Why Aussies have lost faith in Albo

There’s a realignment going on all around the English-speaking world at the moment that is seeing progressive left parties becoming increasingly the preserve of the white collar, writes James Campbell.

The Australian Labor Party is – as its name suggests – meant to be the party of the workers.

But there’s a realignment going on all around the English-speaking world at the moment that is seeing progressive left parties becoming increasingly the preserve of the white collar.

Earlier this month Donald Trump won a clear majority of blue collar voters.

This poll is yet more evidence Australia is not immune to this trend.

Albo might have grown up in public housing but it’s the managers of Australia who are more likely to think his government has its priorities right, not the workers.

If you subtract the percentage of professionals and managers who think the Government has the wrong priorities from the percentage who think it’s on the right track, you get -6.

Do the same thing for blue collar voters and you get -40.

As I said, the realignment is global, but it’s hard not to wonder if Albo isn’t speeding it up.

Albo might have grown up in public housing but it’s the managers of Australia who are more likely to think his government has its priorities right, not the workers. Picture: Wagner Meier/Getty Images)

The government’s polling woes can be traced to its decision to spend a year in which workers’ standards of living were falling, talking about inserting special rights into the constitution for Indigenous Australians.

That decision, to put the Voice at the heart of Labor’s first term agenda, was Albo’s.

Blue collar Australia voted overwhelmingly against the Voice.

The managers loved it – donating their shareholders’ money to the Yes case, and putting ads for it on the sides of the planes they sit up the front of.

No wonder they’re more inclined to think Albo’s government has its head screwed on.

There’s no global historical trend either driving Albo’s love of flying round the country from A-list event to A-list event, none of which he ever seems to pay for.

The $4.3 million Copacabana beach house in an area of Australia where people are living in caravan parks?

That’s a PM special too.

In this cost-of-living crisis Labor would almost certainly be struggling with blue collar voters but it’s been made worse because, instead of the boss, an Albo-tross about their neck is hung.

Originally published as Why Aussies have lost faith in Albo