‘They’ve turned off Allan’: Victorian Labor vote plunges to historic low, poll shows

The Allan government is facing a historic collapse in public support, as a new poll shows Labor’s primary vote slumping to a record low 22 per cent, down 6 points in two months.

If replicated at next year’s state election, the results of the latest Resolve Political Monitor survey would bring to an end 12 years of Labor rule and deliver a Coalition government in Victoria for just the second time this century.

More immediately, they point to a previously unthinkable challenge for the ALP before a looming byelection in Werribee, a nominally safe western suburbs seat it has held since 1979.

On Thursday, the Victorian and federal governments announced a jointly funded package of $333.5 million in road upgrades for major arterials in and around Werribee aimed at addressing traffic complaints plaguing the outer suburban area.

The poll, conducted exclusively for The Age across two surveys in early December and mid-January, puts Labor’s primary vote down 6 points from the previous Resolve result.

It suggests that since the November 2022 state election, when former premier Daniel Andrews led his party to a crushing third consecutive win, one out of three people who voted for Labor have abandoned the party.

To put this into a national political context, Victorian Labor’s primary vote is tracking well below the 32.6 per cent recorded by Queensland Labor in last year’s state election, when it lost government after nine years in power, and below the 25.3 per cent primary vote recorded by the West Australian Coalition in its 2021 electoral wipe-out.

The Coalition primary vote of 42 per cent is up by more than 7 points since the 2022 election, while 37 per cent of respondents indicated that if an election were held today, they would vote for the Greens, an independent or other parties

The voters who have deserted Labor have shifted in roughly even numbers to either the Coalition or third parties.

Resolve Political Monitor does not publish a two-party preferred figure with its poll results due to the difficulty of calculating how preferences may flow at future elections. Based on preference flows at the last state election, the results equate to a two-party split of 55.5 to 44.5 in the Coalition’s favour.

The Coalition, which has governed for only four of the past 25 years in Victoria, needs to gain 17 seats to win the next state election.

The new poll shows that former Liberal leader John Pesutto had boosted his party’s vote and was in an election-winning position at the time he was dumped by his party room colleagues.

It also suggests the change of leaders two days after Christmas was relatively cost-free. In a survey taken just three weeks after Brad Battin became opposition leader, he led Allan as preferred premier by 10 points.

The recorded collapse in Labor’s primary vote will be treated cautiously by political observers and requires some caveats. The next state election is nearly two years away, which means voters are less likely to be focused on the political contest, and December and January are months when people are generally less engaged in state and national affairs.

Like all opinion polls, it is an indicator of voter sentiment at the time of the survey, rather than a predictor of future election outcomes.

The twin surveys were taken on either side of long-serving former treasurer Tim Pallas’s departure from politics, and during renewed scrutiny of the government’s financial management and mounting debt. They also cover a tumultuous period for the opposition, including the verdict in the Moira Deeming defamation case, which prompted her return to the Liberal party room and Battin replacing Pesutto as leader.

Resolve director Jim Reed said the result, while dramatic, continued a trend his surveys had been detecting since Andrews retired from politics in September 2023 and his preferred successor Allan was sworn in as premier.

“Voters have been peeling away from Labor for much of this term, but this is a step change that takes them to a historical low point,” Reed said.

“It’s almost as though Victorians had given Allan until the end of the year, but deserted her when she didn’t deliver.”

Reed said that despite the instability within the Liberal Party, which played out through a series of party room meetings and backroom machinations in December, the respondents to his survey were squarely focused on the Labor government and Allan’s performance as premier.

“People obviously don’t know Battin well yet, and one of his major tasks will be to introduce himself, but amazingly he’s already preferred premier,” he said.

“That’s a sign of just how much they’ve turned off Allan.”

The next material test of voter sentiment in Victoria will be the February 8 Werribee byelection triggered by the resignation of Pallas, who held the seat at the last election with a 10.9 per cent margin.

The mortgage-belt seat, which has not been in Liberal hands since the Hamer government, is being targeted by Battin’s newly honed pitch to outer-suburban voters and a slew of independents.

In Werribee, the new funding will upgrade the Werribee Main Road-Princes Freeway Interchange to cut peak travel times by increasing capacity and reducing bottlenecks in peak periods. There will also be an upgrade to the Ballan Road intersection in Wyndham Vale.

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