Newspoll: Scott Morrison rides out darkness before the dawn

Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Picture: Getty Images

Scott Morrison last week described the current stage of pandemic as the darkness before the dawn.

The idiom appears to be as true a statement for the political situation the Coalition finds itself in as it is for the course of the pandemic itself.

The politics of Covid have written the politics of the country for the past 18 months.

Around this time last year, all leaders, including the Prime Minister, were still riding a wave of unprecedented approval.

It has now entered a new chapter, with community fear compounded by growing anger and deepening partisan divisions between the federal government and state Labor premiers.

The frustration is nowhere more evident than for the millions of people locked down in the two largest states of Victoria and NSW.

The latest Newspoll results are doubtless driven primarily by discontent in the two lockdown states that happen to be the largest by population and electoral weight.

Evidence for this is supported by the fact that the contest between Morrison and Anthony Albanese remains relatively unchanged.

Morrison still maintains a comfortable lead over his rival, if not a marginally improved one on the previous poll, whereas the most noticeable movement in the headline numbers has been the leakage in voter intention to “other” minor parties.

That is, those other than the Greens or Pauline Hanson’s One Nation – reflecting a shift not from right to left but from right to further right or elsewhere. The question is whether the shift is a transient one, as is more likely, rather than a transitional one, which would be dire.

Taking the polls on face value, Morrison and the Coalition have been here before.

The last time Newspoll had the Coalition in this position was in March 2019, two months before the election. Its primary vote was 36 per cent compared with Labor’s 39 per cent.

The two-party-preferred vote was 54-46 in Labor’s favour.

No one, or at least very few people, believed Labor could lose that election. Yet it did.

There are similarities but also key differences, apart from the obvious absence of a pandemic 2½ ago.

As preferred prime minister, Morrison led opposition leader Bill Shorten by 43 per cent to 36 per cent in the March 2019 poll. He now leads Albanese 50 per cent to 34 per cent.

While Morrison’s approval ratings today are in similar territory to then, he remains the only leader of the past five years to remain more consistently in positive territory.

Morrison knows that he is in for a rough few months, having ­decided his national plan for re-opening the country at a 70-80 per cent vaccination rate is in the best interests of the country both economically and socially, while maintaining a health imperative that ensures lives are saved.