Australians have sent the Albanese government a clear, unambiguous message: get your act together.
The decline in electoral support has been sharp and swift. A four-point fall in primary vote support in the space of three weeks is the largest single drop in this election cycle so far.
It has tipped Labor into negative territory next to its election result and elevated the Coalition on to an equal footing on the two-party-preferred vote.
If an election were held on these numbers, Labor would likely be in minority government with the loss of almost half a dozen seats.
This theoretical prospect will present an unexpected and destabilising development for Labor caucus as it meets this week formally for the last time this year.
A different mood will prevail to the one earlier this year when Anthony Albanese addressed his MPs and boasted of Labor’s superiority, listing the seats he believed Labor would win at the next poll.
This has all changed. A two-term proposition is under threat, only midway through the first.
Not that the Coalition is in any position to believe it could form government.
Labor now proceeds into the second half of the term on the defensive, with its ascendancy having evaporated at a faster pace than for the Rudd/Gillard government.
The effect of the Reserve Bank’s recent interest rate hike and warnings of more to come can’t be underestimated.
There is clearly now deep electoral irritation. While the referendum defeat caused significant harm to Albanese personally, the party is now copping it as well.
The policy inertia and political paralysis that appears to have seized Labor since the referendum loss is reverberating electorally.
Albanese appears disengaged and the government adrift. The rhetorical and policy response to multiple political crisis – immigration detention, Chinese military aggression, anti-Semitism – has exposed a structural weakness within the party, an absence of ideological rigour and a failure of political management.
These are the events of government that determine its competence. Some of it will be short-lived, but it is the worsening economic outlook and the rapid decline in living standards that is surely now having the greatest impact in the polls.
Until now, the Albanese government had avoided blame for people’s worsening circumstances.
The latest Newspoll poses the question as to whether that linkage has now been made.
The impact of the referendum loss appears two-fold. Albanese has been damaged for backing a losing proposition, reinforcing a perception he was out of touch with mainstream Australia. At the same time, the perceived lack of attention to the core economic imperative is now biting.
This is the first poll since the election where the 2PP contest has narrowed to 50-50.
Even Peter Dutton will be surprised that fortune has turned so acutely the Coalition’s way. It took the Tony Abbott-led opposition almost three years to tighten the contest to this point in 2010.
Labor’s primary vote at 31 per cent is below where it was at the election, while the Coalition has built on its own result, lifting to 38 per cent with a leader widely considered unpopular.
This is not a winning formula for the Coalition, although the Howard government won the 1998 election with a primary vote of 39.51 per cent.
Nevertheless, it is bound to have an impact on how Albanese and Labor reframe the forward agenda if the party’s internal research is reflecting a similar electoral mood.
Albanese is now on a net approval rating of minus 13, level with Dutton, whom Labor believes is unelectable.
This is a strategy that must now surely be under revision.
The only measure on which Labor is now ahead is who would make the better PM.
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