But it’s worth noting there was another poll this week that had the Coalition ahead and a third poll that had it neck and neck, and all were within the margin of error. So, the last thing any Coalition supporter should do is panic just because the Coalition’s lost momentum over the past few weeks has shown up in the polls.
Because the fundamentals have not changed. There’s still a cost-of-living crisis – and it’s still Anthony Albanese’s fault. The Coalition just has to better sheet home to voters who is responsible for their pain. People have a right to be angry because under this government’s watch our living standards have dropped 8 per cent – the worst in the developed world.
This fall is driven by Labor’s mad energy policy that’s putting power prices through the roof, Labor’s spending addiction that’s keeping mortgage interest rates higher for longer, and Labor’s record immigration numbers that are depressing wages, hiking housing costs and clogging our roads. It is Labor’s green-left ideology that’s made your life harder, and it will only get worse if Albanese is re-elected and dependent on the Greens to keep his job.
My other reason for perspective is personal experience. Back in 2010, in my first election as his chief of staff, Tony Abbott was behind in every poll, but the then opposition leader went on to win more seats than Labor, then led by Julia Gillard. So, here’s what I know as a campaigner: polls don’t drive results – it’s policy and performance that drive political outcomes and that’s what Coalition candidates and supporters should be focused on now.
A month out from the 2010 election, not long after Labor had swapped out Kevin Rudd for Julia Gillard, with the Coalition behind in Newspoll 45-55, nervous Libs were blowing up my phone with text messages of panic. My response was simple: “hold your nerve” and “redouble your efforts”. When people questioned how hungry Abbott was, his response was the 48-hour continuous campaign leading into polling day – a blitz that brought home the soft vote and for the first time in almost a century took a first-term government to the brink.
As I often say to people, we won the seats but lost the negotiation – 73 Coalition seats to Labor’s 72. And, in a salutary reminder of how teals already have a blueprint in up-ending the centre-right instincts of their electorates, it was with the support of those ex-National Party MPs, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor, that Gillard formed her alliance with the Greens and Australia was thrown into chaos with that infamous hung parliament.
In 2019 Scott Morrison, too, was behind in every poll including on election day, and yet he hung on for his miracle win. So, any commentator who claims to know the outcome of this race now disqualifies themselves by that very admission because this is a volatile electorate, the vote across the board is soft and the fundamentals are against a government that has no record to run on, and a leader with backbone of a jellyfish.
Whenever the Coalition has fought on household economic issues (such as power prices) – and where it has made climate change an economic issue rather than a moral one, as Peter Dutton is now doing – it has done well.
It’s only when the Liberal Party effectively me-toos Labor’s climate and emissions policies, as it did with Malcolm Turnbull in 2016, and in 2022, when Morrison signed the Coalition up to net zero – that it has gone backwards (in Turnbull’s case, a devastating double-digit seat loss).
Cost of living is issue one, two, three and four in this election. Most of us are feeling the impact of this crisis and what Dutton must do is point out repeatedly between now and polling day that it’s this government’s energy policy that’s slowly strangling the economy and that Labor’s Big Australia migration push is radically reshaping the country.
Remarkably, the PM has now disowned the RepuTex modelling that the government had previously used to validate Labor’s claims that moving to 82 per cent renewable electricity by 2030 would deliver a $275 per household per year cut to power prices.
Yet even though he now admits the price cut promise was never justified, Albanese still insists that the policy should not be changed.
How can any government push forward with a radical plan to up-end Australia’s entire energy system based on modelling that it has never updated, never republished and now admits is not worth the paper it is printed on? If this were a company, ASIC would already have the directors in jail.
Outside of Europe, Canada and Australia, no net-zero transition is taking place, other than in the rhetoric used at global conferences to shame richer countries into pouring billions into slush funds to atone for their climate crimes. China, India and Russia have never committed to net zero by 2050 and now neither is America, meaning that none of the four biggest emitters is part of the transition that the Albanese government insists is not just “irreversible” but necessary to save the planet.
Because of its spending addiction and union loyalties, modern Labor just can’t do economic reform so it will have no choice but to keep pumping up the Ponzi scheme of high immigration as the only way to sustain nominal economic growth; even though record levels of low-skill migrants are making us all poorer. And if Labor needs Greens votes (plus the votes of the Gucci greens, the teals) to keep a majority in the House of Representatives, in addition to more union power, a larger immigration intake, much greater government spending and a still bigger administrative state, the pressure for the wealth taxes and inheritance taxes and the ever higher refugee intake that the Greens are constantly demanding will be all but irresistible.
Re-electing this hard-left Labor government will put us well down the road to no longer being a First World economy, as well as accelerating their nirvana of diluting the Judaeo-Christian ethic that’s made us the wonderfully humane society that we are – or at least used to be.
Rather than simple inadvertence and incompetence, the government’s decision to issue 3000 tourist visas to largely unvetted people from terrorist-controlled Gaza looks like deliberate indifference to the importance of maintaining Australian values, especially when coupled with its reluctance to deport hate preachers and break up anti-Semitic encampments.
The best explanation for the Prime Minister’s supine failure to call out any of Beijing’s acts of aggression against us – whether that be the trade boycotts, exposing our service personnel to extreme danger or the recent drive-by naval shooting – is that he and his ministers have never really grown out of their undergraduate belief that communism is a liberation movement.
While routinely admitting that these are the most perilous strategic circumstances since the 1930s, these Manchurian candidates take almost no practical action to deal with them, putting off any serious rearmament to the arrival of nuclear-powered submarines a decade hence. Many Labor MPs would be secretly relieved if the price of Greens support for a minority government is the abandonment of AUKUS (and perhaps another former Liberal PM too?).
If ever a campaign mattered, it is this one.
And just as the silent majority roared during the voice, they must again hold their nerve and fight.
More Coverage
Clear winner with the audience
The first debate of the 2025 campaign has set the tone for the next four weeks. Importantly, neither leader made any mistake and there was no stumble.
Putting energy back into common sense
The engineers and bean-counters are back in control of the Queensland electricity system in what should be a template for the national grid.
Polls are a good guide to how you’re going, but not always a good guide as to what to do, in part because they tend to be a lagging indicator. The drop in Newspoll this week should not have been a surprise because the Coalition attack has slowed down in recent weeks.