There’s an awful lot of talk around the traps about how Beazley suffered immense damage from opposing the 2005 tax cuts. In one respect that’s very true – Beazley’s approval ratings went down the gurgler, although they were already starting to go that way before he made his tax stand.
However, the vote estimates are a bit of a different story.
While the ALP lost a small amount of their primary vote, it was a pretty temporary affair and on the two party preferred, not a great lot happened at all.
First up the vote estimates – here we’ll use Newspoll monthly averages, Morgan monthly averages and Nielsen (which is monthly anyway). We’ll also take the all poll monthly average and look at both primary and two party preferred vote estimates.
Worth remembering is that Beazley opposed the tax cuts in May 2005.
There was literally only a few points here and there on the primaries between May and September, while the two party preferred did pretty much nothing at all. The Party vote didn’t seem to suffer greatly from Beazley’s stand except for the hypothetical “what if” scenario – “WHAT IF” Beazley hadn’t opposed the tax cuts, then “MAYBE” public support for the ALP would have been higher.
Yet, Maybes aren’t worth much.
Where he did seem to take a hit, or rather where the hit exacerbated pre-established trends was in the satisfaction ratings. Here we’ll just use Newspoll and Nielsen.
Ouch!
May became the turning point where the overall perception of Beazley went negative with the public. Even though his personal ratings were slipping in the lead up to May, post-May the negative perceptions set like concrete.
Bringing this back to the current stand being taken by Turnbull -the parallel isn’t really whether the party vote will move like it did in 2005, but whether Turnbull’s personal ratings sink, reinforce the strength of the vote gap (hardening up ordinarily soft ALP voters) and make him and the Coalition unelectable in the process.
If the vote moves substantially against the Coalition (which is hard to see since they are already coming off such a low vote base) then it won’t be a replay of 2005 – it will be something else entirely. If the vote moves against the Coalition slightly in the short term, but Turnbull’s personal ratings go down the gurgler and stay there over the longer term – then we really will have a replay of the Beazley tax cut experience.
So keep an eye on the personal ratings of Turnbull over the next few months rather than the vote estimates- for that is where the real action will be. Once those personal ratings tank, they simply dont come back – and you can’t win a Federal election when you’re in negative net approval territory.
