Newspoll: 52 to 48 in the Coalition’s favour
The first Newspoll of the year has Howard in front.
The headline prediction from last weekend’s poll was a national two-party preferred vote of 52 per cent for the Coalition and 48 per cent for Labor. This is the first time Newspoll has had the Coalition ahead since the first week in October 2005.The Coalition’s primary vote was 45 per cent and Labor’s was 37 per cent. Such a national vote would see the government returned comfortably.
It looks like Christmas with the folks and two weeks at the beach has erased national unease with Howard’s industrial relations reforms. I thought that Senator Andrew Murray’s analysis would prove correct: the industrial relations reforms would not impact on a significant number of people before the 2007 election. As a result, I thought the uncertainty that drove the polls in the last three months of 2005 would dissipate. If Morgan and ACNielsen replicate this poll result, it will have happened much faster than I had anticipated.
(Note: technically this result is not statistically different from the previous result. We could be witnessing nothing more than random noise. That is why it is important to wait and see whether the result is replicated before coming to a firm view about the voting intention of the nation after the Christmas break).
The usual graphs are here. You may need to hit the refresh or reload button on your browser to see the latest graphs. (I will update the remaining graphs when Newspoll publishes the full dataset).