With four days to go, Labor is breathing a little easier about Saturday’s result. After a ragged and ratty start to the campaign, Bill Shorten and his team found their stride over Easter; three debate victories and a bungled News Corp-Liberal hit job involving Shorten’s mother halted Morrison’s momentum and forced the Liberals back to protecting seats that shouldn’t be in play.
Some of those aren’t under threat from Labor but from independents — Cowper, which will probably be saved from the return of Rob Oakeshott, and Farrer, where six-term veteran Sussan Ley is said to be in deep trouble against independent Kevin Mack despite her hard work in the vast seat since 2001.
Expectations of a series of Labor wins in Queensland have now been dampened down. Today’s state-based Newspoll figures — the first of the campaign, and the most important poll — show the parties at 50-50 there, which is a big recovery for the government from a catastrophic 47-53 earlier in the year, but still enough to hand Labor at least half a dozen seats given it performed so poorly there in 2016. The One Nation and Palmer factors, however, will probably cut that back in regional seats if preferences flow the way pollsters expect them to (which is a substantial IF in all the current polls).
The government has also recovered against Labor in NSW, and looks to be in with a good chance in Lindsay to go some way to offsetting a loss in Farrer or Cowper, with Dave Sharma likely to take back Wentworth as well. Ditto WA, where a swag of seats were once on offer for Labor but now appear out of reach. Readers are advised to continue to ignore single seat polls, so Labor hasn’t given up on Boothby, but the government has steadily recovered in South Australia since late last year.
There’s no state-based numbers in Tasmania, so Bass and Braddon will continue to flummox everyone until Saturday night, when their voters could again display their penchant for messing with the heads of major parties and turn against Labor.
But it’s Victoria that still looks bad for the government — much worse than published polls suggest (Newspoll shows a small swing to Labor beyond even its good results in 2016). Josh Frydenberg is expected to hang on, just, in Kooyong but other Liberal heartland seats are expected to fall to fury over the government’s climate denialism.
What’s still worrying some in Labor, however, are the remaining undecideds — the voters who get up on Saturday, or even walk into the polling booth, not knowing whom they’ll vote for. If they break for the government, it could be enough to stave off defeat in key seats. Labor could easily end up winning a majority of the national vote, but failing to get over the line in enough seats to govern, leaving us still in minority government. Even that result would be a triumph for Scott Morrison.
This is an election Labor should have locked down weeks ago; that it could still lose at this point despite its opponent being a literal one-man band with no policies suggests the Labor campaign strengths we’ve been hearing about for months are more imaginary than real.
Or it could turn out the strangely consistent polls clustering around 51-49 have been getting it wrong. We’ll see.
The power of propaganda should never surprise us,
It’s almost as if the ALP have had to battle against the COALition, Palmer United, One Neuron and 90% of the scribblers in this country.
They also have to battle against the feeble mentality of voters that can be swayed by Palmer’s huge spend, or that see real value in someone as transparently vacuous as Hanson.
Granted, but the audacity of the malodorous author who runs an almost consistent anti ALP line and then observes his good work cannot go uncelebrated.
Ain’t it so.
“Readers are advised to continue to ignore single seat polls.”
Bernard doesn’t need polls to tell us how the single seats will turn out and the peasants should just be grateful that he has deigned to share his insights with them. I can only hope the chook was dead before the entrails were examined.
At uni in a half sad / half funny kind of way you run across the kind of nerd who thinks he is
(a) the smartest kid in the tutorial and
(b) one of the Cool Kids.
If the delusion persists into middle age you end up with David Brent channelling Marlon Brando and mumbling “I could have been a contender / candidate/ Washington correspondent / Collingwood President / whatever.
Sad.
Alas, BK’s most fervent desire is that one day the mudorc will notice his scribblings and allow his Ring to be kissed by the humble scribe.
Especially after he done done such good work for Gladys.
Isn’t this what happened to Hillary Bray/Christian Kerr, one of BK’s predecessors at Crikey.
Should Labor win, even by just a 2-3 seat majority, then it will hopefully prove that the power of MSM is finally broken.
I admire your intent Marcus but unless Saturday delivers an earth shattering landslide that wounds the COALition for three terms, then the MSM will have played a major role in running defence for the nasties. My observation is that the ABC are now outmurdoching Newscorp by running a consistent anti ALP line on the ABC news channel. The more junior of their political sprukers are unabashedly pro COALition. The halfwits that have been travelling on either campaign bus are simply Liberal party hacks.
I think Labor just winning shows the power of the MSM – they were able to make it into an even contest instead of one party with policies and one party in ruin.
The primary problem is that Newspoll relies on LANDLINES for its polling, & the number of landlines amongst registered voters has declined significantly-& is almost non existent amongst the under-25 demographic (a demographic that has surged since the 2016 election). It might also partly explain why the Libs did worse in Queensland, Victoria & WA than the official polls were suggesting.
This piece really should acknowledge that 70% of the media in this country are currently actively campaigning for a return of the Coalition government. If they focused instead on an unbiased coverage of the facts, the election would be a done deal already and the LNP would be looking at electoral oblivion. Unfortunately that’s not the reality we currently live in and so the Labor Party not only needs to run a perfect campaign but also find some way to reach voters who rely on the News Corp stable for their information. It’s hardly been a fair fight.
Quite right Vicki and it could also be acknowledged that 70% of the writings of the author of this piece are ‘currently actively campaigning for a return of the Coalition government’.