The Liberal Party’s primary vote in Bennelong has collapsed, leaving the Coalition and Labor in a tight race for the previously safe Liberal seat and the Turnbull government’s slim command of parliament in the hands of Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives.
A Newspoll, conducted exclusively for The Australian a week out from a by-election that if lost could force the Coalition into minority government, has revealed an 11-point slide in the Liberal primary vote since last year’s election.
The results, if repeated this Saturday, would propel Labor’s Kristina Keneally into a competitive 50-50 two-party-preferred contest with incumbent John Alexander, with the Liberal Party having to rely on preferences from right-wing fringe parties to hold on.
In what will come as a blow to the Liberal Party’s campaign strategy to shame Ms Keneally’s record as NSW premier, almost two thirds of voters in the safe Liberal seat believe she was an average or above average leader.
…A senior Liberal source conceded that an upset Labor victory was possible. “It is impossible to say what the real numbers are,” the Liberal source said. “But the primary vote will be noticed by every sitting Liberal MP in Australia.”
Malcolm Turnbull has capped off a torrid parliamentary year with a positive shift in his approval rating, and he remains ahead of Bill Shorten as preferred prime minister, according to the latest Guardian Essential poll.
But while Turnbull ends the parliamentary year buoyed by the passage of a bill legalising same-sex marriage and Barnaby Joyce’s win in the New England byelection, the latest survey of 1,831 voters confirms again that the ALP remains well in front of the Coalition, leading on the two-party preferred measure 54% to 46%.
The Turnbull government has not led Labor on the two-party preferred measure since 1 July 2016. The gap between the major parties narrowed briefly around the time of the May budget but widened for the remainder of 2017 as the government became bogged down in infighting and multiple challenges – from the dual citizenship fiasco to settling energy policy, to the eventual resolution of the marriage debate.
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.
