Election analyst Kevin Bonham has estimated the “shadow” Labor-One Nation two-party-preferred match-up going back to June last year, showing the right-wing party closing the gap from the mid-30s to within striking distance. At latest count, with three polls — Freshwater, Resolve and Newspoll — since last week’s Farrer by-election and Tuesday’s federal budget, Labor leads One Nation 53.2 per cent to 46.8 per cent in the estimated two-party-preferred vote. The Coalition’s aggregated two-party-preferred vote is 47.3 per cent to 52.7 per cent. Entrepreneur John Morgan
on Sunday shared a striking chart overlaying Mr Bonham’s Labor-One Nation match-up with the Yes vote percentage, starting from August 2022. “We now have three polls post-Farrer and post budget,” he wrote on X. “ONP is still tracking the Voice trajectory. A preference cascade unwinding the same way. Uncanny.” A preference cascade — a term coined by Turkish economist Timur Kuran in 1989 — is a sudden shift when voters, realising others feel the same way, become comfortable expressing their privately held views in public.
In the lead-up to the failed October 2023 referendum, the Indigenous Voice to Parliament appeared all but a sure thing. Polls showed nearly two thirds of Australians supported the Voice a year out from the vote. That gradually trended down as the Yes and No campaigns got underway, before a dramatic plunge beginning around May 2023. The Yes campaign never recovered. The Voice was resoundingly defeated, with 60.1 per cent (9.45 million) voting No and 39.9 per cent (6.29 million) voting Yes on October 14,
with a tearful Anthony Albanese telling the nation the “result is not one that I had hoped for”. “The evolution of the One Nation vote continues to resemble the shift toward the No vote in the run up to the Voice referendum,” commentator Tarric Brooker wrote. It comes as two new opinion polls — Newspoll, commissioned by The Australian, and Nine Newspapers’ Resolve Political Monitor — suggest last week’s federal budget has been a disaster for the Prime Minister. Newspoll found voters’ disapproval of broken
promises around negative gearing and capital gains tax was worse than Joe Hockey’s controversial 2014 budget, which threatened to introduce a $7 GP co-payment. This year’s result is the most unpopular budget since Paul Keating’s 1993 effort. Forty-seven per cent of Newspoll respondents believe the “budget is driving a wedge between younger and older generations”, and a clear majority think Labor’s housing reforms “will make no difference”. However Labor’s primary vote remained static at 31 per cent, despite voters’ grumpiness over broken promises and One
Nation jumping from 24 per cent to 27 per cent. More concerningly for Mr Albanese, Resolve put opposition leader Angus Taylor well ahead as preferred Prime Minister, 33-30, with 37 per cent undecided — a dramatic plunge since February when Mr Albanese held a commanding 38-22 lead. One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, meanwhile, is now Australia’s most “likeable” politician, according to Resolve, pulling in a performance rating of plus 12 percentage points, ahead of Mr Taylor on plus 11 percentage points. Mr Albanese’s net likability
rating has dragged to minus 13 percentage points, down one point from the month before. One Nation won its first federal lower house seat at the Farrer by-election earlier this month, after a similar outperformance in the South Australia state election in March saw One Nation pick up four lower house and three upper house seats. The anti-immigration party has surged in popularity since the Bondi terror attack in December, overtaking the Liberals in a January Newspoll that marked the first time in Australia’s history
a minor party has polled higher than one of the majors. After Tuesday’s budget, Ms Hanson told news.com.au the budget backflips showed “Labor cannot be trusted with anything they say or promise”. “It’s a Marxist, communist budget which attacks hardworking Australians who have sacrificed and saved to invest,” she said. “Labor is using this budget to build a taxpayer-funded war chest for the next federal election. Rather than create intergenerational equity, this budget creates intergenerational poverty. “It will drive up inflation, interest rates and mortgage
payments — wiping out any relief such as the paltry $5 per week Labor is handing out from next year. The changes to negative gearing will also drive up rents, as happened the last time Paul Keating made changes to negative gearing and was forced to reverse them within two years. Meanwhile, a new poll on Monday shows a clear majority (51 per cent) of Australian voters trust the Albanese government less due to broken budget promises on housing reform. The poll, conducted by strategic
campaign agency Wolf+Smith for Amplify, a nonpartisan community group founded by technology investor Paul Bassat, found voters were divided over whether the changes will work but more Australians back changes to negative gearing than the status quo. Nearly seven in 10 Australians said the fact that changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount were ruled out before the election was important to how they viewed the policies. Amplify chief executive Georgina Harrisson said the data pointed to a fundamental problem for the
government’s reform agenda. “Half of Australians surveyed say they have less trust in the federal government after the budget compared with before,” Ms Harrisson said. Just 27 per cent believe the budget will be good for the country as a whole, compared to 40 per cent who think it will be bad. “This dramatic fall in trust comes amid a backdrop of already declining trust in the ability of governments to solve the housing crisis,” she said. Younger Australians are most likely to support overhauling
negative gearing and capital gains tax, but they are also sceptical it will help them buy a home. — with Samantha Maiden
One Nation, Voice referendum, Kevin Bonham, Anthony Albanese, federal budget, polling data, preference cascade