Scott Morrison must regain initiative as brutal ALP tactics take toll

The strength of Scott Morrison’s popularity had been the key to the government’s predominance. Picture: AFP

Scott Morrison is the target of a co-ordinated and unbridled political campaign directed by the state labor premiers and the federal opposition. And it’s working.

On the latest Newspoll numbers, the Morrison government would obviously lose an election. And probably lose it badly.

What will be of most concern to the coalition strategists is not the slide in Morrison’s approval ratings over time.

While they have gone from a peak net positive of 41 to just six, they remain in positive territory.

What should trouble them is Labor’s primary vote of 39 per cent. This would no longer appear to be an aberration but a consolidation of popular support at levels significantly above the 33 per cent it achieved at the 2019 election.

Even with a soft Coalition primary vote, the strength of Morrison’s popularity had been the key to the government’s predominance. This is now starting to fade in tandem with a collapse in the Coalition’s primary vote.

This is the danger zone for the Morrison government. It will take resolve for Morrison’s camp not to overreact and assume that this is structural. Voters have had a gutful of lockdowns and are buying the argument being pushed aggressively by the state labor premiers that have imposed the restrictions that Morrison is to blame.

For the first time, voters are now also accepting the proposition that the federal government has botched the vaccine rollout. The risk for Morrison was always going to be that people would eventually link the lack of access to vaccines to the mugging of their liberties. It’s pointless to argue whether this may be a misdirected anger. It is the reality that Morrison is now dealing with.

Albanese and the Labor premiers have seen the opportunity to inflict maximum damage on Morrison and have taken it. Despite their insistence that the national cabinet continue, they have abandoned the principles upon which it was based and have used it to defrock Morrison of its leadership.

And Morrison is now paying the price for appeasement.

But his problems are uniquely solvable, which leaves Labor potentially exposed longer term. Morrison has always maintained that the next election will not be held until it is due next year. And the politics of today will not be the politics come March next year.

The only danger is that the longer the damaging political campaign continues, and the contemporary lived experience of the vaccine rollout and lockdowns supports that narrative, the more irretrievable the lost political capital may become.

Nevertheless, the latest Newspoll marks a significant strategic shift that will trigger calls from within Liberal Party ranks for a rethink of the Morrison government’s political tactics, notwithstanding that the strategy is still sound.

Some will be calling for Morrison – who still enjoys a unified party, unlike past leaders who found themselves in a similar position – to seize back the initiative and take the gloves off with the premiers.

Others will be counselling him to resist the temptation to mount a counter-offensive in the knowledge that people are inherently parochial and such actions could only make the situation worse.

Morrison once reminded the party room of John Howard’s mantra that people pay on results. It will be the results, namely the vaccine rollout, that ultimately determines, who wins the political argument next year when it matters.