Echoes of Kevin Rudd in Anthony Albanese’s popularity slide

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: Getty Images

In the last six months of campaigning for the referendum for an indigenous voice to Parliament, voter satisfaction with Anthony Albanese has fallen 12 percentage points, from a near historical high of 57 per cent to 45 per cent in Newspoll.

It is clear as Prime Minister Albanese is paying a price for seeming to be distracted from the main issue of cost-of-living pressures on peoples’ lives by a moral issue that is not the top priority of ordinary Australians.

What’s more, it appears his crusade for an indigenous voice to parliament and executive government could face a devastating defeat at Saturday’s referendum.

Voter satisfaction may seem to be a mere ancillary figure to the more telling crushing support for the no vote in the referendum but there is an historical parallel which will send shivers down the collective spine of the ALP.

In the same period of time – just six months – Kevin Rudd suffered the same loss in voter satisfaction – 13 points – as he fought for the moral issue of climate change and dealt badly with illegal boat arrivals and asylum-seeker policy.

In political terms the weight given to voter satisfaction and dissatisfaction with a leader is far less important than the polling for primary vote, preferred prime minister and the two-party preferred calculation but it can presage problems for both the Prime Minister and the Government.

Voter satisfaction – which can be used to provide an index of voter feeling by calculating the difference between satisfaction and dissatisfaction – for Albanese in the latest Newspoll was minus 1, only the second time he has had a minus reading.

Just in May Albanese had a 57 per cent rating for voter satisfaction and dissatisfaction of just 38 per cent – a differential of positive 19 percentage points.

In the six months between October 2009 and April 2010 voter satisfaction with then prime minister Rudd fell from 63 per cent to 50 per cent and dissatisfaction rose from 28 per cent to 41 per cent.

Rudd’s historical high of voter satisfaction was 71 per cent and was 67 per cent in mid-October 2008.

But as Rudd started to push for his carbon pricing scheme – the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme – to address climate change as “the moral challenge of our lifetime” voter satisfaction fell rapidly. His campaign went badly, he didn’t get it through parliament and in April 2009 backed away.

Simultaneously, Rudd was failing to deal with growing illegal boat arrivals, a far greater concern among the public than climate change, and lost all credibility when an Australian ship was stranded in Indonesia with 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers trying to reach Australia.

Rudd had been distracted from a prime concern of the public while trying to create a system to address climate change and failed. Voter satisfaction plummeted and never returned to the giddy heights of 70 per cent.

Indeed, the collapse of the climate change plans, anger over the asylum seeker issue and the onset of Labor’s mishandling of the mining tax ensured Rudd’s voter satisfaction never went above 50 per cent again and was the leading indicator for a collapse of support for him as leader and for Labor as a government. Indeed it was the end of Rudd’s leadership.

It all started with voter satisfaction falling first.

Albanese needs to ensure that if the voice referendum fails he immediately shifts back to focus on cost-of-living remedies for households and doesn’t revisit a moral campaign or blunder on a major policy.

Voter satisfaction may be the least important of the Newspoll indices but it can be a deadly leading indicator.