Author: William Bowe

Two new polls out this evening, one being the first Newspoll result from The Australian in four weeks, showing the Coalition with an unchanged two-party lead of 51-49. Both major parties are up two on the primary vote, Labor to 33% and the Coalition to 40%, with the Greens down one to 11% and One Nation down two to 5%. Anthony Albanese is steady on 40% approval and up one on disapproval to 55%, while Peter Dutton is up two on approval to 40% and down one on disapproval to 51%. Albanese’s lead as preferred prime minister narrows from 45-37 to 45-41. The poll was conducted Monday to Friday from a sample of 1261.

Nine Newspapers has the monthly Resolve Strategic poll has Labor unchanged on 30%, the Coalition up one to 39%, the Greens down one to 11%, One Nation steady on 5%, independent down one to 11% and others up one to 4%. I reckon this to put two-party preferred somewhere between 50-50 and 51-49 to the Coalition, based on preference flows at the 2022 election. Anthony Albanese is up two on approval to 37% and down one on disapproval to 51%, while Peter Dutton is up four to 45% and down one to 40%. The two leaders are tied 37-37 on preferred prime minister, after Albanese led 38-35 last time.

The poll also finds 26% rating Donald Trump positively and 55% negatively, compared with 41% and 25% for Kamala Harris, with 40% considering Trump’s election will be bad for Australia compared with 29% for good. A series of findings on foreign policy questions, one being that 27% agreement that Australia should pause or withdraw from the AUKUS nuclear submarines arrangement with 35% disagreeing. The poll was conducted Tuesday to Saturday from a sample of 1621.

The fortnightly Essential Research poll has Labor bouncing back three points on the primary vote after a four-point slump last time, to 31%, with the Coalition down a point to 34%, the Greens steady on 12% and One Nation up two to 9%, with the undecided component down a point to 5%. Labor’s improvement does not flow through to the 2PP+ measure, on which the Coalition’s lead shifts from 48-46 to 49-47. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Sunday from a sample of 1131.

Further results offer particularly interesting results on the US election, finding a distinctly narrow lead for Kamala Harris of 41% to 33% for Donald Trump when respondents were asked how they would vote if they could. Even more strikingly, respondents were uniformly positive in relation to four of Trump’s key talking points: 60% agreed that “globalisation has gone too far, we need to protect local workers with tariffs on foreign goods”, with only 11% disagreeing; 59% that “government is fundamentally corrupt and politics has been taken over by vested interests”, with 15% disagreeing; 59% that “a deep state of unelected officials has too much control”, with 10% disagreeing; and 59% that “illegal immigrants should be deported”, with 19% disagreeing. Conversely, 41% felt abortion should be legal in all cases, 38% in most, 14% illegal in most cases, and only 7% illegal in all cases.

Substantial majorities also rated that politicians should not accept complimentary flight upgrades and access to airline lounges, sporting events and concerts. Essential Research executive director Peter Lewis connects the dots in an analysis piece for The Guardian:

Regardless of the US result, what does all this mean for Albanese’s Labor? Winning power at a time when people have lost faith in government is a poisoned chalice; in your success you become the problem. This is why the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge allegations against the prime minister have had such salience; the idea that those in control have special access and special privileges feeds this populist backlash.

Newspoll did not grace us with its usual three-weekly presence on Sunday evening, but the weekly Roy Morgan can always be relied upon – as presumably can the fortnightly Essential Research, which should be reported tomorrow and previewed by the time most of you read this in The Guardian. Roy Morgan finds the Coalition opening up a 51-49 lead on two-party preferred, after trailing 50.5-49.5 last time. However, this is down to changes in the respondent-allocated preference flow rather than the primary vote, on which both Labor and the Coalition are up half a point, to 30.5% and 38% respectively, with the Greens steady on 14% and One Nation up half a point to 6%. The alternative two-party measure based on 2022 election flows has Labor leading 51-49, in from 51.5-48.5 last week. The poll was conducted Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1651.

The Guardian has also launched a federal poll aggregate, devised by the publication’s data journalists Josh Nicholas and Nick Evershed together with Luke Mansillo of the University of Sydney, based on a model developed by the latter together with political science doyen Simon Jackman. Strikingly, it credits the Coalition witha two-party lead of 51.4-48.6, based on polling data up to and including last week’s Roy Morgan result. That the Labor primary vote of 27.5% is half a point lower than any poll published during the past term presumably reflects the fact that Labor significantly underperformed the polls at both the 2019 and 2022 elections. However, recent state elections have offered no further evidence for bias on such a scale.

On this point, a comparison of performance at the Queensland election by Resolve Strategic, presumably intended to blow the pollster’s own trumpet, demonstrates that the industry did rather well across the board. The national figures from The Guardian aggregate are also worse for Labor than the accompanying state breakdowns, although the latter only track as far as September.

Further:

• Proposed new federal boundaries for the Northern Territory were published in October 18. These predictably dealt with the need for the Darwin-based seat of Solomon to gain voters, and Lingiari to lose them, by transferring the outer suburbs of Palmerston, inclusive of Yarrawonga, Farrar, Johnston and Zuccoli, to Solomon. Antony Green calculates that this increases Labor’s margin in Lingiari from 0.9% to 1.7% and reduces it in Solomon from 9.4% to 8.4%.

• Matthew Denholm of The Australian reports Brian Mitchell, who maintains Labor’s increasingly tenuous grip on the central Tasmanian seat of Lyons, is “being strongly urged by federal figures” to make way for former state party leader Rebecca White, who has been a member for the corresponding state electorate since 2010. It is further reported that Mitchell would be willingly to go quietly, and that White is “understood to be willing to switch”, but “does not want a preselection stoush”.

• Matthew Denholm of The Australian also reports Anthony Albanese “blindsided” the Tasmanian branch of the ALP by announcing that Richard Dowling, adviser to state Labor leader Dean Winter and former director of public policy with Meta, would succeed Catryna Bilyk at the top end of the party’s Senate ticket at the next election. The report quotes Bilyk saying she had not said she was retiring as of yet, and that state MP Shane Broad and former Forestry Australia president Bob Gordon had been floated as potential successors if she did. However, Dowling was “assured the position as the choice of the Right faction’s Australian Workers Union”, a fact which was “not widely known within the party” until Albanese made it so.

• Andrew Clennell of Sky News reports a Liberal preselection vote for the Hunter region seat of Paterson, held for Labor by Meryl Swanson on what I calculate to be a post-redistribution margin of 2.5%, was won by Laurence Antcliff, operations manager at the Housing Industry Association. Antcliff reportedly won a preselection vote by 24 to 16 ahead of local doctor Owen Boyd.

• The above report further notes that Lucy Wicks, who lost the Central Coast seat of Robertson to Labor in 2022, is considered the front-runner in a preselection ballot for the seat to be held on November 16. She is opposed by Michael Feneley, a cardiologist who has run for the party five times in various seats, most recently in Dobell in 2022, and Bernadette Enright, a banking executive.

• David Gillespie, who has held the New South Wales Mid North Coast seat of Lyne for the Nationals since 2013, announced a fortnight ago that he will not recontest the next election.

Moving on from Queensland, up to a point, three items of polling to relate:

• The weekly Roy Morgan poll has Labor’s two-party lead in from 52-48 to 50.5-49.5, from primary votes of Labor 30% (down two), Coalition 37.5% (up one), Greens 14% (up half) and One Nation 5.5% (steady). Based on 2022 election flows, Labor leads 51.5-48.5, in from 53-47. The poll was conducted Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1687.

• Roy Morgan also has a result on republicanism that points to the brittleness of the support for the concept that polls generally record when the issue is out of the limelight. In the wake of the royal visit, a forced-response SMS poll of 1312 respondents conducted last Tuesday and Wednesday broke 57-43 in favour of retaining the monarchy.

• RedBridge Group has a timely result of federal voting intention from Queensland (hat tip to comments regular Nadia88) that has Labor on 28%, compared with 27.4% at the 2022; the Coalition at 41%, compared with 39.6%; the Greens at 13%, compared with 12.9%; and One Nation at 10%, compared with 7.5%. The poll was conducted several weeks ago, from October 4 to 16, from a substantial sample of 2315, and the full release contains detailed demographic breakdowns. It also finds Anthony Albanese on 34% approval and 53% disapproval; Peter Dutton on 39% and 42%; Steven Miles on 35% and 35%; and David Crisafulli on 40% and 31%.

• If you’re a Crikey subscriber, you can read my review of the Queensland election wash-up.