Tony Abbott is set for a comfortable win in Saturday’s election, but his lead has been clawed back by a late shift toward the minor parties, the final pre-election Essential Research poll shows.
The poll, conducted this week with a sample size of 1035, shows Labor on 35% — steady compared to last week — and the Coalition down a point to 43%. The Greens are steady on 10%, and “others” are now on 12%. Just two weeks ago, the minor parties’ collective was on 8%.
The two-party preferred result is 52-48% to the Coalition.
State breakdowns of the figures, which Crikey will reveal tomorrow, suggest minor parties are performing very strongly in Queensland, certainly well enough to secure a Senate quota with favourable preference deals, and to tip a number of marginal House of Representative seats via preference flows. On a national basis, the 2.1% swing to the Coalition suggested by the final poll would allow the Coalition to pick up eight seats, plus Lyne and New England, for a comfortable majority.
However, making seat predictions in Queensland will be much harder even with state breakdowns because of the strong support for minor parties like Clive Palmer’s PUP and the unpredictable nature of their preference flows. On-the-ground reports suggest Palmer is drawing voters from both Labor and the Coalition and preferences might not break 60:40 to the conservatives as has been assumed (and which is the basis for Essential’s allocation).
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
