Author: William Bowe

The second and third federal polls for the year have been published over the last few days, the more recent being a Roy Morgan result that has Labor down two on last month to 30%, the Coalition up four to 30.5%, One Nation down half to 15% (a distinctly different result from the other two recent polls) and the Greens steady on 13.5%. Whereas Morgan’s practice since the May election has been to publish large-sample monthly results compiled from its regular surveying, this result is limited to a 1676 sample over a one-week period from January 5 to 11, the former date marking the resumption of its surveying after a break that began in mid-December. Labor is credited with a 52-48 two-party lead using both respondent-allocated preferences and previous election preference flows, compared with respective leads of 55-45 and 55.5-44.5 last month.

The other comes from Fox & Hedgehog, a new outfit founded by former Peter Dutton staffer Michael Horner, and has Labor leading 53-47 from primary votes of Labor 29%, Coalition 25%, One Nation 21% and Greens 14%. Also featured are further two-party preferred match-ups showing Labor leading One Nation 56-44 and the Coalition leading One Nation 63-37, and a “three-party preferred” result with Labor on 46%, the Coalition on 29% and One Nation on 25%. Together with Anthony Albanese (33% approval and 48% disapproval) and Sussan Ley (19% approval and 32% disapproval), personal ratings were included for six further politicians, with Pauline Hanson scoring 38% approval and 41% disapproval. Albanese leads Ley 39-31 on preferred prime minister.

As well as extensive breakdowns on voting intention, the poll further offers the striking findings that 51% consider the Australian political system “fundamentally broken”, with only 22% disagreeing, and 55% in favour of “a pause to all migration to Australia other than tourists”, with only 22% disagreeing. Twenty-eight per cent favoured the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, with 32% opposed. The poll was conducted January 5 and 6 from a sample of 1608.

The first voting intention poll of the new year has been conducted by DemosAU for Capital Brief, and it offers the remarkable finding that One Nation has drawn level with the Coalition at 23% of the primary vote. The further surge to One Nation has also taken its toll on Labor, whose 29% is three points lower than in any published poll since the election. The Greens are on 12%, leaving 13% for “any other candidate”.

A two-party preferred result has Labor leading the Coalition 52-48 uses preferences flows from last year’s election, which means the 74.5-25.5 split of One Nation preferences in favour of the Coalition is doing exceptionally heavy lifting. The pollster further stirs the pot with a highly speculative Labor-versus-One Nation two-party result of 50-50, which applies Coalition preferences 83-17 in favour of One Nation based on the result in Hunter, splits Greens preferences 88-12 by assuming the same split as between Labor and the Coalition, and the rest 50-50.

Anthony Albanese’s performance is rated positively by 29%, neutrally by 30% and negatively by 41%, while the respective numbers for Sussan Ley are 17%, 55% and 28%. Albanese leads 42-29 on preferred prime minister. The poll was conducted Monday and Tuesday from a sample of 1027 – based on the amount of weighting involved, the pollster estimates an effective sample size of 586 and a margin-of-error of 4%. Demographic breakdowns will be provided in a full report to be published later today.

The inevitable New Year polling drought continues, though Roy Morgan’s regular monthly result may perhaps be along next week. We do have the following:

• The News Corp papers report a poll by Fox & Hedgehog, founded by former Liberal staffer Michael Horner, shows 54% in favour of a royal commission into the Bondi shootings, including 32% strongly in favour. Nineteen per cent disagree, 7% strongly so, while 27% are neutral or unsure. Coalition voters are considerably more likely to be strongly supportive, but even 42% of Labor voters are in favour with 32% unfavourable. The sample for the poll was 1608, with field work dates not reported.

• Nine Newspapers last week ran “net likeability” scores for an array of politicians from the recent Resolve Strategic poll, together with familiarity scores. These found respondents more favourably disposed than when the same exercise was conducted a year ago, with only two scoring net negative ratings: Barnaby Joyce at minus four and Lidia Thorpe at minus 12. David Pocock has ascended to join Jacqui Lambie at the top of the table with plus 15, the two respectively improving by one and ten points. The aftermath of Bondi notwithstanding, Anthony Albanese went from near the bottom of the table at minus 17 last year to the top end at plus nine. Other strong performers were Anne Aly (plus 12), Penny Wong (plus 11) and Catherine King (plus 11) for Labor, and Tim Wilson (plus 11) and Sarah Henderson (plus 10) for the Liberals. The biggest improvers were Joyce, whose poor result was an 18 point improvement on last year, and Pauline Hanson, up 16 to plus three. Both have a higher familiarity rating than Sussan Ley, who was known to 83% and scored plus eight on net likeability.

• Pew Research has findings from a mid-year international survey on views of Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu, which found 25% of Australians holding a favourable and 74% an unfavourable view of Israel, compared with a net median across 24 countries of 29% and 64%. Australia tied with the United States as the country with the highest ideological polarisation on the subject: 90% of left-identifiers professed themselves unfavourable compared with 76% for centrists and 46% for those on the right. Australians held a more negative view of Netanyahu than Americans, with 20% expressing some or a lot of confidence that he would do the right thing in world affairs, compared with 72% for little or no confidence.

• Sarah Elks of The Australian reports Queensland’s Liberal National Party has opened nominations for Senate preselection. Incumbents James McGrath and Matt Canavan are expected to retain first and second position. Potential nominees for third position, which last availed the party in 2019, are moderate-aligned Maggie Forrest, a barrister who ran unsuccessfully in Ryan at the May federal election; conservative-aligned Susanna Damianopoulos, a small business owner and former electorate officer who ran unsuccessfully in Springwood at the October 2024 state election; and Benjamin Naday, a lawyer and former staffer to Karen Andrews, who unsuccessfully contested the preselection to succeed her in her Gold Coast seat of McPherson.

• Sarah Elks of The Australian (again) reports Capricornia MP Michelle Landry will “decide on her future closer to the next election”, amid suggestions her retirement could make the central Queensland seat available to conservative Nationals Senator Matt Canavan.

Last week’s release of the regular quarterly Newspoll breakdowns was the cherry on top of a fairly rich pool of state-level data on voting intention since the May federal election, with Roy Morgan having helpfully adopted the practice of providing state breakdowns on the primary vote as well as two-party preferred with its monthly results, Resolve Strategic continuing to provide results from the three largest states, and RedBridge Group/Accent Research intermittently joining the fun. I have thus felt emboldened to expand the BludgerTrack poll aggregate to encompass state-level measures, which you can observe through the voting intention trend page by clicking on the tabs for the five mainland states (Tasmania, alas, yields too little data to produce plausible results. This is something I didn’t get around to doing in the previous term until a few months before the election.

Things are still a bit shallow and noisy – I am dubious that One Nation is riding higher in New South Wales than Queensland, a conclusion that leans heavily on the most recent Resolve Strategic poll – but it’s useful nonetheless to have the infrastructure in place. I should also take the opportunity to again plug the Victorian state BludgerTrack, made possible by a steady stream of data from RedBridge Group/Accent Research together with the regular bi-monthly numbers provided by Resolve Strategic.

Together with test cricket, Boxing Day reliably provides us with the final quarterly Newspoll breakdowns for the year, via The Australian. Combining 3774 responses from the last three polls, conducted between September 29 and November 20, the national-level results tell us nothing we didn’t already know, having Labor with an aggregated lead of 57-43. The most striking findings relate to the changing balance of One Nation and Coalition support by age: whereas no difference was recorded among the 18-to-34 cohort (both up a point), movement was significant for 35-to-49 (One Nation up four, Coalition down one), substantial for 50-to-64 (One Nation up five, Coalition down four) and seismic for 65-plus (One Nation up seven, Coalition down seven). The effect is still more pronounced on Sussan Ley’s personal ratings, which were effectively unchanged among 18-to-34s but deteriorated in net terms by minus 26 among 50-to-64 and minus 27 among 65-plus.

Breakdowns by income hint at the possibility of a more complex picture than an exodus from the Coalition to One Nation. The latter’s gains are predictably concentrated among the less affluent, by six points among both the less-than-$50,000 and $50,000-to-$100,000 brackets, and in the former case the loss is borne more by Labor (down four) than the Coalition (down one). This is balanced for Labor by a gain among the $100,000-to-$150,000 bracket, up three points on the primary vote with a two-party lead widening from 57-43 to 60-40.

At state level, Labor’s two-party lead narrowed in New South Wales, from 60-40 to 58-42, but widened elsewhere: from 58-42 to 60-40 in Victoria, 51-49 to 52-48 in Queensland, 54-46 to 56-44 in Western Australia, and 55-45 to 58-42 in South Australia. One Nation were up eight points in Queensland to 18% (where the Coalition was down six to 27%) and by three or four points elsewhere.

Also:

• Nine Newspapers reports further results from the Resolve Strategic poll finding more than 70% in favour of toughening hate speech laws, banning extremist Islamist organisations and imposing tougher immigration screening to deal with anti-Semitic or extremist views. Fifty-three per cent favour a “ban on pro-Palestine marches”, with only 16% opposed and the remainder neutral or unsure, and 48% support a Royal Commission into anti-Semitism, with 17% opposed.

• Nicholas Biddle of the Australian National University reports the university’s occasional ANUpoll survey happened to be gathering data on political attitudes and satisfaction with democracy and life from December 9 to 22, a period encompassing the Bondi shootings on December 14. The sample of 3564 included 538 who returned their responses up to the evening of the shootings. With exacting standards applied, Biddle observes statistically significant drops in confidence in the federal government and satisfaction in the direction of the country from the first period to the second. A fall in Anthony Albanese’s personal rating just clears the 95% confidence threshold (with the damage seemingly concentrated from December 18 to 22, when around 900 surveys were completed), while an otherwise similar result for Sussan Ley doesn’t quite get there. Perceived fairness and helpfulness of others was up in the post-Bondi sample, and life satisfaction barely changed.

• In the first piece of preselection news I’m aware of concerning the next election, the Australian Capital Territory Liberals last month chose their lead Senate candidate. The Canberra Times reports the party ballot was won by Nick Tyrrell ahead of Hayune Lee, data architect at Services Australia, by 143 votes to 34. Tyrrell is the party’s territory branch president, a former staffer to Barry O’Farrell, Pru Goward and Gladys Berejiklian and “founder of electric picnic boat hire firm GoBoat”. The Canberra Times further reported last week that a Liberal internal poll had Tyrrell on 21.54% (compared with 17.76% for the Liberals at the May election), with David Pocock on 34.67% (39.16%), Labor’s Katy Gallagher on 23.12% (31.74%), the Greens on 8.25% (7.78%) and others 12.45%. The poll was conducted November 26 to 28, with no sample size provided.

• Former Goldstein MP Zoe Daniel and former South Australian Senator Rex Patrick have launched a High Court challenge against campaign finance reforms that will take effect in the middle of next year. At issue are three features said to advantage major parties at the expense of independents: distinct caps for general party and candidate-specific spending, of which only the latter is of use to independents; the capacity of nationally organised parties to receive donations up to the $50,000 cap in each of their state and territory branches; and a new measure prohibiting donors from contributing to more than five candidates per state or territory. As ever, the plaintiffs hope the court will deem the measures inconsistent with an implied constitutional right to freedom of political communication.

Nine Newspapers has results from what it is calling a “special” Resolve Strategic poll, presumably because it was commissioned specifically to gauge reaction to the Bondi shootings, conducted Wednesday to Saturday from a sample of 1010. It is thus not part of the pollster’s normal monthly series, which typically targets 1600 respondents and presumably produced its final result for the year a fortnight ago. The field work period for that poll was from December 3 – the date first reports appeared that Communications Minister Annika Wells had spent nearly $100,000 on air fares to New York for herself and two staffers, thus initiating a period of bad publicity for the government concerning travel expenses – to December 7.

The latest poll finds only a modest decline in support for Labor on two-party preferred, their lead narrowing from 55-45 to 54-46. However, Labor is down three on the primary vote to 32% with the Coalition up two to 28%, with the Greens up one to 12% and One Nation up two to 16%. Anthony Albanese takes a substantial hit on his personal ratings, his combined very good and good rating down eight to 40% and poor plus very poor up six to 49%, and his lead as preferred prime minister has narrowed from 41-26 to 38-30. Sussan Ley’s personal ratings have also weakened, down three on very good plus good to 36% and up three on poor plus very poor to 40%.

Despite everything, 37% rate social cohesion in Australia as very good or good, compared with 30% for poor or very poor, with the balance undecided. Twenty-nine per cent rate the government’s response to the attacks as strong and 46% as weak, and 72% agree that there has been “a rise in racism and religious intolerance in Australia, including as a result of the Israel-Gaza conflict”, with only 9% disagreement. A further question, whose utility I have my doubts about, finds 55% rating that there has been more anti-Semitism than Islamophobia in recent months, compared with 13% vice-versa and 32% for unsure or both equally.

UPDATE: Further results have been published by Nine Newspapers today, including a finding that 76% want tougher gun laws, compared with only 6% for relaxing them and 10% for keeping them as they are. Respondents were given a list of nine “priorities for government” and asked to pick the two most important, with those at the law enforcement end of the equation (49% for preventing terrorist attacks, 45% tackling crime generally, 35% restricting access to guns) favoured over more abstract concerns (33% preventing radicalisation, 29% tackling anti-Semitism and 26% tackling hate speech).