Yet another poll and yet another result showing Pauline Hanson’s One Nation ahead of Labor at a national level, with the Coalition way behind.
The latest Newspoll has confirmed the trend is clear. Labor is becoming increasingly alarmed, while the Coalition has long been in panic.
Meanwhile, at a state level, polling by Freshwater for the Herald Sun shows Labor running third in Victoria behind the Coalition and One Nation. Almost two-thirds (62%) of the 1,034 people polled also backed replacing Jacinta Allan as premier before the November election – including 39% of Labor voters surveyed.
To discuss why the Victorian election matters nationally, as well as the ongoing federal budget fallout, we’re joined on the podcast by pollster and Redbridge Group director Simon Welsh.
He’s spent more than 20 years in market and social research, including doing qualitative research for the Daniel Andrews Labor government’s successful re-election campaign in 2018.
The Victorian election will be the next electoral test of One Nation’s recent rise – and Welsh predicts it will be “very, very messy” to watch.
On Victoria’s ‘messy’ three-way contest
Welsh said Labor’s vote in Victoria has now fallen “down to its base”. Given One Nation and the Coalition are both polling slightly higher, he understands why many people assume the Allan government will lose the election.
But it’s not quite that simple.
He said One Nation and Coalition had more support statewide, but their votes fall mainly in the same regional or outer suburban areas.
For now, Labor’s vote is holding up middle suburban seats in and around Melbourne, where the most seats are, still giving Labor
a foundation to potentially get close to majority government, even with the polls sort of sitting where it is now. [Labor’s] overlay of its primary vote on the political geography of Victoria is much more favourable than the other two parties, being the Liberals and One Nation […] I think all parties are going to have their challenges and work cut out for them in this election. I think it’ll be very, very messy.
On a possible leadership challenge in Victoria
Amid speculation about Allan’s future as premier, Welsh said swapping leaders just five months before the election would “only do One Nation and even the Liberals a hell of a service”.
I think the one thing that is very clear is that what voters hate, absolutely hate, is when politicians seem to act with surprising urgency on things that threaten their employment, when they don’t seem to actually have the same urgency on things that threaten [voters’] employment. So, in other words, if they were to roll Jacinta Allan now, it sends entirely the wrong message […] It would be disastrous.
One of the things that voters really like about Pauline Hanson – the kinds of voters that are coming off the Labor pile and moving towards her – is her consistency. She stuck it out.
One of the big critiques always on the major parties, particularly over the last sort of decade or more, has been this inconsistency of leadership, this chopping and changing for their own political survival, their own interests ahead of the interests of ordinary Australians like me.
Why One Nation appeals to some Labor voters
Looking at the national picture, the May 12 federal budget brought a sharp backlash from investor groups and business interests.
But Welsh said many voters he’s heard from in focus groups simply saw it as a missed chance to do something to help their straitened living standards.
Probably the defining response to the budget was just a sense of lost opportunity. So again, people going back to these immediate material stresses in their lives. People are literally struggling to put food on the table. We hear this in focus groups all the time: that the picture in that outer suburban regional area of Australia – I can’t convey strongly enough just how deep the economic stresses are in people’s lives right now.
And the feedback on the budget was really […] ‘gee, there wasn’t much in it’ to affect that. You know, we had this tiny little tax cut that’s not really going to touch the sides – if they’d even heard of that. It was really an absence of perception, an absence of anything they felt made a material difference to their lives.
So where did these disaffected voters go? Well, some of them went left, so some of them went to the Greens and other minor parties […] But some did go to One Nation. And that’s kind of the giveaway […] These were voters that just saw, again, [a] major party missing the opportunity to do something for their immediate economic plight.
Labor is losing votes to One Nation. It may not be as much as the Liberals, it may not an existential problem. But it’s enough to make majority government a problem.
Read more:
One Nation takes primary vote lead in Newspoll as Albanese’s ratings slump to record low
