Labor leads race to minority in contest over tax and housing

Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton. Artwork: Frank Ling

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Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese are now locked into a shock and awe campaign to seduce swinging outer suburban voters and solve generational housing inequity with the expectation that the nation is heading toward a second hung parliament that few Australians want.

Both leaders appeal to the same common concerns. Both make claims to the mantle of delivering the dream of home ownership. And both have rewritten the fiscal rule books in their competing cost-of-living tax relief offerings. Neither side wants to be outdone. Yet both now stand accused by economists of having abandoned discipline in budget management while appear bewilderingly unenlightened by the experience of inflation.

But their visions for Australia are in conflict. Dutton put it most simply. Voters need to decide whether they want to remain dependent on government or independent of government.

The coming days will now decide the outcome of this contest. Empathy and strength of leadership are the competing themes in a trial of character.

Albanese’s appeal to fear is the risk of going back to the past. Dutton points to Labor’s role in the steepest decline in living standards in the nation’s history. Sunday’s Coalition campaign launch was the Opposition Leader’s big moment.

Dutton needed game-changing policy to capture the attention of aggrieved households while appealing to an angry army of marginalised younger voters.

Everything is now riding on how his pitch is received. His housing plan is bold and his tax cuts appealing, but will they be enough?

The Prime Minister’s goal was less complex. Labor’s aim now is to snap-freeze the campaign and prevent any momentum swinging back Dutton’s way. There is a softness in the vote that suggests risk remains for the government. The polls are tighter heading into this election than they were before the last. But the latest Newspoll numbers reveal the magnitude of Dutton’s task.

It is an even bet as of today whether Labor will be returned as a majority government or is forced to negotiate power in a hung ­parliament.

It will be Victoria that decides.

While there are still three weeks to go, the downward trend for both the Liberal leader and the Coalition continued during the second week of the campaign.

Something remarkable will have to happen between now and May 3 for the Coalition to reverse the decline and engineer an unlikely victory of its own, in any form. Time is running out for this to occur.

And voter expectations of the outcome have shifted in accordance as the combined vote for the major parties falls to a new record low of 68 per cent.

As recently as January, the money was on the Coalition to form government with a majority of voters, 53 per cent, expecting the Liberal/Nationals to rewrite history by unseating a first term government.

This was reflected in voter intention. The Coalition was leading 51-49, its primary vote was on 39 per cent and Anthony Albanese had bottomed out with record-low approval ratings.

This has now reversed to a 63 per cent expectation of Labor being re-elected. The problem for Albanese is that of this group, a majority expect a minority government.

The latest Newspoll shows that the Coalition is now back to where it was almost two years ago, before the voice referendum.

At 35 per cent, the primary vote is below its last election result. It has not only lost all the ground conquered over the course of this term, it has ceded more.

But not all to Labor.

While it is the third Newspoll in a row to show a fall in primary vote support for the Coalition, it is also the third to show Labor’s primary vote stuck at 33 per cent. Labor has failed to make any ground on its last election result, which produced the lowest primary vote for Labor on polling day since the Great Depression.

The beneficiary of the Coalition’s decline has been Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, where the disaffected Liberal and Nationals voters have decided to park their vote to elevate the minor right wing party’s support to 8 per cent nationally – a three-point gain on its last election result.

It is a return to the post-election dynamic for the Coalition. While Dutton managed to claw back the base following the voice referendum, he has done little since to make it stick.

The other problem that underwrites the Coalition’s challenge now is the turnaround in approval for Albanese. The Prime Minister has turned a minus 21 deficit in January into an almost neutral assessment of his performance in the latest poll.

This is the most significant change on the Labor side, driven by performance and external events.

Albanese has strung together three months in a row of mistake-free footy – something that has been absent from the show since the end of 2022.

In as much as the Coalition was favoured, its previous lead in the polls appears to have been more an opportunity to square up on Albanese and Labor because they weren’t focused on the right ­issues.

Dutton on the other hand has experienced a steady decline from a position of authority on this measure just three months ago. His approval ratings are now the lowest for an opposition leader in the context of an election campaign since Bill Shorten.

There is now a significant structural advantage for Labor in the leadership contest.

For the Coalition, a reversal in the current campaign dynamics will need to occur for Dutton to be catapulted back into the game.