Major parties now confront a new political reality

Outside war or natural disaster, neither Labor nor the Coalition are ever likely to recover 40 per cent or more of the primary vote.

The Liberal party is facing a catastrophic loss of identity in the community with a leader unknown to most.

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Anthony Albanese will stroll into parliament this week with his thumping election victory under one arm and the first Newspoll of his second term under the other.

It will take restraint not to batter his opponents with this renewed and unexpected political authority.

Hubris is now the enemy for Labor. The Icarus curse looms with the Prime Minster’s wings already singed.

But the problem for the Liberal Party is far greater. It is facing a catastrophic loss of identity in the community with a leader unknown to most.

If the election result wasn’t bad enough, the Newspoll results confirm a continuity and deepening of the political crisis for the conservative side of politics.

For the first time in 40 years, the combined primary vote of the Liberal/Nationals parties has fallen below 30 per cent.

This is most likely an historical record for both parties considering Newspoll only commenced polling in November 1985.

Its primary vote of 29 per cent is the lowest ever recorded. Broken down, the Liberal Party share of this is presumably around 23 to 24 per cent, if one includes the Liberal elements of the Queensland LNP. The Nationals makes up the rest.

This means that in most states, One Nation is now securing a greater share of the primary vote than the Nationals. In NSW, PHON secures almost double the vote of the Coalition’s agrarian partner. So which can now be considered the fringe conservative party?

The Liberal Party has only one in four to one in five voters supporting it, compared to almost one in six voting for independents (teals included) or minor parties other than the Greens or PHON.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has to find a formula to talk to both the moderate and conservative sides of the Coalition. Picture: NewsWire / John Gass

The scale of the challenge now facing Sussan Ley as the new Liberal leader is one seemingly somewhere beyond the Everest peak.

A reference point for the downward trend that has been apparent for some time is the fact that the first ever Newspoll showed the Coalition on a primary vote of 42 per cent and Labor on 49 per cent.

At its peak in the mid-’90s, the Coalition’s primary vote reached 55 per cent. Even Labor managed to secure a primary vote of 50 in the late ’80s.

The days of the majors commanding 90 per cent plus of the primary vote are well and truly over. And there appears to be a permanency in the new arrangement, one reflected globally in many Western democracies, which suggests that neither Labor nor the Coalition will ever record a primary vote above 40 per cent at an election ever again outside a crisis or war.

For Labor this appears less of a problem, considering it can conjure up a 57/43 per cent two-party preferred lead over the Coalition on a primary vote of just 36 per cent. And this is exactly what the first Newspoll since the May 3 election demonstrates.

This is the strongest position that the Albanese government has found itself in since August 2022.

By comparison, the Coalition is now presumably at its weakest point.

This is not uncommon for a post-election honeymoon 2.0. The first Newspoll following the 2022 election saw a similar fall for the Coalition under Peter Dutton – almost 3 per cent. The difference is that it was coming from a higher base. And it is the base that has been eroded.

But for the government, the rise in support is not on the scale it enjoyed last time around. Its primary vote has lifted 1.4 per cent to 36 per cent. At the same point following the 2022 election, it rose 4.4 per cent.

Newspoll shows approval of Anthony Albanese’s performance is significantly subdued. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

And approval of Albanese’s performance is significantly subdued this time around. His net approval in July 2022 was plus 35 per cent. It’s now at zero.

On the surface this may appear to be a poor result considering the second honeymoon voters have given Labor. But charted against the performance of PMs since Julia Gillard, outside the pandemic, it’s not outside the average.

For Albanese, this is probably a reasonable result.

This is the new political landscape. And within it, the Coalition must now navigate its own crisis of duality.

It has challenges on the moderate side and the conservative side. To ignore either in favour of the other would be perilous. And this only emphasises the juggling act Ley has to perform. She has to find a formula to talk to both sides.

So far Ley is the great unknown. And her numbers aren’t inconsistent with the debut performances of opposition leaders.

Ley’s numbers align largely with those of Peter Dutton in his first outing as leader and Albanese’s as Labor leader in 2019, when the uncommitted vote averaged around 25 per cent.

Any hope that by simply not being Dutton would improve the Coalition’s stocks will have been wildly unfounded.