Things are looking grim for Victorian Labor ahead of the state election.
With a recent poll not only indicating a near-wipeout for the third-term state government led by Premier Ben Carroll, but also suggesting Carroll’s own seat could be one of the dozens of Labor seats which fall, things could be far worse for the government than initially thought. Despite an increasingly likely Coalition majority, Labor has doubled down on its anti-One Nation messaging, despite little evidence of it making an impact in its favour.
The recent DemosAu poll, as Rachel Withers discussed yesterday in Crikey, shows the Liberal–National Coalition well ahead on primary votes at 33%, while One Nation sits in second place statewide at 21% and Labor at just 18% — just half of what Labor got in 2022. But most notably, the Greens were just one point behind Labor at 17%, well within the margin of error, but by far the worst polling result for the government throughout this term.
It’s worth remembering that so far, this poll is an outlier, and a Resolve poll released later on the same day had Labor at 22% and the Greens at 13% — but it still showed the same broad picture of a Coalition well ahead and Labor slipping to third place. A RedBridge/Accent Research poll released yesterday didn’t give the government any better news either, with a 57–43 two-party-preferred lead for the Coalition that would very likely put them into majority government territory and reduce Labor to a seat count somewhere in the 20s.
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If that DemosAU poll turned out to be close to the final results — and that is a massive “if” — Labor would experience a wipeout at levels comparable with New South Wales in 2011 (when it won 20 seats) or even Queensland in 2012 (when it won just seven). It puts some of Labor’s safer metropolitan seats, previously thought to be unlikely to flip, in the spotlight, such as Mordialloc (8.2% margin against the Liberals), Point Cook (8.3%) and Clarinda (10.2%).
Carroll’s own seat of Niddrie, currently held on a 6.7% margin, is already at serious risk of flipping to the Liberals and would surely be lost if the DemosAU poll was anywhere close to being accurate. Seats in regional areas — where the swing against Labor is set to be larger — would also be gone, including Bendigo East, held by retiring ex-premier Jacinta Allan on a 10.8% margin.
So what can Labor actually do from here?
The consistent message from Carroll throughout this election campaign has been that “only Labor can stop a Liberal–One Nation government” and “the Liberals can only form government with One Nation” (though the latter seems less likely based on the current polling trend). Yet no matter how much it gets repeated, it doesn’t appear as if it’s had the intended impact — Resolve has found 48% of Victorians are comfortable with the idea of a One Nation coalition, while Newspoll showed 28% would prefer a Liberal–National–One Nation government after the election.
Labor began to run Facebook ads on a page called “Don’t Risk It Vic” earlier this week, targeting voters in inner-city Brunswick with the claim that the Greens retaining the seat would help the Coalition form government. The ad included an unlabelled graph suggesting that the Liberals and One Nation’s combined vote totals would get them into a majority (presumedly it’s vote totals, since it’s not clarified) — though bizarrely, it also clearly shows that adding all the Greens support to Labor still wouldn’t be enough to help them. This type of anti-Greens messaging from Labor is not new, but it has started to feel representative of an increased level of desperation to try and take anything from this election.
RedBridge director Kos Samaras, a former Labor strategist who helped run the party’s successful 2014 and 2018 campaigns, told 6 News over the weekend that the anti-One Nation messaging would work better with Labor’s base and “in that case, it’s probably the right strategy”.
“We have to acknowledge that the hardheads in Labor’s camp [are] in preservation mode; they’re not trying to get 45 seats, so I think the campaign they’re running is all about [saving] the furniture.”
But Samaras said Labor’s messaging around a One Nation minority government won’t work for those already planning on voting for the Coalition, and even if it cut through to so-called “soft” One Nation voters — those who are not locked in to supporting the party — those voters will instead “probably jump over to the Liberal Party to ensure that the [Coalition have enough parliamentary seats to govern in their own right”.
In the final days of the 2011 state election campaign, NSW Labor started running on the message of “don’t give the Liberals a blank cheque”, before the Coalition ended up winning 69 out of 93 seats. Western Australian Liberal leader Zak Kirkup infamously conceded two weeks before the 2021 election and ran on the message of “vote Liberal locally”, then lost his own seat in the McGowanslide. Perhaps Victorian Labor won’t get to that stage, but with just days until pre-poll opens, it might be time for the party to start sandbagging its safest seats.
