Stability the key as voters hunker down to ride out the virus

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Dylan Coker

While Labor’s left-wing MPs celebrate a “Biden full moon”, Scott Morrison continues to steadily assemble the electoral ballast for a Coalition re-election campaign perhaps as early as the second half of next year.

The Liberal leader’s high personal approval ratings remain firm, reflecting a stability of government that has been lacking for more than a decade. They have been sustained for longer than just about any other prime minister, rivalling that of Kevin Rudd in his first year of government.

The Coalition’s primary vote — at 43 per cent — is also still a point and a half above it election result. This is also almost without precedent for an 18-month-old re-elected government.

Little has changed over the course of the pandemic. Voters appear to have assessed Morrison and the Coalition and locked in their approval of its management of the crisis. For the time being at least, the political landscape remains largely a case of “It’s COVID, stupid”.

Voters want to remain safe, they want to spend Christmas with their families, they want to keep a job.

While they’ve had to swallow a bitter pill, particularly Victorians, as the rest of the world goes to hell in a hand-basket, Australia appears not such a bad place to be.

As Opposition Leader, Anthony Albanese has a unique challenge. A large percentage of voters have yet come to a conclusion about him: while those uncommitted when it comes to Morrison is at 4 per cent, for Albanese this ranges between 16 and 21 per cent.

The most notable change in the latest Newspoll this week was a rebound in Albanese’s personal approval ratings — an eight-point turnaround marks his second highest net satisfaction ratings this year: positive 4 per cent. This would be more significant if it wasn’t off the back of a similarly sized decline in September and didn’t reflect a return to where he was mid-pandemic.

There will be a temptation to interpret Albanese’s recovery in the latest poll through the lens of the US election and the strong anti-Trump sentiment in Australia, and Labor’s attempt to piggy-back on to a notion that it was somehow an election fought on climate change.

Considering the poll was conducted before Joe Biden was elected puts paid to any suggestion of a “trickle” of progressive leftism across the Pacific, notwithstanding the fact it appears to have gone slightly backwards as a movement.

As one senior Labor MP put it: “The lunar left are now howling at a Biden full moon.”

Putting it in the context of Labor’s convincing win in Queensland would be more plausible, but then Albanese was nowhere to be seen during that campaign so this is equally unlikely.

The most remarkable feature of Albanese’s leadership of the past two weeks has been his success in shutting down the Joel Fitzgibbon/Mark Butler climate wars and finally backing a Labor gas plan.

This would be just as reasonable an explanation for the direct transfer of a single point from the Coalition to Labor — as opposed to the usual minor party preference fiddling — in the latest poll.

Then again, sometimes the best interpretation of polls is that there is little to interpret at all other than a confirmation of a situation pretty normal.