Return to 50-50 on two-party vote is bad optics for Anthony Albanese

Labor Leader Anthony Albanese speaks at Queensland Labor’s State Conference in Brisbane on the weekend. Picture: Richard Walker

Yesterday’s Newspoll was interesting for one primary reason: the major parties are back level pegging on the two party vote.

It was a statistically insignificant change. The primary votes of the majors was unchanged, and the margin of error wasn’t really tested. The reason things tightened up was because of minor changes in preference flows courtesy of even more minor adjustments in the voting patterns of those polled who choose not to identify with either major party.

But a government supposedly on the nose across a host of policy fronts as much as 12 months out from needing to call an election isn’t supposed to be level pegging. John Howard rarely was. In fact this far out from Election Day he was behind going into three of the four elections he faced as PM.

While headlines and analysis have largely focused on the tightening net satisfaction ratings of the prime ministerial candidates, Scott Morrison remains a long way out in front of Anthony Albanese on that score.

Morrison’s net satisfaction rating is positive and in double digits. Albo’s is negative, almost in double digits (-9). That’s quite a lead, and it is only re-enforced when you traverse the better PM stakes which clearly have Morrison out in front. A narrowing is to be expected as we creep closer towards an election, not to mention as managing post pandemic Australia becomes more testing.

To be sure, winning a fourth term won’t be easy for this Coalition government – especially with unfavourable boundary changes and its lost majority this term courtesy of defections. It actually has to go hunting for new seats to pick up to again form majority government.

But those seats are out there and marginal seat Labor MPs know it. For every seat a government takes off an opposition, the opposition needs to win two to keep chugging along trying to find the numbers to win. The degree of difficult rises sharply.

Those potential Coalition pick ups are spread all over the country. In New South Wales the risks for Labor are greatest. In and around the Hunter region there are three gettable seats. Add to those Gilmore, Dobell, Macquarie and perhaps even Parramatta (if the local Labor MP retires). The Liberals will also be expecting to win back Hughes back from Craig Kelly following his defection. And even Eden Monaro isn’t out of the question for the Coalition with the right candidate.

Victoria is a holding pattern for the Liberals with more downsides than upsides when you look around the state, that’s for sure. But the government would still be hopeful of reclaiming Dunkley, for example.

WA and Queensland are similarly holds rather than states in which to target major gains, but the WA seat of Cowan is always a tough Labor hold and the Liberals could run the incumbent member for Stirling given his seat has been abolished. In Queensland, Wayne Swan’s old seat of Lilley and Shayne Neumann’s current seat of Blair aren’t out of the question either.

In South Australia, as long as Liberals hold Boothby despite the retirement of Nicolle Flint, they will be happy, but in Tasmania they are very hopeful of jagging Lyons from Labor, as well as holding the two they won at the last election, Braddon and Bass. And there is a seat to be gained in the Northern Territory which the government is confident about.

Of course the Coalition will fall well short in a number of the seats mentioned, and it will certainly lose others along the way. Queensland in particular is at a near-to-high water mark at present.

But the states where Labor needs to win seats, like resources centres such as WA and Queensland, see the policy debates running against them. That adds to Albo’s degree of difficulty.

While Labor is well and truly in this contest, one thing Albo can’t afford is for his own troops to begin feeling like he will lose and Labor will go backwards. That sort of news leads to leadership speculation, which worsens an already tough reality. It also can see his lieutenants spending more time positioning for after a loss than they spend working hard for victory.

Morrison’s post-pandemic glow is being tested with failures of hotel quarantine and the slow vaccine rollout. The lockdown in Victoria coupled with aged care problems may of itself be enough to put Victorian seats in real jeopardy.

But a return to 50-50 on the two party vote is bad optics for an opposition that needs to keep morale high, even if the changes to Newspoll are statistically insignificant.

Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University