Why has the Coalition made gains on One Nation?

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The Australian did some good old editorialising yesterday about Newspoll:

Labor has lost ground to the LNP in the key federal battleground state of Queensland where Bill Shorten has suffered a hit to his personal ratings in a sign that a vow to stop the Adani coalmine has damaged the Opposition Leader.

However, Malcolm Turnbull would still face an election loss of more than 20 seats across the country, with Labor leading the Coalition in every state, according to analysis of Newspoll surveys conducted exclusively for The Australian in the first three months of this year.

…Mr Turnbull also appears to have re-engaged Queensland voters, with his approval ratings soaring four points as preferred prime minister since the last quarter, providing him with a greater lead in personal approval ratings over the Opposition Leader — 12 points — than in any other state.
But Labor has more than compensated for this by surging in South Australia following the collapse of Nick Xenophon’s party, with the bulk of a six-point slide for independents following the recent South Australian election going back to Labor’s primary vote ledger.

It’s a shame Newspoll doesn’t include Tony Abbott in the preferred PM question. His embrace of ON has been fulsome in recent months and his opening up of the population debate will also have been very well received by ON faithful.

I doubt Coalition efforts will be enough given they’ve been purely symbolic to date. The ON vote remains very high at 13%. But one should include the above factors in any assessment of a switch in the QLD ON vote to the Coalition.

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About the author
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.