Roy Morgan seems to have moved to weekly reporting of its federal voting intention numbers, with a poll published last night showing Labor’s two-party lead in from 58-42 to 57-43 through a survey period that ran from last Monday to Sunday. However, this masks a three-and-a-half point drop in Labor’s primary vote to 36%, which only does minor damage on two-party preferred because the Coalition is also down, by half a point to 32.5%, and Labor has done even better than usual this time on Morgan’s respondent-allocated preference flow. If preferences from 2019 were applied to these figures, the result would come out to about 55-45, in from amount 56.5-43.5 last time. For the minor parties, the Greens and One Nation are each up one-and-a-half, to 12.5% and 5% respectively – respectively their equal best and actual best results for the term – and the United Australia Party is up half a point to 1.5%.
The state breakdowns have Labor leading 55-45 in New South Wales (unchanged on last week, a swing of around 7.5%), 58-42 in Victoria (in from 60.5-39.5, a swing of around 5%), 50.5-49.5 in Queensland (unchanged, a swing of around 9%), 63.5-36.5 in Western Australia (out from 59-41, a swing of fully 19%), 53-47 in South Australia (in from 56-44, a swing of around 2.5%) and 69-31 in Tasmania. The sample size for the poll was 1384.
Also:
• The Australian that Dawson MP George Christensen, having parted company with the Liberal National Party last week ahead of his presumed retirement at the election, will today announce he will run as a candidate for One Nation at the election, though it is not yet clear if it will be for his existing seat. The report also reveals One Nation will run in all 151 lower house seats, whereas it only did so in 59 seats in 2019.
• Labor’s awkward start to the campaign has caused betting markets to tighten significantly: Sportsbet is now offering $1.63 on Labor, out from $1.45 at the start of the campaign, while the Coalition is in from $3.20 to $2.30.
• Australian Development Strategies, run by former Labor Senator John Black, has a map showing federal electorates’ concentrations of 35-to-49 year olds in the highest income quartile, whom he classifies as “maturing traditional swinging voters and aspirational voters in the ages at which they traditionally begin to move their vote from Labor to the Coalition”. We’ll see about that, but in any case it’s a nice and easily navigable map of federal electoral boundaries.