Newspoll: hidden messages as year gets off to surprising start

Surprising Newspoll results for Scott Morrison. Picture: Chris Pavlich

Scott Morrison has begun the unofficial election campaign with an improvement in Newspoll that neither he nor his colleagues had been expecting.

For the past two years the Coalition has been the living embodiment of Sod’s Law, which loosely states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong and at the worst possible time with the worst of consequences.

This has naturally fed into a communal belief, shared even by Liberal MPs and officials, that the government was in for a hiding come May.

The first Newspoll of 2019, however, gives the Prime Minister reason to believe that all is not lost yet.

Not that anyone of lucid thought on the Coalition side could get overly excited.

The improvement represents the theoretical difference between losing 21 seats and 14 seats, which if averaged over the past year would appear to be business as usual for the Coalition.

But there is an underlying message in the results for Bill Shorten as well: it is a warning against complacency.

The three-point slide in Labor’s primary vote will be of some concern to Shorten as the government ramps up its attack on Labor’s negative gearing and dividend imputation policies.

Morrison believes that these two policies represent a significant vulnerability in Labor’s economic argument. The poll results may be a reflection that they could be starting to bite.

Equally, voters simply may have been paying absolutely no attention over the break and have yet to be reminded how much they dislike the government.

There will be great temptation on the opposition side to dismiss the poll as “post-summer poll bounce” mythology when the truth is that governments in recent times have gone backwards over summer as often as they have picked up a bounce.

Morrison will rightly be buoyed and perhaps surprised by these results.