Newspoll: Coalition’s election hopes off the ventilator, but still in ICU

With the election due to be called within days, the Coalition seems to have come off the ventilator … although it remains in ICU.

The pre-campaign Newspoll on the surface would appear to be the beginning of the beginning of a potential political recovery for the government after months in palliative care. Two things stands out in the numbers.

The character assassinations seem to have landed in a nil-all draw.

Scott Morrison has gone up marginally in the face of the slings and arrows from his side.

Anthony Albanese. Picture: Steve Pohlner

Anthony Albanese has gone marginally backwards for the same. Both are in negative approval territory, which seems to have become a feature of elections since 2007.

It is what has happened to the Labor primary vote in the space of three weeks that warrants attention – a three-point fall is significant enough to be alarming for Albanese. If the budget and budget-reply speech are considered to have had a relatively neutral ­effect to the underlying levels of baseline support, then the question is: what has happened?

It’s hard to dismiss a likelihood that Labor’s internal outpouring over the death of Kimberley Kitching and the disappearing act by the party leader amid claims the late senator was bullied by ­female colleagues had an impact.

The Coalition, until now, has failed to define Albanese as a threat. On this issue, however, it found a powerful line that when the going got tough, he was nowhere to be found. But before anyone on the ­Coalition side gets excited, two of the three points that have come off the Labor ledger have gone to the Greens.

Only one has gone to the ­Coalition. With the other minor parties and independents securing no more than they had at the last election, the Coalition can’t solely rely on the notion that it needs to swing more votes back from the right. A lift in primary vote to 36 per cent suggests the budget didn’t deliver the boost in popular support that the 2019 pre-election budget did. On these numbers, the ­Coalition still isn’t within striking distance. It has significant ground to make up. In the lead-up to the 2019 election, the Coalition had begun a similar recovery but by this same point out from that election, it had begun to pull ahead of Labor – 38 per cent to 37 per cent. It will argue that at least the needle is starting to move in the right direction.