Numbers show state of dismay for the Coalition

The Turnbull government has won on school funding but cannot shake the fear that voters have stopped listening.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull with Opposition Leader Bill Shorten. Picture: Gary Ramage

The Turnbull government has had a big victory on school funding but cannot shake the fear that voters have stopped listening.

Every state is now a problem for the Coalition, which has fallen behind Labor 47 to 53 per cent in two-party terms everywhere except South Australia — where the result is a shocking 44 to 56 per cent.

Malcolm Turnbull has regained ground with big decisions in the past — such as his Snowy 2.0 announcement — and he may hope for a rebound now that Gonski 2.0 has been legislated.

But Scott Morrison fears the message will not get through. The Treasurer says Australians have “reached for the remote” to turn the volume down on Canberra’s politicians and media.

The Liberal Party finished its federal council meeting on Saturday with a strong message about the problem, but no proof of a solution. It is yet to find the campaign that gets voters to turn the volume back up.

Bill Shorten seized the advantage over the government in the months after the July 2 election and has kept it. Labor’s primary vote has been remarkably stable at a national level since last August and is now just 1.3 percentage points higher than it was at the last election.

But Shorten’s success has been all about holding the line while the other side of politics rips itself apart. The splintering of conservative Australia is plain in today’s quarterly Newspoll survey, with a surge in support for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation over less than 12 months.

One Nation ran a clumsy Western Australian state campaign. Former party officials have turned on its leader. Hanson has had to apologise for being wrong on child vaccination. She offended many Australians with her remarks about autistic children in schools. None of this seems to have inflicted any substantial damage on the party’s support. One Nation is appealing to all age groups, too. Its primary vote is 8 per cent among those aged 18 to 34, 11 per cent among those from 35 to 49 and 9 per cent among those older than 50.

Turnbull retains the key advantage of being regarded as a better leader than his rival. This is crucial to the government’s hopes of regaining ground in the centre of national politics while winning back some of those One Nation voters.

It may now be too much for Turnbull to reclaim the primary vote from the One Nation supporters, so the Coalition government’s fate rests on being able to get its preferences.