Federal election: Plenty for Coalition to exploit in Anthony Albanese’s foibles

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese. Picture: AAP

Scott Morrison’s problem isn’t that voters think him arrogant. They have thought that of most prime ministers and more so of Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott and at times Kevin Rudd.

Nor is a defining issue of the election going to be that a majority of voters don’t trust him. Almost as many don’t trust Anthony Albanese either.

And just because Albanese is apparently marginally more likeable than ScoMo isn’t on its own going to win Labor the election.

The chief concern for the Prime Minister should be the cliff-fall of opinion over time in two other key metrics.

Morrison is now considered significantly more out of touch with voters than his rival and any other prime minister of the past decade. Perhaps more importantly, only 48 per cent of voters think he is demonstrating strong and decisive leadership, another measure by which he is now considered weaker than leaders before him.

There was always going to be a political price to pay for forming a consensus model of pandemic management with the state premiers and territory chief ministers. When things went right, the premiers got the kudos. When they went wrong, Morrison copped the blame.

Labor has conditioned Australians throughout the pandemic to expect government to get everything right all of the time and to foresee the often unforeseeable.

As a consequence of things not always going right in a one-in-100-year viral outbreak, Morrison is now getting blamed for everything else that goes wrong.

They have weaponised natural disasters.

And this has fed a perception that Morrison is leading from behind, a view that has clearly hardened since January and the delays over supply of RATs.

Not that Albanese should be crowing about his own numbers. On balance, they are also weak.

The Labor leader is considered even less decisive and strong than Morrison or Bill Shorten. Indeed, on several measures, averaged out, he fares worse than his predecessor.

What these numbers show is that while Morrison obviously needs to arrest the poor perceptions of his own leadership, there is plenty there for the Coalition to exploit when it comes to Albanese’s foibles.