A Labor leader agreeing with Peter Dutton? It is election season

The Sunday just gone marked five months since Premier Steven Miles’ first cabinet was sworn in, pitched as a fresh face and focus into the final year of Labor’s third term in government. The one coming will signal the same length of time till the state election.

Things sure feel different. For one, Miles is now thanking federal opposition leader Peter Dutton for “echoing” his call for an overseas migration cut, rather than sparring with him over the long link between unions and the Labor Party in the pair’s home state.

Peter Dutton and Steven Miles found themselves, maybe more by design than accident, on the same side of debate around migration this week.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen / Supplied

“You’ll actually note that Peter Dutton has said what I said first, and that is that the level of migration we’re currently experiencing in Queensland is putting too much pressure on our housing system,” Miles told a media conference today when asked if he agreed with Dutton.

“Steven Miles welcomes Dutton’s call to slash migration” read the text banner at the bottom of the ABC’s 24-hour news channel. It wasn’t Miles’ first recent foray into made-for-TV comments either. (A sitting premier grilling supermarket spinners and big wigs, anyone?)

Not to mention the comments in the Monday morning paper with an unclear ultimatum to, ah, trillion-dollar global social media behemoth Meta, joining calls for raising the age limit for accessing such sites to 14.

Some of the detail in updated polling for Brisbane Times, published today, could help explain.

While not unheard of for a government in its third term to fall behind in such surveys, Labor’s support among state voters has been trending downward for the past year - while the opposition’s has trended upward - to combined third-party and independent levels.

Labor’s primary vote over the three-month snapshot sits some 17 percentage points below that of the LNP – and that’s without even diving into the likeability and preference of premiers measured against Opposition Leader David Crisafulli.

But here lies one sliver of silver still lining Labor’s path to a make-or-break post-Palaszczuk election: fewer people are familiar with him than his predecessor, and of those 84 per cent who have heard of him, the balance is more, well, balanced.

This suggests space for some to still be not so negatively swayed by Miles’ personal efforts to inject himself into debate. But at present, and with only 71 per cent knowing Crisafulli, the LNP leader is being seen in a more positive light.

Whether Miles’ personal profile is enough to lift Labor, as many supporters considered Palaszczuk’s was, is a live question. Never mind the gap so far only widening in the measure that counts: primary votes and preference flows.

The problem? Crisafulli’s positive profile appears to be, so far, growing with his recognition – the opposite of what Labor has been attempting to do by so regularly name-dropping him in a negative light rather than the cold-shoulder often given to oppositions.

Crisafulli’s image seems unharmed by Labor efforts to boost his profile on their own terms, perhaps not helped by Labor’s recent trouble selling some ideas to the community.

But as more voters start to tune in as voting approaches, they will be owed more than cries of “chaos and crisis” with little in the way of detailed solutions – however politically beneficial the LNP might find this approach.

What voters do or do not learn about the LNP’s plans then will force Crisafulli and co. to stand on their own. More detail about the platform Dutton will take to his own election within a year, including on nuclear energy, may add more fuel.

This is already becoming clear in Labor attack lines pushing scary uncertainty over the LNP’s vision, while Miles himself appeared to concede last month that Crisafulli would “very likely” be premier when the next government is formed after October 26.

Then again, after tipping further into negative territory in the last snapshot, the biggest cohort of voters in the new polling still believes the next year will bring no change to the outlook of the state (47 per cent) and their personal lives (43 per cent).

But this number did fall. And, while small by comparison to it and those who think things will “get worse”, the proportion of optimists were the only cohort to lift beyond the margin of error.