Victorian election guide now live

Craig,
What is actuals?

@Spacefish – Actuals: 34.56/31.82/12.2 Lab Lib Grn. 56.35/43.65 2PP Vic. Take that for what it is worth.

It was more of a commentary that Demos , like other pollsters, expected the Liberals to either win or force Labor into a minority which clearly didn’t happen. Liberals seem to underperform their polls. Of course that’s just the national election but only in Tas was the situation reversed. *Actuals* being the real vote totals from May compared to the polls.

The libs should be happy to get 8-11 seats. I think labor is a chance to win Richmond and Croydon. In regards to preferences instead of preferencing one of the other the libs should just preference against the incumbents when it comes to grn vs lab. This puts a strain on both their resources.

@Craig All Fed election polls were somewhat wrong, Demo’s isn’t special.

I do agree they do need improvement in Resolve Redbridge to have a good chance of winning in 14 months time.

I doubt they’re gonna win regardless labor is unpopular but not in the right places to unseat the govt

All federal election polling underestimated Labor and overestimated the coalition. DemosAU wasn’t the most far off. You might recall Victoria was grossly overhyped as a battleground state. Statewide polling before the federal election indicated a swing away from Labor. There was talk about replacing Jacinta Allan if Labor were to lose 3 federal seats in Victoria. The final result was a statewide swing to Labor and a net gain of 3 seats.

New polling out appears to be worsening for the Liberals if this continues then there could be a leadership spill but I don’t think changing the leader will improve their fortunes in the slightest rather what the party is trying to sell.

Are you talking about Federal polling, SpaceFish, or Vic state polling? Federal 2PP has been bouncing around 55-45 in favour of Labor, give or take. Labor has been on an upswing in Vic, the latest poll had Labor up 53-47.

I’m referring to the state polling

If the Liberals think Battin is the problem they are laughing. He is way up on personal approvals (especially compared to JA) and his recent cabinet re-shuffle actually promoted some high achievers who are working the community well and leveraging social media properly. The reason the Coalition can’t make headway in the polls is the backroom dealing and gossiping that distracts the party from actually holding Labor to account, what a useless bunch of clowns seriously.

Does anyone know how Bonham calculated his 2PP from the Resolve poll? I suspect not only is the generic IND vote way too high and some of that ends up getting distributed to the majors (both Demos and Redbridge found the LNP primary north of 35% keep in mind) but OTH at 15% probably includes a fair whack of PHON vote that will flow to the LNP at a better rate that generic OTH did at the last election for example. Looks more like margin of error on 2PP that poll.

Maxim, I agree Battin presents quite a strong image similar to LNP leader David Crisafulli in the leadup to the 2024 Queensland election. His tough on crime campaign does work well given the perception of high violent crime rates in Victoria and Melbourne.

The problem for the Coalition in Victoria is that they have a very limited number of targets currently, unlike the Queensland LNP who had several marginal seats in regional centres compared to Victorian Labor who hold most regional seats with stronger margins (over 5%).

@Maxim Agreed, polls are still tight despite the disaster of the Coalition federal campaign, he leads Jacinta as preferred premier (a metric that always favours incumbents) and leads her by 30 on net approval (+9 vs -21).

I would say this Resolve is around 51-52% for Labor, given the last one was 53% and they dropped 2 points off primary vote since then.

You would have to assume that ON’s primary vote is higher than it was a year ago, like the rest of the country.

The Libs will have a problem in that they may need a 2pp of somewhere like 54% to scrape a majority. It is quite likely that in regional seats they could increase their already huge majority and there is a seemingly wider sense of grievance – bad roads, the fire services levy, roads, crime, patchy health services, power transmission lines, Gippsland train services – and a view that the Allan Government doesn’t care once you are outside Melbourne. It could become problematic for Labor in the LC and they might struggle to get second seats in some regions.

Redbridge poll today – ALP 52 LNP 48. Primary votes – Labor 32 Coalition 37 Greens 13.
Melbourne 54/46, Rural Regional 47/53.

The lion’s share of seats are in greater Melbourne. To do well, the Liberals need to up their game in Melbourne. The issue for the Liberals is that the disaffected voters in normally safe Labor seats aren’t running to them en masse. Tony Barry said this – “There are people who want to jump off the Labor bandwagon but at the moment the Liberals have not reached minimum expectation.”

What was the Melbourne ttp for 2022? I would be interested to see individual seat polling.

@Spacefish I think last election was about 58-59% Labor in Melbourne, and about 53% LNP outside of it.

So this poll actually has a smaller urban-regional gap than the last election did.

So that would translate to a swing against Labor of 4%-5% which would definitely see Labor lose some skin. That still isn’t enough to knock the ALP out of government or even make it a minority government which isn’t a great position for the LNP to be in.

Spacefish a 4-5% swing would absolutely push them into minority. 8 seats to the liberals makes them down to 46 seats. Then you’ve got to take into account seats to the greens. Then take into account that’s not a universal swing so it pushes labor to the very edge of a minority at best.

Looks like Labor have caved in to the pressure and are following the rest of the nation with crime laws, I’m personally surprised it took this long but the relentless 24/7 crime focus and the recent opinion poll having Labor behind shows that the LNP were making inroads. I am curious what the ramifications will be politically as it might work for them in outer suburban electorates but could cost them in some of the inner northern electorates.

Given that a lot of the crime stuff is happening in the inner city areas as much as it is in the outer suburbs I think there’ll be enough voters in the inner city that will be satisfied with these laws. It’s only the Brunswicks and Coburgs that will be angry but they usually vote Green anyway.

@tommo yea and thats the reason for the problem

I don’t support the new proposed laws because I believe the solution is in early intervention & prevention rather than basically throwing someone into what is more likely to become a cycle of crime for life. That said, I would have voted Greens anyway in November so it doesn’t change my vote, and it’s likely a lot of people who share my views are in the same boat.

This announcement is good politics (but bad policy) in my opinion as it will blunt the LNP attacks, they already seem desperate today as Facebook has VIC Liberal MPs posting that Labor have ‘stolen’ the Liberals’ policy, and I think will like help keep some ALP/LIB swing voters who are concerned with crime in the Labor column. That’ll probably be most significant in seats like Werribee and Melton which have the highest number of youth offenders.

I think inner-city electorates have always been known to have high crime rates but people are aware of that when they move there. If you move to Richmond, St Kilda, Footscray or Collingwood you know there will be a high level of drug-related crime that just comes as part of the package of living there. Youth crime is less of an issue there, and more of an outer-suburban issue.

i dont think anyone is voting for labor for a tough on crime policy. people are pretty smart and can usually see its just electioneering.

I agree John but see I think that’s the thing.

I think a very miniscule percentage of voters will be basing their vote solely on the crime / law & order issue. However, there is probably a cohort of ALP/LIB who would prefer Labor on most issues where they are clearly delivering and the Liberals have pretty much zero policy offering, but their concerns about crime are the one issue that might make them consider voting Liberal.

In this context, all Labor has to do is neutralise that issue, so that it’s no longer decisive for them. And that’s where I think this announcement is “good politics”. If ALP & LIB have basically the same policy on crime now, you’re right that people won’t vote Labor FOR their “tough on crime” policy, but it’s also no longer a decisive enough point of difference to swing to the Liberals over.

*A cohort of ALP/LIB swing voters that was meant to say.

Trent, the danger for Labor is that their support for these tough crime laws may not be seen as genuine. In the NT where Labor there also advocated for tougher crime laws, they were defeated heavily.

There’s a difference between committing drug related crime and more violence types of crime, it’s becoming clear there are a group that are criminally minded, and there has always been such an element in the community, as Trent says, inner city suburbs like Fitzroy and Collingwood used to be home to push gangs, and Little Lon was notorious. The problem is we know being hard on crime doesn’t work, with nearly every true crime story starting with someone serving time in a youth centre before becoming a harden criminal, however being soft on crime is taken advantage off by some offenders.

Personally I just wish the electorate was intelligent enough to support evidence-based solutions rather than populist “tough on crime” garbage that has been proven to fail in most other western democracies.

I mean, are we really wanting to model our justice system on the “lock ’em up” approach of the USA, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world but still has far higher rates of violent crime than Victoria, rather than countries like Netherlands and Denmark which have far better long term outcomes by focusing on early intervention, prevention and rehabilitation?

To me it’s an awful policy either way. I can just see that, politically, it is designed just to somewhat neutralise the only one issue the policy-free Victorian Liberals seem to have gained any traction with.

I would say a very legitimate criticism of the Victorian government has been slashing funding for early intervention programs as part of their “budget repair”.

Which ends up being offset by the prison budget growing anyway, to no effect because both the incarceration rate and crime rate have both increased at the same time. Funny that.

You’re 100% right Pencil. Most hardened adults criminals are people who get indoctrinated into a life of crime via the juvenile system first. And I actually don’t think Victoria is “soft on crime” at all. Both parties have been in a race to the bottom on law & order policy since the early 2010s.

But you’re also right that there is a core group of youth offenders who are taking advantage of current conditions. They are a minority, the police have repeatedly said there’s a group of around 600 youth offenders responsible for the overwhelming majority of violent youth crime. They know each & every one of them.

So, a fresh and evidence-based approach that targets that core group would be far more effective than a blanket “tough on crime” policy that actually just puts more kids in prison and reinforces the current failures with the system.

@Trent I wholeheartedly agree with most of it except for the perspective on jailing them. Intervention programs and restorative justice plays an important role but it’s clear that if someone (be it juvenile or adult) does a crime that has heavily impacted the victims, they need to pay the price and suffer the penalties (be it jail or detention) before any form of rehab. We must support these young people but we must also listen to the victims. At the moment there’s too many victims and not supporting tougher laws to punish repeat offenders is a slap on the face for the victims.

And this issue has handed wins to the CLP and LNP in both NT and QLD so I think Labor needs to actually show that they care about the crime issues. They cannot rest their laurels and say ‘they’re doing enough right now’ because the electorate, particularly in Labor heartlands, won’t buy it. I agree there’s a degree of fearmongering from the LNP and the Murdoch media but the reality is the population is buying it and sometimes you have to go low like the population if you want to win them.

I do agree with Trent, it is probably aimed at neutralising the Liberals who have not really announced polcies. The Liberals have been good at arguing what they are against such as cost blowouts on major projects, state debt but they have not really announced a policy of Budget repair or Alternatives to SRL for example they have not commited to Melton electrification etc.