Editor’s view: Trusted poll must be a wake-up call

The Courier-Mail’s trusted YouGov polling should set off alarm bells both inside the Palaszczuk government and state Labor more generally, writes the editor.

Today’s trusted YouGov polling commissioned by The Courier-Mail should set off alarm bells both inside the Palaszczuk government and state Labor more generally.

That Queenslanders are feeling so worried about cost of living pressures, the scourge of youth crime, and a failing hospital system should be a serious worry for a government that will be facing the voters again in 18 months time.

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And the big challenge is that not one of those three can be easily fixed by this government alone – suggesting all will still be there when Queenslanders vote to return Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk for a fourth term on October 26 next year.

The absolute worst thing that those inside Labor can do today is to dismiss this polling. It is of a representative and properly weighted sample of the population by a reputable polling firm, one that got within 0.4 percentage points of the actual result in the March 25 NSW state election.

Anyone inside the halls of power who dismisses this result today as “just a Courier-Mail poll” should hand in their lanyard. Instead, anyone who wants to see Labor win again should concentrate on what the polling shows – and start working on a way to respond.

Nearly 30 per cent of respondents blame the Palaszczuk government for rising prices, as many as say the war in Ukraine is the reason. . Picture: Dan Peled / NCA Newswire

But that will not be easy. Take cost of living, for example. Six in 10 of those polled rated it as among their top two concerns. And nearly 30 per cent of respondents blame the Palaszczuk government for rising prices, as many as say the war in Ukraine is the reason.

These findings alone show just how enormous the challenge will be for the Premier to combat politically. How will she convince the electorate that her government is handling a problem it actually has little control over, and yet that many voters are blaming it for?

The Premier can’t cap mortgage rates, or food prices, or even rents. Her government does have some marginal control over power prices, but really only by handing back to customers some of the profits from its government-owned energy companies – a tactic it has used in the past and is promising to do again, with rebates of more than $175 possible later this year.

And yet the polling shows that growing concern about cost of living pressures is only part of the challenge facing the government.

Poll respondents also listed housing affordability and youth crime as among their most important current concerns – despite the government having dedicated a huge amount of effort in recent months to both issues.

And the pain doesn’t stop there. The poll also reveals growing public concern about the state of the public health system.

Remarkably, nearly half of those polled said they were not confident an ambulance would reach them in time if they were having a heart attack. Almost one in every three of those polled had experienced waits of more than four hours at a hospital emergency department.

Worse than that, from the government’s perspective, the poll revealed more Queenslanders believed an LNP government led by David Crisafulli would be better at the traditional Labor strength of managing hospitals.

Now, health is always a problem for any state government. And the longer a government is in office the easier it is for critics to identify the inevitable shortfalls in service. But you have to at least be seen to be doing something.

So what should the Premier do? For a start, she must move beyond responding to the political crisis of the day with some quickly cobbled-together “action plan”. A far more effective way to govern would be for the Premier to start holding her ministers accountable for fixing problems on their patch. If she fails to do so, these problems will persist until the only poll that matters.

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