Matt Cunningham: NT poll paints picture for Labor ahead of 2024 election

Polls in the NT need to be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism, but Labor will be more than a little alarmed this week, writes Matt Cunningham.

POLLS in the Northern Territory need to be taken with a healthy dose of scepticism.

There are large parts of the NT that are impossible to poll, and the Territory’s tiny electorates can mean a sitting member can achieve enough personal popularity to win, even if their party is on the nose more broadly.

These caveats aside, Territory Labor will be more than a little alarmed following the release of a Redbridge poll this week.

It’s the first serious poll made public during this term of government, and since Natasha Fyles took over from Michael Gunner as chief minister last year.

The poll of 601 people in Darwin and Alice Springs shows Labor’s primary vote at just 19.7 per cent.

The Country Liberal Party’s primary vote was more than double Labor’s, at 40.6 per cent.

Even with the poll’s 5.6 per cent margin of error, these numbers will be of serious concern for Labor.

As Redbridge pollster Kos Samaras, a former Labor strategist, said: “It’s a part of the world that behaves drastically differently to the rest of the country and right now, the baseball bats are swinging.”

There are two obvious reasons for the Government’s fall in fortunes; crime and the economy.

Contrary to the cliché, crime rarely decides Territory elections.

But 2024 might be an exception.

As the NT News reported this week, assaults, sexual offences, break-ins, thefts and robberies are at a 10-year high.

The latest NT police statistics show elevated crime rates across almost all offences for the year to September.

This will come as no surprise to most Territorians.

The escalation in crime is literally in your face almost everywhere you go.

I made two trips to two different local supermarkets this week.

On one occasion I witnessed a brawl with chairs being thrown before security guards intervened.

On the other, a woman holding a half-empty bottle of wine took cover inside the supermarket’s front entrance from another woman who was threatening to attack her with a large rock.

These sorts of incidents would shock people in most parts of this country.

Here, they’ve become a normal part of life.

The causes of the crime wave are many and varied.

They’ve been decades in the making and are not the sole fault of this administration.

But the government has been unable to have any impact in addressing this issue.

The government’s bigger problem, however, might be the state of the economy.

Despite declaring in its Boundless Possible creed that the Territory was a place where “if you have a go, you’ll get a go”, those having a go seemed to be stopped in their tracks at every turn.

Whether it’s a bike track at Bagot Park or the Barossa gas field, developments big, small and in between have been curtailed. Figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday showed the NT recorded by far the nation’s worst decline in gross state product, down 5.3 per cent year-on-year.

None of this means next year’s election is a foregone conclusion.

The bush is an unknown quantity and some within Labor are confident they can make a play for the seats of Barkly and Namatjira, which the CLP won by just a handful of votes in 2020. It’s also true that most people won’t have given their vote a minute’s thought at this point. Labor has outcampaigned the CLP at the past two elections and will expect to do the same again in 2024.

Chief Minister Natasha Fyles is a dogged campaigner, and you can bet Labor will try to convince the Territory’s largest voting blok – the public service – that their well-paid jobs are only safe with an ALP government.

Voters thinking of switching to the CLP will also need to convince themselves that the Territory would be better served by a new and inexperienced cabinet, rather than the one it has now, whatever its flaws.

But if Labor can’t make inroads on crime and the economy between now and next August, its path to victory looks narrow.