Without improvement, disaster looms large for Coalition

Scott Morrison is better liked than Bill Shorten as Prime Minister but that’s the only good news.

Analysing opinion polls is as much an art as a science, but it is also easy to interpret their actual relevance out of existence altogether.

The notion that today’s Newspoll is anything other than bad news for the Coalition is positively laughable. Trailing Labor by six points (53 to 47 per cent) on the two party figures would see the government bundled out of office losing a swag of seats in the process.

And Newspoll came out on the same day that the Fairfax poll showed the Coalition’s positioning worsening to 45-55 per cent on the TTP vote. Factoring in both margins of error, it’s impossible to conclude anything other than changing prime ministers has weakened the government and worsened its electoral position.

Remember that the final four Newspolls under Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership saw the Coalition trailing Labor by just 49-51 per cent. Throw in the catastrophe looming at the Wentworth by-election (even if the Liberal candidate scrapes home with a huge swing against the Liberals), and momentum isn’t something Scott Morrison can rely on.

Yes, Morrison leads Bill Shorten on the better PM numbers, just as Turnbull did. That says more about Shorten’s unpopularity and his technique of ripping into the government on a daily basis. It’s hard-edged politics, and it makes it nigh impossible to be a popular alternative PM. But when it impacts on the two party vote it’s effective, just as it was for Tony Abbott against Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd ahead of the 2013 election.

In the here and now, today’s Newspoll primary numbers have the Coalition more than five percentage points behind the result it achieved at the 2016 election, when it only secured a one-seat majority. In other words, without a major improvement disaster looms large. And Labor’s primary vote, while short of where it would like it to be, is more than three points higher than at the 2016 election, suggesting securing a working majority won’t be a problem for it.

If one’s sole purpose is to find positives for the government in the numbers out today, it is true that Morrison has moved Newspoll from 56-44 TPP immediately after the leadership debacle to 53-47 now. But did anyone seriously expect the vote to stay where it was? For the coup to have been anything other than an unmitigated act of self harm, Newspoll has to get back to where it was under Turnbull and stay there.

Even if that happens, Turnbull supporters will rightly credit Morrison’s rise for that, not the idiocy of those who backed Peter Dutton for the top job, who had the support of six per cent of Australians for taking over the leadership according to Newspoll.

Peter van Onselen is a professor at The University of Western Australia and Griffith University.