Yesterday’s Newspoll was startling for one simple reason: the pandemic management rating Scott Morrison received. Not because it was surprising, rather because it has plummeted as much as it has.
In April last year, 85 per cent of this country blindly put its faith in the way Morrison was handling the pandemic. It is now just 48 per cent. We are no longer all in this together. States are divided and snapping at each other. The mutual respect the PM and NSW Premier once had for each other appears to be over. Partisan differences are coming to the fore right around the country and certainly in Canberra. And the voting public is frustrated and scared as Delta continues to pose challenges seemingly beyond our policy makers.
It is all Morrison’s fault apparently.
The shift in 16 months from 85 per cent satisfaction to just 48 per cent is politically dangerous for a PM who has to face the voters by May next year – especially when pandemic management will be the one and only issue on which the forthcoming election will be decided.
The irony is that in April last year Morrison wasn’t even handling the pandemic all that well. His messaging was confusing, late night media conferences doing more to cause panic than calm. Schools were definitively safe, masks were unnecessary, disputes with state border closures were just around the corner.
While there are now problems with the vaccine rollout, the simple fact is any comparative analysis with the rest of the world highlights how much better we’ve handled this crisis than everyone else. But voters have memories like goldfish: there is no gratitude for the upsides of Australia’s pandemic management. Millions of Australians are locked down and at risk of losing their jobs. They blame Morrison, not the unavoidable realities of a global pandemic.
The Coalition will be banking on that 48 per cent figure lifting as vaccination rates lift, which they are steadily doing as more supply comes on stream. The unknown is whether doubts voters now have when it comes to Morrison are easily flipped, as they were from his horrendous handling of the bushfires at the beginning of 2020 to the early months of the pandemic. He hit that 85 per cent pandemic management approval rating surprisingly soon after his polls had crashed for his thoughtlessness when it came to bushfires.
But can Morrison turn things around again?
Probably is the likely answer. Butting up against that likelihood, however, is how hard NSW had been hit by the latest problems. Morrison’s home state is where he hopes to win seats off Labor to help arbitrage defeats in other states. This includes in the Hunter, Sydney’s west and on the central coast. All three areas have been badly impacted by the latest lockdown, which helps explain why Morrison and Gladys Berejiklian are now the best of enemies. He said it wasn’t a race to get vaccinated, she now says oh yes it is. He says the way out of this crisis is lockdowns, she says it is more vaccines. (It is neither by the way, the evidence around the world is that vaccines don’t overcome lockdowns when it comes to the Delta strain. Buckle up for a difficult decade everyone.)
Morrison and Berejiklian are circling one another and no longer operating in harmony. But it is Morrison who must face the voters first.
To be sure, the Newspoll – while favouring Labor – is far from a worst-case scenario for the Coalition government federally. The primary vote of 39 per cent apiece is recoverable for team Morrison, and a two party vote of 47 per cent for the Coalition government this far out from the last election would have been a godsend. Importantly, the fine print from this latest poll also shows a rise in uncertain voters, which suggests that while some Coalition support has ebbed away, there is as much political hesitancy among voters about giving the reins of power to Labor and Anthony Albanese as there is vaccine hesitancy in the community.
Opinion polls are a mere snapshot in time, and this latest one suggests if an election were held now it would see Albo elected PM. But the circumstances all favour Labor right now, and the election remains a long way off. No one in Labor is getting ahead of themselves and no one in the Coalition is panicking. Not yet.
Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.
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