Newspoll: Roger Cook surging but Anthony Albanese off the boil with half of voters in WA
Half of voters in the crucial election state of Western Australia believe Anthony Albanese does not deserve to be re-elected, despite Premer Roger Cook being on the verge of delivering a third landslide victory for WA Labor.
Half of voters in the crucial election state of Western Australia believe Anthony Albanese does not deserve to be re-elected, despite his state counterpart Roger Cook being on the verge of delivering a third landslide victory for WA Labor.
An exclusive Newspoll conducted for The Australian suggests that the Prime Minister’s ongoing unpopularity in the west has thrown a lifeline to the state’s embattled Liberal Party that could see it claw back a swag of the seats it lost in its historic 2021 election rout.
Just 35 per cent of voters polled in WA agreed that the Albanese government should be re-elected, with 50 per cent saying it was “time to give someone else a go”.
And one in five Labor voters who responded to the poll believe the Prime Minister does not deserve a second term.
The findings will be a major cause for concern for the Albanese government, given its success in the west in the 2022 federal election was key to it securing power in its own right.
Mr Cook, in contrast, faces a far rosier picture ahead of next month’s state election, with Newspoll showing Labor leading the Liberals 56-44 in the west and the Premier enjoying a strong overall satisfaction rating.
His government maintains a comfortable lead despite a swing towards the Liberals of almost 14 per cent. If that swing was sustained evenly across the state, the Liberals and Nationals would pick up another 12 seats: a vast improvement on their current position, but well short of what is needed to seriously challenge Labor’s parliamentary dominance.
Newspoll accurately predicted the stunning 2021 WA election result, correctly forecasting that the Liberals would be reduced to just two of the state’s 59 lower house seats. There had been fears within the WA Liberal Party that another single-digit haul of seats was looking likely, with the latest Newspoll figures likely to temper some of those most dire fears.
Liberal insiders have told The Australian of strong anti-Albanese sentiment among voters during doorknocking across Perth. The Albanese government’s flirtations with nature positive laws, which have been strongly opposed not just by the state’s resources sector but also the Cook government, and its ban on live sheep exports have proved particularly unpopular in WA.
Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek was repeatedly targeted by the Coalition in question time on Thursday. Ms Plibersek had been negotiating with the Greens and other crossbenchers over the policy before Mr Albanese intervened to kill off the bill during this parliament.
Asked on Thursday about the potential impact of federal Labor on the state election campaign, Liberal leader Libby Mettam said WA needed a premier who was willing to take on Mr Albanese.
“We’ve seen that Roger Cook has failed to stand up for WA when it has come to the live export ban, which has overwhelmingly hurt Western Australian farmers. While there has been a pause on nature positive there are very real concerns that that could well come back after the next election,” she said.
“There is very real concern that under Roger Cook’s weak leadership we have a premier who has failed to stand up to Anthony Albanese.”
The swing forecast by Newspoll would still deliver the WA Liberals their second-worst result in the party’s history, and would be poorer than the 2017 landslide defeat that prompted a party review and which was thought at the time to be the party’s lowest ebb.
But such a swing would deliver a host of new names into the parliament and give the party something to work with in 2029, when Labor would be pushing for a fourth term.
The near-certainty around the election result has taken some of the heat out of the campaign. Asked if the expectations of another comfortable Labor win made it hard for her to pitch a vision to voters, Ms Mettam acknowledged that it was “challenging”.
“There is a responsibility on all of us to be able to present a better future for Western Australia,” she said.
“This is an election of great contrasts. On one hand, you’ve got the Liberal Party, who have very diminished resources, and a Labor government who have extraordinary resources, in fact, the most resources of any modern government in Western Australian history.”
Newspoll found that Mr Cook recorded a strong popularity rating for a leader trying to shepherd his government into a third term. Some 55 per cent of voters said they were satisfied with Mr Cook’s performance as premier, compared to 37 per cent who were dissatisfied.
That is significantly better than other premiers ahead of their most recent elections, such as Danial Andrews in Victoria (51-44), Steven Marshall in SA (48-47), Dominic Perrottet in NSW (43-33), and Steven Miles in Queensland (41-51). Of those four, only Mr Andrews was re-elected.
Mr Cook, meanwhile, spent a second-straight day on the hustings attacking star Liberal candidate Basil Zempilas.
The media personality was ordered by the Local Government Standards Panel to issue a public apology after he had kept the title Lord Mayor of Perth on the Facebook page he is using during his election campaign. The panel found that constituted a minor breach of the Local Government Act.
Mr Cook said that while Mr Zempilas’ breach was not serious, it showed that Mr Zempilas did not believe the rules applied to him.
“This is someone who’s standing up to present themselves to the people of Western Australia saying that they should be a representative in the WA parliament. Before that process has really got going, they’ve already shown that they’ve got a scant regard for the rules and under which we operate,” Mr Cook said.
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