Category: Federal Politics 2022-2025

Monday miscellany: youth polling, preselections, Werribee by-election latest (open thread)

A late vacancy arises in a safe Labor seat, expectations management sets in ahead of Saturday’s Victorian by-elections, and more besides.

The campaign for the Western Australian election on March 8 formally commences this week with the issuing of the writs, there are two interesting Victorian state by-elections on Saturday (more on one of them below), and there will shortly be a New South Wales state by-election to contend with in Port Macquarie following retirement announcement from Nationals-turned-Liberal member Leslie Williams. That’s to say nothing of the small matter of a looming federal election, for which April 12 is generally considered the most likely date, particularly after last week’s inflation numbers shortened the odds on an interest rate cut later this month.

Also of note:

• The Financial Review this week had polling data for the 18-to-34 cohort broken down by gender, combined from Freshwater Strategy’s monthly polling in November, December and January. Presumably inspired by the stark divide in voting and ideology that’s opened up between young men and women in the United States, the results find the phenomenon to be relatively subdued here: the big difference was that support for the Greens was at 32% among young women and 20% among young men, with both major parties scoring higher among men (Labor 36%, Coalition 32%) than women (Labor 32%, Coalition 25%). Kos Samaras of RedBridge Group calculates two-party Labor leads of 67-33 among the women and 59-41 among the men. Anthony Albanese led Peter Dutton as preferred prime minister by 58-27 among the women and 55-37 among the men, but both leaders scored much worse among women than men on net approval.

• 7News has a new election prediction model, in which political science academics Simon Jackman and Luke Mansillo were involved. Mansillo was also involved in The Guardian’s tracker, but this one is quite different: whereas The Guardian’s model goes far beyond any poll result in crediting the Coalition with a commanding 53.1-46.9 lead, the 7News model has it at 51-49. Mansillo is quoted saying the mode leans just slightly in favour of Labor forming government because of an inefficiently distributed Coalition swing, leaving them set to run up margins in already safe rural and regional seats.

• Labor’s Stephen Jones announced last week that he will not seek re-election in his Illawarra region seat of Whitlam. Ronald Mizen of the Financial Review reports the only known contender for Labor preselection is Keely O’Brien, general manger of corporate affairs for the Council of Australian Life Insurers. However, O’Brien is of the Right and the consensus appears to be that the Right will not formally oppose the national executive ratifying the nominee of Jones’s own Left faction. The report further relates that an informal deal reserves Whitlam to the Left and the state seat of Shoalhaven to the Right, but some consider the Right is owed a seat after Anthony Albanese imposed Ashvini Ambihaipahar of the Left in Barton.

• The South Australian Liberal Party has chosen Leah Blyth, education executive and state party president, to fill the Senate vacancy created by Simon Birmingham’s retirement, replacing a moderate with a conservative. Brad Crouch of The Advertiser reports Blyth won the party ballot with 119 votes to 71 for lawyer Sam Hooper and 11 for Adelaide councillor Henry Davis. As Birmingham was re-elected in 2022, Blyth will not be required to contest the coming election.

• A party vote to disendorse Jacob Vadakkedathu as the Liberals’ Australian Capital Territory Senate candidate over branch stacking allegations was defeated on Saturday. X account Preselection Updates relates the margin was 109 votes to 74.

• Patrick Durkin of the Financial Review (no link available at present) reports Labor polling shows Saturday’s by-election in Werribee “could be as close as 48-52” in favour of the government, suggesting a 9% Liberal swing. However, Liberals “denied the race was that close” and said a 5% swing would be a good result. Chip Le Grand of The Age also cites a Liberal source talking down the party’s chances by citing a “missed opportunity” to win over the local Indian community by preselecting local businessman Rajan Chopra, instead choosing 63-year-old real estate agent Steve Murphy.

Miscellany: federal election guide, Morgan poll, Australia Day polling (open thread)

Introducing the Poll Bludger’s lavishly appointed and keenly anticipated federal election guide.

The Poll Bludger’s long-awaited federal election guide is now in action. It’s outwardly similar to this site’s past such guides but, in very real if not immediately apparent ways, better. A beginner’s guide:

• There is a page for each of the 150 lower house electorates, featuring overviews of their history and demographic profiles, candidate lists that are as up-to-date as I can make it (an ongoing task) with write-ups for those deemed competitive, an interactive map display with booth results from the 2022 election (which opens if you click the “activate” button at the bottom of the post, chart and tabular table of the 2022 results, historical charts showing party votes going back to 2001, and a number of charts recording the electorate’s demographic indicators. The historical vote charts now include primary as well as two-party preferred, which took some doing. One of the ways you can get all this is through a map-based landing page which also contains what could loosely be described as a pendulum.

• Margins and party vote shares are based on my own determinations where redistributions have been held, namely New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and will thus differ from those of the ABC and the AEC. To follow on from this rather arcane earlier post discussing the various approaches taken by practitioners of electoral science in estimating support for independent members in areas where they weren’t on the ballot paper last time, some further explanation is warranted for the margins shown in five seats where independents made the final counts in 2022 and where the boundaries have changed: Fowler, Wentworth, Goldstein, Kooyong and Wannon. I have implemented a new method of estimating latent independent support to add to those described in the earlier post (by the AEC, Antony Green, Ben Raue, and me on my first go), in which statistical models have been developed to predict teal vote share based on the Indigenous Voice yes vote and various demographic variables. We seem to be in fairly close accord in most cases, but are all over the shop with Wentworth (UPDATE: Which turns out to be a tabulation error on my parts, which I’ve now corrected).

• There is also Senate guide featuring an overview page and individual pages for the six states and two territories, along similar lines to the aforementioned lower house seat pages.

• An overview page reviews the 2022 result, explains a few of the basics, considers where the election might be won, lost or fought to a draw, and has chart and table displays of results from last time and election past.

• The BludgerTrack poll aggregate now has a home under the roof of the federal election guide.

This seems to amount to around 80,000 words on top of all the coding and data aggregation that was required, and much of it constitutes preliminary work for the live results that will feature on this site on election night and beyond, which I humbly submit will put all its rivals in the shade. To this point, all I have to show for all this is satisfaction with a job well done: if you think something more is deserved, donations are gratefully received through the “become a supporter” button at the top of the site and at the bottom of each post.

While we’re here, some polling loose ends:

• The weekly Roy Morgan poll has the Coalition with an unchanged 52-48 lead on respondent-allocated preferences, but in from 52-48 to 51-49 based on 2022 election preference flows. The primary votes are Labor 29.5% (up one), Coalition 40.5% (down one-and-a-half), Greens 11.5% (down one-and-a-half) and One Nation 6% (up two). The poll was conducted Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1567.

• Further results from last week’s Resolve Strategic poll show 61% support for keeping January 26 as the date for Australia Day, substantially up from 47% when the same question was asked two years ago, with opposition down from 39% to 24%. There remains a marked generational effect, with respective numbers of 35% and 42% for those 18-to-34 and 79% and 12% for 55-plus. Fifty-two per cent expressed support for Peter Dutton’s proposal to enshrine the date in law, with 24% opposed.

Newspoll: 51-49 to Coalition (open thread)

The first Newspoll of the year maintains an impression of an ongoing slow downward trend for Labor.

As reported in The Australian, Newspoll has become the last poll series to return for the year, showing the Coalition opening up a 51-49 two-party lead after a 50-50 result in the last poll in early December. Labor is down two points on the primary vote to 31%, its equal worst result for the term, with the Coalition steady on 39%, the Greens up one to 12% and One Nation steady on 7%. Anthony Albanese’s personal ratings are his worst result to date at both ends, with approval down three to 37% and disapproval up three to 57%, while Peter Dutton is up one to 40% and steady on 51%. Albanese’s lead as preferred prime minister narrows from 45-38 to 44-41, also Albanese’s weakest showing this term. The poll also finds 24% expect a Coalition majority government, 29% a Coalition minority, 33% a Labor minority and 15% a Labor majority. The poll was conducted Monday to Friday from a sample of 1259.

Federal polls: Resolve Strategic, Essential Research and Roy Morgan (open thread)

Another three federal polls, each giving the Coalition the edge on two-party preferred, two showing Labor’s primary vote with a two in front of it.

Three new polls, none of them terribly encouraging for a government no more than four months away from an election:

• Nine Newspapers bring us the first Resolve Strategic poll of the year, which more or less repeats its grim result for Labor from December – with the apparent addition of a two-party preferred measure, based on respondent-allocated preferences, which the pollster has traditionally eschewed such a thing. This has the Coalition leading 52-48, where a determination based on 2022 election preference flows would more likely be at 51-49. The primary votes are Labor 27% (steady), Coalition 38% (steady), Greens 13% (up one) and One Nation 7% (steady). Peter Dutton is credited with a 39-34 lead as preferred prime minister, which I believe he is the first time he has led by more than one point on this measure from any pollster, compared with 35-35 last time. Anthony Albanese’s personal ratings have improved, up two on approval to 33% and down two on disapproval to 55%, but Peter Dutton’s have improved more, up four to 44% and down four to 38%. The poll was conducted last Wednesday to Tuesday from a sample of 1616.

• The first Essential Research poll for the year has the Coalition up two on the primary vote to 37%, Labor steady on 30%, the Greens down one to 12% and One Nation up one to 7%, with a steady 5% undecided. The 2PP+ measure, which uses respondent-allocated preferences and does not distribute the undecided, is unchanged at 48% for the Coalition and 47% for Labor. The monthly leadership ratings find Anthony Albanese perking up with a six-point gain on approval to 45% and a five-point drop on disapproval, also to 45%, while Peter Dutton is down two on approval to 42% and up two on disapproval to 43%. The “national mood” is better than it’s been since May 2023, with a seven-point increase since last month in the feeling that the country is headed in the right direction, with “wrong track” down five to 46%. The poll also finds 42% feel the standard of living of Indigenous people has improved over the past decade, with 34% saying it has remained the same and 15% that it has got worse. Forty per cent oppose a separate day for Indigenous recognition, with 30% favouring one separate from Australia Day and 19% favouring one in place of Australia Day. Forty-two per cent expressed support for TikTok to be banned unless sold to a non-Chinese company, down three on last March, with 27% opposed, up two. The poll was conducted last Wednesday to Sunday from a sample of 1132.

• The weekly Roy Morgan poll has the Coalition leading 52-48 on both the respondent-allocated and previous-election preference flow measures, the former out from 51.5-48.5 last week, the latter from 50.5-49.5. The primary votes are Labor 28.5% (down one-and-a-half), Coalition 42% (up one-and-a-half), Greens 13% (up one) and One Nation 4% (down half). The poll was conducted Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1564.

Federal polls: Freshwater Strategy and YouGov (open thread)

Two new polls show green shoots for Labor on the primary vote, though not enough to impact the headline two-party results.

Perhaps reflecting by the imminence of a federal election, polling seems to be picking up quicker after New Year than usual:

• The Financial Review has the latest Freshwater Strategy poll on its regular monthly schedule, presently only available in the paper’s digital print edition, recording no change to the Coalition’s 51-49 lead on two-party preferred. This is despite a slight improvement in Labor’s position on the primary vote, up two points to 32%, with the Coalition steady on 40% and the Greens down a point to 13%. Conversely, Peter Dutton draws level with Anthony Albanese at 43% apiece on preferred prime minister, which he had never quite managed in this series before. Anthony Albanese is down two on approval to 32% and down one on disapproval to 50%, while Peter Dutton is down one to 36% and steady on 40%. The poll was conducted Friday to Sunday from a sample of 1063.

• YouGov has a federal poll that’s yet to appear on its website, but which has a headline two-party result of 51-49 to the Coalition, compared with 50-50 at the last poll in November – though the primary vote numbers look quite a bit more like 50-50 if preference flows are applied strictly as per the 2022 election result. The primary votes are Labor 32% (up two), Coalition 39% (up one), Greens 12% (down one) and One Nation 7% (down two). Anthony Albanese records improved personal ratings at 40% approval (up four) and 55% disapproval (down one), which is also true to a lesser extent of Peter Dutton, up three to 43% and up one to 49%. Albanese leads 44-40 on preferred prime minister, out from 42-39. The poll was conducted January 9 to 15 from a sample of 1504.

We’ve also had YouGov’s head of Australian political polling, Amir Daftari, relate on X that polling of 630 respondents from October to January suggests Labor is poised to win the seat of Brisbane from the Greens, with the latter running third on 23% to the LNP’s 35% and Labor’s 34%, which would translate into an easy win for Labor after the distribution of Greens preferences, reversing what happened in 2022.

Further:

• A Liberal preselection for the northern Sydney seat of Bradfield on Saturday was won by Gisele Kapterian over Warren Mundine by a margin of 207 to 171, with cardiologist Michael Feneley managing only 16 votes and another mooted contender, local councillor Barbara Ward, seemingly not making it to the starter’s gate. The seat will be vacated by retiring Liberal member Paul Fletcher and contested for a second time by teal independent Nicolette Boele, who came within 4.2% in 2022. Both Antony Green and I have calculated a post-redistribution Liberal-versus-teal margin of 2.5%, following its absorption of parts of abolished North Sydney.

• The Canberra Times reports the Liberal Senate candidate for the Australian Capital Territory, Jacob Vadakkedathu, faces a party vote for his disendorsement over accusations of branch stacking, after a petition to the management committee attracted the requisite 30 signatures from voting members.

• Lydia Lynch of The Australian reports Kara Cook, former Brisbane councillor and a lawyer specialising in domestic violence cases, is set to be preselected as Labor’s candidate for the LNP-held Brisbane seat of Bonner. An earlier report in The Australian said Labor’s national executive had intervened in Bonner to block Billy Colless, lead organiser of the public sector union Together Queensland, who had initially been the only nominee. Another Labor candidate in an LNP-held Brisbane seat is Rhiannyn Douglas, former teacher and current state party organiser, in Longman.

• The federal redistribution of the Northern Territory was finalised on January 7, confirming the boundary proposed in the draft report, which drew no dissenting submissions. The redistribution does the obvious thing of ceding the part of Palmerston that was formerly in Lingiari, which by my reckoning reduces Labor’s margin in Solomon from 9.4% to 8.4% and increases it in Lingiari from 1.0% to 1.6%.

• Angira Bharadwaj of News Corp quotes a Labor source on election timing saying “the cold hard truth is we aren’t ready and we won’t be ready for another month”.

Miscellany: election timing, Morgan poll and preselection news (open thread)

The Liberals gear up for a preselection on Saturday in the Sydney seat of Bradfield, a former stronghold where a teal independent is now in the mix.

Writing in the News Corp papers, Phillip Hudson of Bondi Partners summarises the election date situation so I don’t have to:

The first choice the PM needs to make is whether to allow parliament to go ahead as scheduled for the first two weeks of February or to visit Governor-General Sam Mostyn to call the election … Might Albanese break convention and surprise us all by ending the guessing game — and catching almost everybody off guard — by calling an unlikely poll in mid-January for February 22? … The attraction of a March election is made difficult by the Western Australian state election scheduled for March 8, which is also a long weekend in the southern half of the country, while March 15 clashes with the Formula 1 Grand Prix. March 29 and April 5 are a possibility, especially if there’s a February rate cut. April 12 is emerging as a red hot option as the WA election would be over on the weekend it needs to be called. That scenario would allow for parliament to be dissolved without having a budget … If he waits any longer he will have to deliver another budget as there’s no chance of an election on April 19 or 26 due to a later than usual Easter then Anzac Day commemorations. The final window is May 3, 10 or 17.

Also of note:

• This week’s Roy Morgan poll has the Coalition’s two-party lead at 51.5-48.5, in from a 53-47 blowout last week that was entirely due to an aberrant result on respondent-allocated preferences from Greens voters. Labor is in fact down a point on the primary vote to 30%, with the Coalition steady on 40.5%, the Greens up half a point to 12.5%, and One Nation up one to 4.5%. The two-party result based on 2022 election preference flows is 50.5-49.5 in favour of the Coalition, compared with 50-50 last time. The poll was conducted Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1721.

• A keenly fought Liberal preselection will be held on Saturday to choose a successor to Paul Fletcher in the northern Sydney seat of Bradfield, where the party is under pressure from teal independent Nicolette Boele. This is largely shaping up as a battle between moderates who favour Gisele Kapterian, international trade lawyer and former staffer to Julie Bishop, and conservative backing Warren Mundine, who among other things was one of two Indigenous spearheads in the campaign against the October 2023 Voice referendum, together with Senator Jacinta Price. Kapterian’s backers include Joe Hockey, Nick Greiner, Barry O’Farrell, Gladys Berejiklian and Sussan Ley. Mundine has been endorsed by Tony Abbott, John Anderson and Jacinta Price, but faces the difficulty of being 68. Also contesting the preselection are local councillor Barbara Ward and cardiologist Michael Feneley.

• The Nationals have announced that their candidate for Hunter is Sue Gilroy, registered nurse, founder of a business coaching company and past candidate for Shooters Fishers and Farmers. The seat is held for Labor by Dan Repacholi on a post-redistribution margin of 4.9%.

Polls: Roy Morgan and RedBridge ideology report (open thread)

Roy Morgan gives Labor its worst two-party result of the term, courtesy of some highly unusual preference flows.

Roy Morgan returned to the field this week with an eye-catching headline result of 53-47 in favour of the Coalition on two-party preferred, but this turned out to be entirely down to an unorthodox set of respondent-allocated preference flows, with the accompanying release relating that Labor’s share from the Greens was down from 85% to 55% from the previous poll. A previous election preferences measure was not provided on this occasion, but such a result assuredly have come in at 50-50. Labor were in fact up three-and-a-half points on the pre-Christmas poll to 31%, with the Coalition down half to 40.5%, the Greens down half to 12% and One Nation down one-and-a-half to 3.5%. The poll was conducted December 30 to January 5 from a sample of 1446.

Also out this week from RedBridge Group was a follow-up report from its recent MRP survey relating to ideological positioning on the customary left-to-right scale. On a ten-point left-to-right scale, 51% rated Labor at very points on the left, 18% had them in the centre and 20% on the right, whereas the Liberals were put on the right by 62%, in the centre by 14% and on the left by 13%. Thirty-one per cent placed themselves in the centre, 23% on the left and 33% on the right. Forty-two per cent either way felt the Liberal Party to be to their right and Labor to be to their left, with 43% rating the Liberal Party’s position similar to their own compared with 39% for Labor.

BludgerTrack 2025 2.0 (open thread)

Federal polling trends suggest Labor’s position is weakening in its stronghold state of Victoria.

This site’s renowned BludgerTrack poll aggregate has been given a seasonal makeover, now boasting state-level federal polling trends for the five mainland states (Tasmania being almost entirely lacking in published data). Its principal insight is that Labor has – assuming always that the polls are to be believed – a problem on its hands in Victoria. Two-party swings in the other states are in a narrow band from 1.2% in Queensland to 2.1% in New South Wales, but the current reading for Victoria has it at 4.6%, enough to wipe out the advantage Labor has established there in recent years. Labor can take some comfort in the fact that the state is not rich in marginal seats, a uniform swing of that size being only sufficient to cost it Chisholm and McEwen.

The state-level measures are created by combining separate trend measures for national voting intention and the respective states’ deviations from it, the data for which can be accessed from the “poll data” tab at the top of the BludgerTrack page. The only comparable effort I’m aware of is The Guardian’s poll tracker, which also has trend measures for a range of other demographic indicators, though it doesn’t seem to be drawing on too many data points for some of them. The big difference overall between the two is that The Guardian assumes the polls to be very heavily skewed to Labor, particularly on the primary vote, and duly points to a fairly comfortable Coalition win. BludgerTrack assumes the polls to be broadly accurate, particularly Newspoll and the related entities of Pyxis and YouGov, and has for some time pointed to a near dead heat on two-party preferred.

The imminence of a federal election notwithstanding, there is inevitably not much to report this time of year, although a The West Australian yesterday related that a very firm view had taken hold within Labor’s WA branch that the Prime Minister plans to call an election for April very shortly after the state election is held on March 8. It was also revealed yesterday that Victoria’s state by-election for Werribee will be held concurrently with the Prahran by-election on February 8.

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