Newspoll: Albanese’s capital gains trending up

Anthony Albanese will head to the summer break having banked significant political capital in his first six months of office. He will need it next year.

Anthony Albanese will head to the summer break having banked significant political capital in his first six months of office.

He will need it if next year delivers the conditions economists are predicting.

As Prime Minister, he is in command of the political agenda, using a friendly Senate to govern and deliver a Labor agenda, and he is mostly winning the rhetorical battle.

This is reflected in strong electoral support in the final Newspoll survey of 2022, for both Albanese as Prime Minister and Labor in government.

Some will say that not being Scott Morrison helps.

Peter Dutton. Picture: Martin Ollman

The final sitting week of parliament, which saw Albanese deliver on key election commitments while keeping his foot on the opposition’s neck with a censure motion against the former PM, would have been a contributing factor to an end-of-year lift in popular support for both Labor and Albanese as leader.

More than that, Albanese’s lofty approval ratings now reflect a longer and sustained level of strong satisfaction with his ­performance.

While the Labor leader has finished the year where he wanted, it’s not necessarily where others expected him to be.

Not everyone, even those on his own side, was convinced about his ability to grow into the prime ministerial role.

The only dip in Albanese’s approvals so far have been immediately after the October budget, which fell flat electorally.

Apart from Morrison’s record levels of support in the early days of the pandemic, few prime ministers other than Kevin Rudd have enjoyed a prolonged period of approval at these sorts of levels.

Malcolm Turnbull’s numbers were in the same ball park when he took over from Tony Abbott, but it didn’t last long. Turnbull reached a net rating of plus 35 – equal to that of Albanese a month into his prime ministership – but within six months this had plummeted to minus 10.

Albanese is still at plus 33.

As ominous as this may look for Peter Dutton and the ­Coalition, it’s not as bad as it seems. Dutton’s approval ratings, while poor, aren’t catastrophic.

And while the Coalition has yet to start rebuilding support since its primary vote fell to its lowest on record at an election, it would be naively optimistic to think that it could do much within six months.

It took almost two years for the Coalition primary vote to become competitive again after it lost the 2007 election.

Its primary vote then hovered between 31 per cent and 37 per cent for the first six months of ­opposition.

The current trend is consistent with this. Six months into this term, it is at 35 per cent.

It wasn’t until June 2009 that it hit 40 per cent – and this was only briefly. It wasn’t sustainably above 40 per cent until January 2010, eight months before the election.

The key difference between now and then is that the Coalition then had 65 seats compared with 58 now, suggesting the long road back for Dutton is somewhat steeper.