Category: Federal Politics 2022-2025

The Australian reports the final Newspoll of the year has Labor recovering a 52-48 lead after the previous poll three weeks ago found the Coalition drawing level. The primary votes are Labor 33% (up two), Coalition 36% (down two), Greens 13% (steady) and One Nation 7% (up one). Anthony Albanese is up two on approval to 42% and down three on disapproval to 50%, while Peter Dutton scores his highest approval rating of the term with a two-point gain to 39%, with his disapproval down two to 48%. Albanese’s lead as preferred prime minister is unchanged at 46-35. The poll was conducted Monday to Friday from a sample of 1219.

The News Corp tabloids also reported today on a RedBridge Group poll showing Labor leading 52.8-47.2, on which more details should be available tomorrow.

UPDATE (Freshwater Strategy): The Financial Review has a Freshwater Strategy poll, conducted Friday to Sunday from a sample of 1109, which records a 50-50 tie on two-party preferred, from primary votes of Labor 31%, Coalition 39% and Greens 13%. This is the fourth federal poll from this outfit this term, and like the first two it has Labor’s two-party share two to three points lower than the most proximate Newspoll. It also credits Anthony Albanese with a relatively narrow 43-39 lead over Peter Dutton as preferred prime minister.

The poll further includes approval and disapproval ratings for a range of public figures, which find Anthony Albanese on 37% approval and 42% disapproval and Peter Dutton on 34% approval and 36% approval, with a respective 1% and 5% saying they had never heard of them. Penny Wong had the best numbers for Labor with 35% approval and 30% disapproval, with the others canvassed each having non-recognition ratings of around a quarter: Jim Chalmers at 22% approval and 21% disapproval, Tanya Plibersek at 21% and 23%, and Chris Bowen has 16% and 22%.

Two Liberals other than Dutton were canvassed, with Sussan Ley at 16% on both approval and disapproval and 37% on non-recognition, and Angus Taylor respectively at 15%, 13% and 39%. The two best results for Coalition figures were recorded by Nationals: Jacinta Price had 28% approval, 21% approval and 17% non-recognition, while party leader David Littleproud was respectively at 20%, 17% and 29%. Barnaby Joyce did less well, with 25% approval, 42% disapproval and 8% non-recognition.

Also featured was a question on issue salience that allowed the respondents to pick multiple options. Immigration was number eight with a bullet, having increased five points to 13% since September, while the cost of living remained well clear at the top of the table with 71%, albeit that this was down six points. Immigration was also the weakest issue area for Labor as best party to manage, down six to 23% with the Coalition up two to 36%. However, Labor widened its lead on job security and unemployment, up one to 35% with the Coalition down two to 30%, and holds a commanding lead of 40% to 24% on welfare and benefits.

Two new items of opinion polling:

• RedBridge Group has a poll of voting intention from Western Australia, encompassing both a federal result and a state one you can read about in the post immediately above. Both are encouraging for Labor, the federal result crediting them with a 55.2-44.8 lead, effectively unchanged on a 2022 election result of 55.0-45.0. The primary votes are Labor 39% (36.8% at the election), Coalition 37% (34.8%), Greens 12% (12.5%) and One Nation 5% (4.0%). Field work dates are not provided, but the sample was 1200.

• Roy Morgan has an SMS poll on politicians’ trustworthiness, and while only scarce detail is offered, we are told three out of twenty-four had net positive results: Penny Wong, Jacinta Price and Jim Chalmers. Anthony Albanese recorded minus three, while Peter Dutton was on minus fourteen. The poll was conducted November 16 to 20 from a sample of 1095.

Preselection latest:

• Varun Ghosh, a Right-aligned barrister at Francis Burt Chambers, has been confirmed as Labor’s successor to the Western Australian Senate vacancy that will be created next month by the retirement of Pat Dodson.

• Steph Hodgins-May, former senior campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, won a Greens preselection vote to fill the Victorian Senate vacancy that will be created when Janet Rice retires in the second half of next year. Hodgins-May ran three times in the inner Melbourne seat of Macnamara, where she came very close to unseating Labor’s Josh Burns in 2022. Broede Carmody of The Age reports the other candidates were “City of Monash councillor Josh Fergeus, former Melbourne lord mayoral candidate Apsara Sabaratnam, former Legislative Council MP Huong Truong, Coburg-based surrogacy lawyer Sarah Jefford and barrister David Risstrom”.

• Nola Marino, who has held the seat of Forrest for the Liberals in Western Australia’s South West region since 2007, announced last week that she will retire at the next election. The West Australian reports former Senator Ben Small is “believed to have the inside track” to succeed her as Liberal candidate. Small is a former logistics manager at Woodside Energy and owner of a Bunbury bar and restaurant. He came to the Senate when he filled Mathias Cormann’s vacancy in November 2020 and failed to win re-election from third on the ticket in 2022.

• Katina Curtis of The West Australian reports Ian Goodenough, the Liberal member for Moore, may face a second preselection challenger in Matt Moran, an Afghanistan veteran, former journalist and former staffer to Malcolm Turnbull and Christopher Pyne. Moran now works in government relations for shipbuilder Luerssen. It has long been anticipated Goodenough will be challenged by RSLWA chief executive Vince Connelly, who held the seat of Stirling before its abolition in 2022 and then run unsuccessfully in Cowan after losing a preselection ballot against Goodenough by 39 votes to 36.

• Paul Sakkal of The Age reports Susan Morris, who runs a vascular surgery practice in Kew, will run for Liberal preselection in Kooyong. She is the second nominee after Amelia Hamer, director of strategy at tech start-up Airwallex.

I’ve been too busy in the last few days to give the site the attention it deserves, and in particularly to have anything to offer about the by-election that is sadly upon us in the marginal Labor seat of Dunkley in Melbourne’s south-east. The Age had a Resolve Strategic poll for Victoria on Saturday that escaped my notice at the time and which I’ll finally do a post on later today. For now, I offer a perfunctory account of two recent federal results:

• The latest Essential Research poll is all but unchanged on last fortnight, with the Coalition, Labor and the Greens all steady on 34%, 31% and 13%, One Nation down a point to 6%, and undecided down a point to 5%. The pollster’s 2PP+ measure has Labor up a point to 49% and the Coalition down one to 46%. Also included in the poll are monthly leaders’ favourability ratings, where respondents are asked to rate their performance on a scale of one to ten, which find Anthony Albanese still in decline though at a slower rate than last month, and Peter Dutton taking a downward turn after a relatively strong result last month. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Monday from a sample of 1102.

• The weekly Roy Morgan poll has Labor with an unchanged two-party lead of 51-49, with Labor down two on the primary vote to 30.5%, the Coalition down half 37%, the Greens up one-and-a-half to 14% and One Nation steady on 5%. The poll was conducted Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1719.

• Nine Newspapers had further results from last week’s Resolve Strategic poll on Sunday regarding immigration, which found 62% believe current levels are too high, 23% about right and 3% too low. Fifty-seven per cent felt the government was handling immigration in an “unplanned and unmanaged way”, with only 16% favouring the “carefully planned and managed” alternative. The poll predated the government’s announcement of its immigration strategy on Monday.

The final poll of the year from YouGov, which will return next year as a regular three-weekly series, finds Labor with a steady 51-49 lead on two-party preferred based on preference flows from the previous election, despite recording their lowest primary vote of any poll since the election. Labor is down two points on the last poll to 29%, their day saved to some extent by a two point rise for the Greens to 15%. The Coalition is up one to 37%, while One Nation is steady on 7%. Anthony Albanese is down four on approval to 39% and up five on disapproval to 55%, while Peter Dutton is down one to 39% and up one to 48%. Albanese’s lead as preferred prime minister is in from 48-34 to 46-36. The poll was conducted Friday to Tuesday from a sample of 1555.

I have recently started adding YouGov and RedBridge Group polling to the BludgerTrack poll aggregate, which doesn’t seem to have caught all the way up with the recent slide in Labor’s fortunes. In the case of the earlier three YouGov polls (though not yet the latest one), the poll data feature incorporates an array of unpublished breakdowns by state and various demographic indicators.

The monthly Resolve Strategic poll in the Age/Herald has the Coalition up four points on the primary vote to 34% without taking a bite out of Labor’s 35%, the balance coming from drops of one point for the Greens to 12%, two for One Nation to 5% and one for the United Australia Party to 1%. The pollster does not provide two-party preferred numbers but I get it to 54.6-45.4 to Labor – a seemingly solid result for Labor, but just shading the June poll as its weakest since the election, in line with the broader trend when Resolve’s skew to Labor relative to other pollsters is accounted for.

Anthony Albanese is down three on approval to 36% and up two on disapproval to 48%, while Peter Dutton is respectively down one to 34% and up two to 42%. Preferred prime minister is little changed at 42-28 in Albanese’s favour, compared with 40-27 last month. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Sunday from a sample of 1605, and will presumably be followed over the next few days by a bi-monthly read of Victorian voting intention combining results from this poll and last month’s.

Also out yesterday was the weekly Roy Morgan poll has Labor’s lead back to 51-49 after moving three points in their favour to 52.5-45 last week. The primary votes are Labor 32.5% (up half a point), Coalition 37.5% (up two-and-a-half), Greens 12.5% (down one) and One Nation 5% (steady). The poll was conducted last Monday to Sunday from a sample of 1730.

A few pieces of state news before we move on to the hard stuff. The finalisation of Western Australia’s state redistribution is covered in the post above, and a new state poll from Tasmania gets the once-over in a the post below. In Victoria, the results from the Mulgrave state by-election were finalised earlier this week, and they defied Liberal claims on the night that they had improved on their state election performance to the extent of finishing second. In fact, independent Ian Cook amassed 9,122 votes (25.3%) at the second-last exclusion to take the silver ahead of Liberal candidate Courtney Mann on 8,964 (24.9%), the final score being 20,363 (56.5%) for Labor’s Eden Foster and 15,681 for Cook (43.5%), a swing to Cook of 4.3%.

On with the show:

• Sunday’s preselection to fill the New South Wales Liberal Senate vacancy created by Marise Payne’s retirement delivered an upset win for Dave Sharma, who held Wentworth from 2019 until his defeat in 2022 at the hands of teal independent Allegra Spender. Sharma won the party ballot at the final count with 295 votes against 206 for the widely touted favourite, former state government minister and federal Gilmore candidate Andrew Constance. The favoured candidate of Peter Dutton, arch-conservative former ACT Senator Zed Seselja, dropped out at the second last round with 155 votes to Sharma’s 177 and Constance’s 169, at which point his supporters seemingly fell in heavily behind Sharma. Earlier exclusions with non-trivial vote shares were, in reverse order, Jess Collins, James Brown, Monica Tudehope and Pallavai Sinha.

• Sue Bailey of The Mercury reports Clarence mayor Brendan Blomeley has failed in his conservative-backed to topple moderate incumbent Richard Colbeck from the business end of the Tasmanian Liberal Senate ticket, on which Colbeck will have second position behind conservative incumbent Claire Chandler, reversing the order from 2019. The third position, which has not availed the Liberals since 2004, goes to Jacki Martin, an electorate officer to Senator Wendy Askew.

• A Victorian Liberal preselection ballot on Sunday chose Kyle Hoppitt, former Baptist preacher and director of JAK Audio Visual, as third candidate on the party’s Senate ticket. The result was a snub to Greg Mirabella, who stood aside as the party’s state president to run. Mirabella served in the Senate from November 2021 until mid-2022, having failed to win re-election from the number three position at the May 2022 election. The Age reports Hoppitt prevailed with 187 votes to 173 for Mirabella, who lost conservative support as state president for acquiescing in the expulsion of factional powerbroker Ivan Stratov by the party’s administrative committee. Neither federal Liberal leader Peter Dutton, who backed Mirabella, nor state Liberal leader John Pesutto, who favoured Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Karyn Sobels, succeeded in getting their preferred candidate up.

• Pat Dodson, Labor Senator for Western Australia, has announced he will retire from the Senate on January 26 due to health issues. The West Australian reports Varun Ghosh, Right-aligned barrister for Francis Burt Chambers and the son of first-generation Indian immigrants, is the front-runner for the vacancy.

• Noel Towell of The Age reports the Liberals have preselected candidates for Higgins and Chisholm, the two Melbourne seats the party lost to Labor at the 2022 election. Katie Allen will again contest Higgins after winning a ballot ahead of Port Phillip mayor Marcus Pearl. Allen she served from 2019 until her defeat at the hands of Michelle Ananda-Rajah, who became the seat’s first ever Labor member. The candidate for Chisholm will be Monash councillor Theo Zographos, who was preselected unopposed.

• Roy Morgan has an online poll of 1006 respondents exploring the half-formed opinions of Australians concerning the Middle East crisis.

• The Australian Electoral Commission scored the strongest ratings of any government agency in an annual public survey conducted by the Australian Public Service Commission, with 87% saying they trusted it (either strongly, somewhat or somewhere in between) and 91% professing satisfaction with it.

Courtesy of Shaun Ratcliff, University of Sydney and YouGov alumnus now at Accent Research, a study on political attitudes and voting behaviour across the generations offers a detailed look at the exacerbating tendency of younger voters to favour the left and its future implications. This scaled new heights at the 2022 election, for which survey research cited in the report shows gaps between Gen-Z (born 1996 and after) and baby boomers (born 1946 to 1965) of 23 points in support for the Coalition, four points in support for Labor and 26 points in support for the Greens.

What this means for the future depends in large part on whether the gap bespeaks life-cycle effects, in which conservatism is encouraged by personal and economic circumstances that tend to apply later in life (notably home ownership and family formation), or cohort effects, in which variations in political attitudes reflect divergent historical experiences. Contrary to common belief (Ratcliff notes it being expressed by former Liberal Senator George Brandis), it is plainly not the case that life-cycle effects consistently manifest as stronger support for the left among the young, as the current tendency to that effect has only been evident since the 1990s. However, proponents can argue that the gap at least partly reflects the fact that emerging generations are reaching life-cycle milestones later in the game.

For conservatives, the life-cycle thesis holds out hope that younger voters will adopt the attitudes currently associated with baby boomers in due course. The implications of cohort effects are more troubling, at least for conservatism as presently understood, as they are less likely to change over time. The manifestations of cohort effects tested by Ratcliff’s study are possession of a university degree (22.1% among boomers, 40.2% among the millennial cohort born 1981 to 1995), non-identification with a formal religion (54.7% among Gen-Z, 31.3% among boomers), LGBTQ+ identification (17% among Gen-Z, 4% among boomers) and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identification (5.4% among Gen-Z and 1.8% among boomers, which is presumably not entirely down to health outcomes).

Ratcliff’s analysis reaches something of a split decision: life-cycle and cohort effects each explain five to six points of difference in Coalition support between boomers and Gen-Z, and eight points each for the Greens. However, life-cycle effects do little to explain the smaller but still substantial gaps between boomers and millennials, whereas cohort effects explain three points in the difference for the Coalition and six points for the Greens.

In any case, progressives should be warned against triumphalism, at least with respect to the immediate future. As the greying of the population continues to play out, the 70-plus cohort is increasing as a share of the overall voting population – a point illustrated in a Grattan Institute report noting its 13% increase between the 2016 and 2019 elections.