November 14, 2011
Opinion
Julia Gillard has led her government into a more comfortable political dwelling place, but it still lives on the political equivalent of death row.
Today's Herald-Nielsen poll shows a sustained improvement in the Prime Minister's polling numbers. But it is only a relief, not a reprieve.
Gillard's personal approval rating has improved undeniably; she is no longer second to Tony Abbott as preferred prime minister; and Labor's share of the two-party vote has held up at a level slightly higher than the party's all-time low. Why?
First, she has looked prime ministerial. She hosted the Queen, won her carbon tax, referred the Qantas shutdown to an emergency hearing and decided to pay better wages to carers. Even where these actions were not popular, they were actions nonetheless.
Most voters oppose the carbon tax and a plurality think Gillard mishandled the Qantas dispute. But she was asserting herself and exercising power.
Second, her government managed to pull off a month free of political disaster.
The latest poll figures will reinforce the new orthodoxy among those in the front row of the political show that Labor is coming back.
Even so, it still has a very long way to come back. ''We have to remind ourselves that, if an election were held now, Labor would lose, and lose in a landslide, with the lowest primary vote it's had in probably 100 years,'' the Herald's pollster, Nielsen's John Stirton, remarks.
Today's poll has Labor's primary vote at 30 per cent, unchanged in a month. It needs about 40 per cent to be in a position where it could contest an election with a reasonable hope of victory.
At the rate of improvement that Labor has enjoyed since hitting its all-time nadir in July, how long would this take? ''It would take more than a year to hit 40, so that's a worry for Labor,'' Stirton says.
But then, of course, there is always the other side of politics. The Coalition is dominant in the polls, but Tony Abbott is almost as unpopular as Gillard. And his anti-carbon tax barnstorm has passed its peak.
Despite all his furious huffing and puffing, the tax is now law; the impotence of his rage is abruptly exposed. The impracticality of his campaign to repeal it will be increasingly plain. And the Coalition's rampant populism is opening ever-widening doubts about its fitness to govern responsibly. Even on death row there is hope of a reprieve.
