Australia’s ruling Labor Party retakes poll lead from right-wing One Nation

CANBERRA: Australia’s ruling Labor Party has retaken the lead in opinion polls, pushing the insurgent right-wing One Nation party into second place.

A third of the 1,235 voters surveyed last week said they support the government of prime minister Anthony Albanese, the party’s highest result this year in the Newspoll carried in the Australian newspaper. Support for One Nation fell to 29%, although the Liberal-National coalition saw no benefit from that decline in support for their right-wing competitor, dropping to a historic low of 17%.

A separate poll conducted for the Australian Financial Review newspaper showed a similar result, with the Labor Party just ahead of One Nation.

One Nation has surged in the polls over the past six months, winning its best result in the March state election in South Australia and also winning its federal first lower house seat in May. That increase in support has mostly come at the expense of the traditional conservative Liberal-National coalition, which has continued to plummet in the polls despite changing its leader in February.

Albanese was the preferred leader for almost half of the people surveyed, with One Nation leader Pauline Hanson second and coalition leader Angus Taylor third, the poll results showed.

The government’s support may have been helped by its efforts to make housing more affordable, with the first tranche of legislation aimed at making buying a home easier for younger Australians passing parliament last week.

The survey was conducted from Monday to Thursday last week with a 3% margin of error. The survey indicated that part of the reason people are supporting One Nation is that they feel it is listening to their frustrations. More than a third of One Nation supporters said the most important thing they look at is whether they understand “people like me”, much higher than any other group.

The government is trying to tap into that, with treasurer Jim Chalmers saying Sunday on television that “we understand in our government, that the status quo is not working for people, particularly in the economy, but in our societies more broadly.”

“Change is accelerating in our society and in our economy. These global and generational pressures are intensifying on people, and from our point of view, we’ve chosen to address that to deliver real change rather than to dismiss it or ignore it,” he said, calling those concerns “legitimate”.