Oz Politics Blog

According to Dennis Shanahan Newspoll has Labor on 47 per cent to the Coalition’s 53 per cent.

MARK Latham’s diaries have hit the Labor Party like a truck, turning voters off the ALP and dismantling hard-won personal gains by Opposition Leader Kim Beazley.

After two weeks of saturation coverage for the scathing diaries, the ALP’s primary support has dropped five points, to the level it was at immediately following Mr Latham’s devastating election defeat last year.

ACNielsen in the Fairfax press (here, here, here, here, here and here) has a similar result — the Coalition on 51 per cent to Labor’s 49 per cent — but Fairfax reporters have cast this result within the longer sweep of ACNielsen results. For example,

KIM Beazley cannot blame Mark Latham for his dismal approval ratings in today’s AgePoll. They are largely all his own work. The fall began well before The Latham Diaries and the latest deterioration is incremental.

For whatever reason, there is an alignment of the three major polls at the moment.

On its primary vote, Labor is at least five points off the magic 40 per cent. Many pundits believe Labor would struggle to win government with less than 40 per cent of the primary vote.

ACNielsen asked a couple of questions on Latham. According to Michelle Grattan:

42 per cent in the ACNielsen poll believe Labor would be more likely to win the 2007 election with Julia Gillard as leader, compared with 44 per cent who disagree. Mr Latham has endorsed Ms Gillard as the best person to lead the ALP.

Nearly three-quarters of those interviewed rejected Mr Latham’s indictment of Labor as “beyond repair” and almost two-thirds disagreed with his proposition that Mr Beazley was unfit for high office. Even Coalition voters disagreed with Mr Latham’s harsh assessment of Mr Beazley’s character — nearly six out of 10 rejected the assertion that the Opposition Leader is unfit for high office.

But 70 per cent of all voters agreed with Mr Latham’s claim that supporting American foreign policy had made Australia a bigger target for terrorism.

With all the chest beating on Latham, the reporters have not reported the full range of statistics from the polls. Reading between the lines, it appears the Greens may have been a winner at Labor’s expense. I will come back to this when Newspoll and ACNielsen release their results. In the interim, only some of my graphs have been updated.