Surely Albo is not going to allow his party to use its how-to-vote cards to elect a party full of anti-Semites to represent the heart of Jewish Melbourne

Latest poll results make grim reading for the Prime Minister, while the Greens appear to be in real trouble.

Monday’s Insightfully polls of Greenland – the six inner-city Brisbane and Melbourne seats where the heart of the Greens party beats strong – will make grim reading for the Prime Minister.

Commissioned by the right-wing activist group Advance from the respected ex-Crosby-Textor pollster Leanne White, they show that in Queensland the leftoid outfit is likely to lose Brisbane and Ryan and is a good show to drop Griffith – all to the LNP.

Things are not better for the Greens in the People’s Republic of Victoria where while its general-secretary, sorry leader, Adam Bandt will be returned with a Pyongyang-like level of primary vote, it won’t be taking next door’s hipster-meets-Hamas-supporter seat of Wills.

But that’s where the good news in this poll ends for the Greens.

Adam Bandt will be returned with a Pyongyang-like level of primary vote. Picture: Nadir Kinani

And for Albo, too, because down in the bagel-belt seat of Macnamara, home to a huge chunk of Melbourne’s Jewish community, Labor’s first-term Labor MP has slipped into third place behind the Liberals and Greens.

The collapse in the ALP primary in Macnamara, a seat it has always held, is not just bad news for the obvious reason – that the government’s a chance to drop an MP – but because it creates an extremely unwelcome moral test for the Prime Minister.

More on that later, but first we should take a minute to note this is the second dose of bad crossbench-related news the PM has to put up with after last week’s Freshwater poll that showed four of the six Teals will struggle to be re-elected – a poll that incidentally would have been much worse for the Climate 200s MPs but for the inclusion of Zali Steggall in Warringah.

Between them these two polls mean that in a worse-case scenario, seven of the MPs Albo could reasonably have expected would be open to supporting him in the event of a hung parliament are a good chance of being replaced by Liberals.

The poll would have been much worse for the Climate 200s MPs but for the inclusion of Zali Steggall. Picture: Martin Ollman

The least surprising of the results is the news that the Greens are in trouble in Brisbane and Ryan.

That’s because the party’s wins there were more akin to the teal victories in the “nice” parts of Sydney, Melbourne and Perth than the socialism-on-the-march victory of Bandt in his inner-city fortress.

In each of these cases, comfortable people in expensive areas of these capitals had decided they’d had enough of that awful Scott Morrison and voted for whoever they thought was most likely to turf the local Liberal.

In some places this was a teal but in Brisbane that wasn’t an option, so these people went Green instead.

The proof these voters were just anti-Liberal rather than a pro-teal and Green is because in Higgins in Melbourne, which on paper should have been a teal gimme, they instead jumped on Labor because its candidate was clearly best placed to knock over the Liberal MP.

The poll results will make grim reading for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: Nikki Short

Without Morrison to run against this time, as the Freshwater poll suggests, it looks like a bunch of these teal votes are going home to the Liberals.

So I suppose it should not surprise us that their cousins in Ryan and Brisbane look as though they are going home, too.

The conservatives are also in the hunt in Griffith, but unlike the other two Queensland seats, the jump in their primary vote appears to have come largely from voters shifting from Labor to the LNP.

The failure of the Greens to cut through in Wills – a seat many expected them to win on redrawn boundaries – is at first glance surprising.

But it turns out the Greens misjudged the appetite of rich Baby Boomers for a three-year-long post-grad seminar of Marxism run by conveners in PLO keffiyehs.

That this should have no appeal to Melbourne’s Jewish community was, in contrast, entirely predictable, and had the government behaved with even a modicum of even-handedness since October 2023, left-wing Jews would have flocked from the Greens to Labor.

But they didn’t, and so to many Jews at this election there seems little difference between the two parties, which is why not only are many of them shifting from Red to Blue, they’re going straight from Green to Blue as well.

Which means there’s a decent chance Labor will wind up being eliminated, and the preferences of its votes will decide who sits in parliament representing one of the two most Jewish seats in Australia.

For almost 30 years, Labor leaders have demanded that the Liberal and National parties “must” put Pauline Hanson last.

Typical was Bill Shorten’s callout to Malcolm Turnbull in 2017: “Why is he still refusing to put One Nation last? He can make all the platitudes he likes, but is it his policy to help One Nation get elected?”

Surely Albo is not going to allow his party to use its how-to-vote cards to elect a party full of anti-Semites to represent the heart of Jewish Melbourne.

Surely the Prime Minister is better than that.

Originally published as Surely Albo is not going to allow his party to use its how-to-vote cards to elect a party full of anti-Semites to represent the heart of Jewish Melbourne