Category: Federal Politics 2022-2025

We’re now five weeks without a Newspoll, which is unfortunate from my perspective as it’s time for a new post and I’ve been too busy working on my Victorian election guide (which should be up later this week) to have put much thought into how one might look. There’s always the regular Roy Morgan two-party figures from its weekly update video, which have lately found it moving to the rest of the pack by recording growth in Labor’s leads, the latest result putting it at 55-45 after a 54.5-45.5 result the previous week.

Elsewhere:

• Shaun Ratcliff at YouGov offers findings from its Australian Cooperative Election Survey, conducted during the May election campaign, that appear to suggest the age effect for the Coalition primary vote doesn’t amount to much up to the age of about 40, but accelerates dramatically thereafter. The implication that support for the Coalition is heavily concentrated among the very oldest voters would not appear to bode well for them in the short to medium term.

• Antony Green and Adrian Beaumont at The Conversation both sound off against Victoria’s retention of group voting tickets for the Legislative Council, making the state the last bastion of preference harvesting following recent reforms in Western Australia.

• The turnout for the recent state by-election for North West Central in Western Australia, which has the state’s second highest indigenous population share, came in at just 47.7%, or 5335 out of an enrolment of 11,189. The Nationals have blamed the Western Australian Electoral Commission for insufficient advertising. Merome Beard of the Nationals won the seat with 3071 votes after preferences (60.5%) to 2008 for Liberal candidate Kim Baston (39.5%).

• Rod Culleton, who ran at the May election as the lead Senate candidate of the Great Australian Party in Western Australia, has been charged with providing false information on his nomination form. This included a declaration that he was not an undischarged bankrupt when the National Personal Insolvency Index identified him as such, although Culleton insists this was not the case. Culleton was elected as a One Nation Senator in Western Australia in 2016 but subsequently disqualified after being declared bankrupt by the Federal Court.

The Australia Institute has a poll out which offers the interesting finding that 41% favour the repeal of the stage three tax cuts, with only 22% on board and the remainder unsure. Forty-six per cent understood the cuts to most favour high income earners, compared with 18% for middle income earners and 8% for low income earners. Asked whether “adapting economic policy to suit the changing circumstances even if that means breaking an election promise” rated higher than “keeping an election promise regardless of how economic circumstances have changed”, 61% favoured the former and 27% the latter. The poll was conducted September 6 to 9 from a sample of 1409.

The Guardian reports on the fortnightly poll from Essential Research, which continues to hold off from voting intention and does not include leadership ratings on this occasion, and is mostly devoted to questions on incidental political relevance regarding the Optus security breach. Fifty-one per cent would support stronger curbs on information collected by private companies and 47% expressed concern about governments collecting their personal information. The full report should be along later today.

UPDATE: Full Essential Research report here.

The Age/Herald has published the second of what hopefully looks like being a regular monthly federal polling series, showing Labor down three points on the primary vote 39%, the Coalition up four to 32%, the Greens down two to 10%, One Nation up one to 6% and the United Australia Party steady on 2%. Based on preferences from the May election, this suggests a Labor two-party lead of 57-43, in from 61-39 last time. Anthony Albanese’s combined good plus very good rating is down one to 60% and his poor plus very poor rating is up two to 24%. Peter Dutton is respectively down two to 28% and up three to 40%, and his deficit on preferred prime minister has narrowed from 55-17 to 53-19.

The poll also finds 54-46 support for retaining the monarchy over becoming a republic in the event of a referendum, reversing a result from January. The late Queen’s “time as Australia’s head of state” was rated as good by 75% and poor by 5%, while David Hurley’s tenure as Governor-General was rated good by 30% and poor by 13%, with the remainder unsure or neutral. Forty-five per cent expect that King Charles III will perform well compared with 14% for badly. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Sunday from a sample of 1607.

Also out yesterday was the regular fortnightly release from Essential Research, which features the pollster’s monthly leadership ratings, though still nothing on voting intention. Its new method for gauging leadership invites respondents introduced last month is to rate the leaders on a scale from zero to ten, categorising scores of seven to ten as positive, zero to three as negative and four to six as neutral. Contra Resolve Strategic, this has Albanese’s positive rating up three to 46%, his negative rating down six to 17% and his neutral rating up three to 31%. Dutton’s is down three on positive to 23%, steady on negative at 34% and up four on negative to 34%.

The poll also gauged support for a republic, and its specification of an “Australian head of state” elicited a more positive response than for Resolve Strategic or Roy Morgan, with support at 43% and opposition at 37%, although this is the narrowest result from the pollster out of seven going back to January 2017, with support down one since June and opposition up three. When asked if King Charles III should be Australia’s head of state, the sample came down exactly 50-50. The late Queen posthumously records a positive rating of 71% and a negative rating of 8% and Prince William comes in at 64% and 10%, but the King’s ratings of 44% and 21% are only slightly better than those of Prince Harry at 42% and 22%. The September 22 public holiday has the support of 61%, but 48% consider the media coverage excessive, compared with 42% for about right and 10% for insufficient. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Monday from a sample of 1075.

The weekly Roy Morgan federal voting intention result, as related in threadbare form in its weekly update videos, gives Labor a lead of 54.5-45.5, out from 53.5-46.5 and the pollster’s strongest result for Labor since the election.

Finally, some resolution to recent by-election coverage:

• Saturday’s by-election for the Western Australian state seat of North West Central produced a comfortable win for Nationals candidate Merome Beard in the absence of a candidate from Labor, who polled 40.2% in the March 2021 landslide and fell 1.7% short after preferences. Beard leads Liberal candidate Will Baston with a 9.7% margin on the two-candidate preferred count, although the Nationals primary vote was scarcely changed despite the absence of Labor, while the Liberals were up from an abysmal 7.9% to 26.7%. The by-elections other remarkable feature was turnout – low in this electorate at the best of times, it currently stands at 42.2% of the enrolment with a mere 4490 formal votes cast, down from 73.8% and 7741 formal votes in 2021, with likely only a few hundred postals yet to come. Results have not been updated since Sunday, but continue to be tracked on my results page.

• A provisional distribution of preferences recorded Labor candidate Luke Edmunds winning the Tasmanian Legislative Council seat of Pembroke by a margin of 13.3%, out from 8.7% when the electorate last went to polls in May 2019. Labor’s primary vote was down from 45.2% to 39.5% in the face of competition from the Greens, who polled a solid 19.3% after declining to contest last time, while the Liberals were up to 28.8% from 25.3% last time, when a conservative independent polled 18.4%.

Two contributions from Roy Morgan: its weekly report video tells us this week’s federal polling has Labor’s lead unchanged at 53.5-46.5, without offering any information on primary votes, and it has an SMS poll of 1012 respondents conducted on Sunday that found a 60-40 split in favour of retaining the monarchy over becoming a republic, albeit it might be faulted for having been conducted at an uncommonly opportune moment for monarchist sentiment.

The Australian also reported yesterday that SEC Newgate polling found 57% of Victorians were optimistic about the direction of the state; cost of living, health care and employment as the top priorities; “nearly half” trusting Daniel Andrews to lead the state through pandemic challenges compared with 16% for Matthew Guy; and 57% holding the view that the state was headed in the right direction, the highest of any state. Conversely, 53% of New South Wales respondents felt the state was heading in the wrong direction and only 35% believed the Perrottet government was doing a good job, the worst results for any state, although sample sizes in some cases would have been very small. The polling was conducted from August 31 to September 5 from a sample of 1502, 600 of whom were in Victoria.

Finally, the first batch of submissions – 212 of them – have been published from the Joint Standing Committe on Electoral Matters’ inquiry into the federal election. I haven’t had time to read any of them myself, but there are a good many notable names featured, though nothing yet from the parties.

I don’t have a huge amount of material off which to hang the new open thread that is now past due, partly because a certain event has crowded other matters out of the media, but mostly because of a threadbare schedule of post-election opinion polling in which this is an off week. All we have on that score is the soon-to-be-superseded Roy Morgan weekly update, which tells us only that its latest voting intention poll comes in at 53.5-46.5 in favour of Labor, out from 52-48. This is at the high end of how the Albanese government has been doing from this particular series since it came to office, which has been substantially softer for it than the two results we’ve had from Newspoll and the one from Resolve Strategic.

The only other item of electoral news to relate is the confusing news of the United Australia Party’s self-deregistration. This came as a surprise to the party’s sole Senator, Ralph Babet, with Clive Palmer seemingly unclear as to whether the decision was made on his own initiative or that of the party’s supposedly independent executive committee. Palmer, who if Forbes is to be believed is worth $2.1 billion, told Matthew Killoran of the Courier-Mail that he wished to spare himself the barely existent expense of maintaining registration, and would re-register the party shortly before the next election, despite not planning to run himself.

However, electoral law maven Graeme Orr told the Age/Herald that he might be in for a disappointment on this score, as the electoral laws appear to leave the United Australia Party name off limits to him and anyone else for the remainder of the parliamentary term. Babet will continue to be identified as a Senator for the party for parliamentary purposes, which do not relate to the Australian Electoral Commission’s party registration process.

Essential Research continues its fortnightly polling series minus voting intention or numbers for Peter Dutton when it conducts its monthly leadership ratings, as it has done in the current poll. These record Anthony Albanese returning to his post-election peak on approval at 59%, up four, with disapproval down three to 25%. A monthly question on whether Australia is headed in the right direction is likewise back to where it was in the post-election result with a five point gain to 48%, with a two-point drop in wrong direction to 29%.

Further questions cover the Scott Morrison ministries saga, which find 51% believe the former Prime Minister should resign from parliament compared with 25% who disagree; 59% agree that the reputation of his government has been diminished, with 19% disagreeing; and 59% believe he should appear at the inquiry into the matter, with 18% disagreeing. Support for a federal integrity commission is at 76%, down two from October last year, with opposition up four to 15%. Further questions cover the powers such an institution should have, trust in health authorities, police, the justice system and federal parliament and the salience of state politics issues, and can be found in the full report. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Sunday from a sample of 1070.

Further:

• The tracking poll of international leaders’ personal ratings conducted by US firm Morning Consult continues to record no significant change for Anthony Albanese, who ended August on 58% approval and 28% disapproval, both up one on the end of July. The numbers from this series combine results of polling conducted over seven days from a sample of around 1000.

• In a report on kickboxer-turned-misogynist internet celebrity Andrew Tate, Benjamin Clark of Crikey highlights data from the Australian Cooperative Election Study showing that while younger women are more likely than older women to agree that more needs to be done to achieve gender equality (76.5% among those aged 18 to 34 compared with 58.4% among those 65 and over), the opposite is true of men (30.1% among the youngest cohort rising to 40.4% among the oldest). The 18-to-34 cohort was also the only one in which a significant gender distinction was observed on what I take to be the two-party preferred vote, with 67.5% of young women favouring Labor compared with 60.3% for men. Also featured is Gallup data from the United States showing young women have become markedly more likely to identify as liberal over the past decade (from 30% to nearly 45%) whereas the rate for men has remained steady at around 25%.

• An international survey by US concern Pew Research on “global threats and international co-operation” found Australia with the second biggest gap out of 14 countries between those on the political left and right with respect to the threat posed by climate change, respectively identified as a major threat by 91% and 47%. Far ahead of the rest in this respect was the United States, where only 22% of those on the right rated climate change a major threat compared with 85% on the left.

• The final score from the August 20 by-election in the Northern Territory seat of Fannie Bay was 1844 (52.6%) for Labor candidate Brent Potter and 1662 (47.4%) for Country Liberals candidate Ben Hosking, a swing against Labor of 7.0%. Next cabs off the by-election rank are the Tasmanian Legislative Council seat of Pembroke on Saturday, which is being contested by both Labor and Liberal, and the Western Australian seat of North West Central next week, to be contested by the Nationals and the Liberals with Labor sitting it out.

• I’ll be conducting an online seminar as part of the John Curtin Institute of Public Policy’s Curtin Corner series from 6pm on Friday eastern standard time, specifically exploring the issue of where all the major party voters are going/have gone. You can register for live participation here, and a video will be posted after the event.

The Australian reports the second Newspoll since the election has produced an even weaker result for the Coalition than the first four weeks ago, with Labor’s two-party lead out from 56-44 to 57-43. Labor’s primary vote is steady at 37%, with the Coalition down two to 31% – their equal worst result in Newspoll history, matching the third poll under the Rudd government in February-March 2008 – with the Greens up one to 13%, One Nation up one to 7% (their strongest result in three years) and the United Australia Party steady on 2%.

Anthony Albanese is steady on 61% approval and up three on disapproval to 29%, while Peter Dutton is down two on approval to 35% and up two on disapproval to 43%. Albanese’s lead as preferred prime minister has widened from 59-25 to 61-22. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Saturday from a sample of 1505.