One part of the government’s message has fallen flat: the federal budget. Only 32 per cent say this budget is good for the country, the lowest rating in years. But this is not pivotal for the election. The result was 50 per cent for the federal budget in March 2022, when Scott Morrison was prime minister. Albanese won power seven weeks later.
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By rights, the Coalition has “won” the budget argument. Only 51 per cent like the Labor cut to personal tax rates, but 68 per cent like the Coalition cut to fuel excise. Albanese has rebounded anyway. Australians are looking past the election sweeteners when they consider the two leaders and their parties.
Resolve director Jim Reed says the results suggest the shift to Labor was under way long before the budget – and as far back as the arrival of Cyclone Alfred, which made an earlier election impossible.
“Alfred rescued Albo,” says Reed. “The longer campaign and the federal budget have been very beneficial for Labor.”
Labor strategists will not see it this way, because they always thought Dutton would lose ground when he came under scrutiny closer to polling day. Cyclone or not, the race was going to tighten when election day neared.
The latest survey reveals a big shift over just one month. Unlike other polls, the Resolve Political Monitor does not give respondents an option to be undecided on primary vote; they must tell us how they would cast their votes. This can lead to big swings because nobody can “park” their vote in an uncommitted cohort.
“Our poll is designed to be more sensitive by not allowing voters to hide by refusing to answer,” says Reed. “This is why Labor’s initial honeymoon was higher in our poll, why we were the first to show a majority No vote in the referendum, why Labor’s fall from favour was sharper in our survey – and why we are now seeing a large swing back to them this month.”
The margin of error in this survey is lower than usual, at 1.7 percentage points. This is because Resolve put the core questions to a larger base of 3237 respondents. As always, the pool of respondents was selected to reflect the wider population.
The survey shows the two major parties are neck-and-neck with 50 per cent each in two-party terms when voters say how they would allocate their preferences. Some polling experts prefer a measure that calculates preferences on the way they flowed at the last election. Tallied this way, the results show Labor has the edge: 51 per cent to 49 per cent.
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Neither result is conclusive because the margin of error is 1.7 percentage points.
The 50-50 outcome suggests a swing of 2.1 per cent against Labor in two-party terms since the last election. This would be enough to see Labor lose four seats – Gilmore, Bennelong, Lyons and Lingiari – when applying the pendulum devised by ABC analyst Antony Green. But there is no such thing as a uniform swing.
So this poll is not a prediction. It is merely a snapshot of a point in time, with a wild ride ahead to polling day.
The outcome, at this stage, is far from a Labor victory. It is wiser to regard it as a Labor recovery. The rest depends on whether Albanese builds on it – or Dutton crushes it.
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