrave/Lilydale line suburb to a Pakenham line suburb has a drastically shortened trip, it’s not about the point to point of Box Hill to Cheltenham or whatever.
It would be like going to Tokyo and saying why do you have the Yamanote line, who’s doing round trips around edge of inner Tokyo when you already have all these trains from Tokyo central radiating out to all these areas? Well, nobody. But Tokyo’s system without the hugely busy Yamanote line as a connector would be unthinkable, because while nobody is doing round trips, lots of people need to swing around one or two or three sectors. Having everyone head to the centre and back out again is massively inefficient.
Daniel Bowen (from the Public Transport Users’ Association) published this today:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BPiT4wqLE/
Essentially, research from the City of Melbourne showing that the SRL has 60% support and only 17% opposed. It’s more popular than the NE Link (53% in favour) but which won’t get criticised by the Liberal Party or the mainstream media, because it’s a road.
Airport Rail had 73% support.
Re Daniel Bowen,
The SRL is hugely popular. The big potato must live in the CBD.
In Frankfurt am Main you can get from any point in the city to any other point in the city on the U-bahn and S-bahn with only one change and a wait of only a few minutes at your chosen station. It was fully operational 50 years ago……
It doesn’t matter where Chip the Large lives, his paycheck is paid by an organisation who direct all reporting about PT to be negative no matter what, and to try and remove the Labor state government no matter what.
But actually, people who live in the CBD are much more at the progressive end of the curve – if his place of residence is what skews his perspective, it’s more likely somewhere like Brighton, the last old-school Liberal party hold-out in the state.
Chip is carrying on the work of Annika Smethurst. Two ex-Murdoch journos enlisted by The Age after the Nine takeover to shift the paper into a full blown Liberal Party newsletter.
Every article, even if the story is actually positive (out of what is probably reluctant necessity, some positive stories still require coverage), is infused with language that attacks Allan and the Labor government. It’s really clear that they have been given the assignment of taking down the Labor government.
“Independent. Always.” really needs to be removed from their banner these days. They are just another arm of Channel 9. May as well get Karl Stefanovic to be their political editor.
Despite federal Labor getting a no on a Voice to Parliament and Executive in 2023, Victorian Labor through the PR of Victoria’s parliament has just passed a mix of race-based lobbying/ advisory/ consultation/ oversight/ truth and reconcilliation commission
I suppose it will be interesting if it does better on closing the gap, may be next a new approach to JobSeeker/ dole, and how it affects Australia’s rankings for living standards/ well being on international benchmarks
Then again, two wrongs don’t make a right, crown radical title, some pigs are more equal than others?