Scott Morrison caught between perceptions and Anthony Albanese doing a Bradbury

Fighting an election where premiers can impose arbitrary shutdowns is a deadly proposition for Scott Morrison. Picture: Christian Gilles

Scott Morrison risks losing the next election to a Labor leader seen by a majority of Australians as their second choice.

The Coalition has been unable to leverage the booming economic and labour market recovery into a clear lead over the ALP.

Josh Frydenberg’s big-spending budget, delivering more than $50bn in new money for essential social services, has failed to trouble the scorers.

For the past six months, Newspoll has shown the major parties running neck-and-neck, with Labor edging out the Coalition after preferences.    

The risk for Morrison is that Australia’s health success in fighting Covid-19 is now overshadowed by the politics of the vaccine rollout.

This is a fight Morrison cannot afford to lose, with his political future tied to the delivery of vaccine supply, general take-up and achievement of a post-lockdown Australia.

Fighting an election where premiers can impose arbitrary shutdowns on the basis of a handful of cases is a deadly proposition for Morrison.

 

Yet this is the fight Anthony Albanese wants.

He is already setting up the key political test for voters.

“Scott Morrison had two jobs in 2021,” Albanese says.

“Roll out the Covid-19 vaccine and fix the nation’s broken quarantine system.

“The PM has bungled both.”

The most recent Newspoll analysis shows worrying signs for the Coalition, including a nearly 10-point drop in Morrison’s approval ratings.

This trend is most notable among women and in the states of Western Australia and Queensland, whose premiers have become the chief critics of the Prime Minister’s pandemic management.

Despite the downward slide for Morrison, the underlying trends for Albanese are worse.

A majority of Australians rate Morrison the better leader — a trend replicated across all states, including WA and Queensland.

Anthony Albanese is setting up the vaccine rollout as the key political test for voters. Picture: Jono Searle

Women prefer Morrison as prime minister over Albanese by a margin of 55-28 per cent.

Morrison also has a net positive approval rating of 18 per cent compared with Albanese’s negative rating of -6 per cent.    

The problem for Morrison is these metrics are not reflected in the two-party-preferred vote, which points to a Labor win at the next election.

Changing this will be key to any Morrison victory and it requires him to promote more clearly to voters the distinct choice in leadership, character and policy they face at the federal level.

The reality is that this choice has been obscured over the past 18 months by the elevated profile of the premiers, the creation of national cabinet and emergence of major political disputes between the commonwealth and the states.

Federal Labor has taken a back seat during the pandemic.

And while Newspoll shows voters are growing increasingly frustrated with Morrison, Labor’s conundrum is that they are even less fond of Albanese.