When both leaders are loathed – a polling dynamics history

After months of inactivity, this will be a very busy period for this sporadic column. As well as the very recent EMRS opinion-poll-shaped-object dealing with state voting intentions, there will be a Hobart City Council season starting shortly, commencing in mid-September with an article on the orientations of aldermen that even includes two-dimensional graphing! But before we get on to that I want to have a detailed look at something unusual in the federal scene that has been missed in much of the discussion.

Nobody needs me to tell them that polling suggests the Gillard government is very unpopular at present, and writing articles about Labor’s failures to sell itself, what Labor is doing wrong, and the strange disappointments of the Gillard reign so far is like shooting fish in a barrel. (I was going to add with the water out, but supposedly it’s easier with the water in, as the shockwave from a single shot then stuns them all. It’s always good to know these things.)

What interests me, though, is the contrast between the fortunes of the parties and the fortunes of their leaders. With Labor polling appallingly, it stands to reason that its leader is not popular. But what is more surprising is that with the government on the nose, and the Opposition soaring, the Opposition Leader is disliked as well.

In examining federal opinion poll trends over time, I have taken to using mainly Newspoll data. Newspoll is particularly useful because the Newspoll website includes historical series of approval ratings and primary votes for parties going back to 1985 in an easily cut-and-pasteable form. Morgan have been in the field much longer, but little of their early data is online, and the analysis of Morgan polls is complicated by varying polling methods yielding up-and-down results (as well as often smallish sample sizes). As well as the Newspoll website, another precious resource for me is is Peter Brent’s original Mumble website tables . These fill in the gaps in the Newspoll 2PP figures from the times when Newspoll did not routinely calculate such statistics.

Newspolls are usually taken fortnightly (except close to elections when they occur more often), though before 1992 they were monthly. I have formed a sample of 571 Newspolls, for which I have found the approval ratings of the PM and the Leader of the Opposition, and the two party preferred vote (2PP) for the Government and Opposition of the time.

To consider Labor’s current plight as a party first of all, in the 8-10 July Newspoll it recorded a 2PP of 42 (the equal sixth worst by a government in the sample) and in the 19-21 August Newspoll a 43. It has also had two 44s and three 45s in recent months. By comparison, the worst Newspolls recorded by a government were a 39 by the last Howard Government in March 2007, a 40 by each of Howard again that year and Keating in his second term, and three 41s also by Howard in 2007. These governments all lost at the next election. The three prior 42s included another 2007 Howard, another second-term Keating and one polled by Hawke in 1991 just before Keating replaced him. The latter is the only previous case of a government that polled a 42 or worse in Newspoll winning the next election – and it did so under a different Prime Minister. Hence, if she wins the next election, Gillard will have scored the worst Newspoll 2PP polled by the party of a PM who retained office (and it was clearly no freak result either). However, Keating in his first term recovered from two 43s to quite comfortably win the unwinnable election, and Howard polled a 43 in a bad patch in 2001, as well as a 44 in his first term in 1998 and a 45 in Mark Latham’s honeymoon period prior to Howard’s fourth and final win. So while Gillard would need to set records from here to win again, she would not go all that far beyond what has been done before. Furthermore, the past history shows that opinion polls taken well out from an election don’t predict what will happen at it well. Governments tend to be resilient and to have lots of second chances, but at the same time, governments that were soaring mid-term can come very close to defeat.

The best indicator of a leader’s popularity is generally their net satisfaction rating (“netsat”) found by subtracting their disapproval rating from their approval. If the former is higher then the number will be negative. Note that the netsats of newly elected leaders tend to be good, since voters who like the party tend to approve of the leadership change, while opponents tend to give the new leader a fair go.

Gillard’s first recorded netsat as Prime Minister was +19. She stayed in positive territory until the end of February 2011 then lost 23 points in a single poll following her announcement of the carbon tax and has been in negative-netsat land ever since, with a worst of –34 in the late June Newspoll (and the current –32 is not much better). The 23 points dropped by Gillard in one poll was the second-largest fall for a PM in the sample – John Howard dropped 24 points from +32 to +8 in Feb 2002 for reasons unknown to me. (The largest fall for an Opposition Leader is 40 points for Malcolm Turnbull during the Ozcar bungle, but Alexander Downer’s effort in losing 36 points one Newspoll then another 28 points two later was even more impressive.)

Gillard’s approval ratings are bad, but they are far from unsurvivable based on past electoral history. Hawke dipped to a netsat of –25 in 1989 and still beat Peacock, and bad spells for Howard included a –25 in October 1997, a –31 and other bad results in June 1998, and a –36 among others in March 2001 when almost everybody thought that he was gone. After winning the election later that year, he stayed above –10 for the rest of his career and left office still respected by the public with a net approval rating of +6.

But the real master of unpopular PM status was Paul John Keating. From taking over the post in late 1991, through one election victory and up to his defeat by Howard in 1996, Keating set an astonishing record of which he would probably be proud – in 109 Newspolls he did not record one single positive net satisfaction rating. His best was minus two when he got a bounce for winning the 1993 election, and he later managed a minus three when Downer got so awful that it made him look OK by comparison. In the term in which he won, Keating bottomed out at –44 and was nearly always below the –19 that was supposedly terminal for the luckless Kevin Rudd. It is no surprise that Keating holds the record for the worst netsat by a PM in Newspoll history, –57, not once but two polls in a row. And yet, after all that, his party was actually polling competitively in the leadup to the ‘96 election (behind, but rarely disastrously so), and only a series of late-breaking blunders and missed chances really caused it to lose that one as heavily as it did.

As Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott started with a slightly positive netsat (and a low undecided rating for a new leader) and generally stayed close to zero until the carbon tax announcement, going down to –15 and up to a peak of +10. From the stage where Gillard crashed onwards, Abbott has usually been in double figure negatives with a worst of –21 in late March, and the current –19 is not much better. We don’t know much about the Newspoll profile of a winning Opposition Leader since there have been only two of them in that time, but it’s notable that Howard during his winning term was rarely in negative terrain with a worst of –12, while Rudd enjoyed massive pluses all the way to the bank.

One way to explore cases of mutual PM and Opposition Leader unpopularity is to just add the two netsats, although there will always be cases where one leader is far more to blame than the other. This combined figure dropped from zero to –24 immediately following announcement of the carbon tax, and has now crashed to –51, showing that Gillard and Abbott are the least popular leadership pair for sixteen years. In the context of the time back to 1985, we are now getting close to the bottom five percent of readings for this figure. (The worst combined netsat was –76 by Keating/Hewson in Sep 1993.)

Another way to look at it is to simply consider the maximum of the two netsats, and find the lowest maximums. Here Abbott’s current –19 is even closer to the bottom with the worst being –30 by Keating against Hewson (who was on –35) in June 1993.

Whichever way it is looked at there are only four phases in the last 25 years in which the combined ratings of the two leaders were as bad as this or worse. One briefly involved Hawke and Peacock in the leadup to the 1990 election, which Peacock’s party somehow managed to almost win although two-thirds of Australians disapproved of him. The second phase involved bad mutual ratings for Keating (“recession we had to have” plus general perceptions of arrogance) and Hewson (“feral abacus” wielding the Fightback GST and other New Right schemes) sporadically through 1992 and early 1993. The third was a longer, deeper and more solid period of mutual dislike of Keating and Hewson. This started only months after the 1993 election that had in fact damaged both of their authorities (Hewson because he lost it, and Keating because he had promised too much in order to win.) Finally, the fourth involved Keating and Downer after Downer had clearly failed as Opposition Leader – four months of his ratings being worse than Keating’s and Downer was out the door.

So, the (limited) past polling history of these sorts of periods is that the Opposition Leader is either replaced before the next election or else loses, while the PM might use the unfitness for office of the Opposition to survive, but only for one more election if so. We don’t know yet whether this is how the current tape plays out at all, and throwing the polling out the window for a moment, the view that Labor is probably doomed is such a tempting one on so many fronts. But if the Liberals have to change their leader to win the next election, then the limited historical record is telling us we should not be that surprised. Whatever the Coalition’s successes, Abbott is less popular now – with the Coalition romping in the polls – than he was before the last election where they only more or less broke even. That raises a serious doubt about where he might find himself should the party numbers tighten and questions be raised about whether his leadership places a likely Coalition win at any risk.

An even better way to look at the relation between leader ratings and lopsided party support is to pick out those Newspolls where the Opposition led by 55:45 or better. This has actually happened in 59 polls, more than 10% of the sample, including the most recent seven in a row. The Prime Ministers who appear in this sample are Hawke, Keating, Howard and Gillard (Rudd was removed before he got anywhere near) while the Opposition Leaders who figure most prominently are Rudd, Hewson, Beazley and Abbott. Downer and Latham appear in a few cases while they were still in their honeymoon periods, and Howard as Opposition Leader appears only twice.

The median netsat for a PM in this sample is –19. Gillard’s netsats among her seven recent entries are generally worse than that median, but this is mainly because of the high esteem still enjoyed by Howard personally even in 2007, so the top half of the table is just about all Howard. Gillard’s numbers are similar to those of both Hawke and Keating at times when the Liberals under Hewson looked to be headed for victory (but as it turned out, weren’t). So Gillard’s unpopularity given that of her government – or perhaps even the other way around – is nothing startling.

The median netsat for an Opposition Leader whose party has such a hefty lead is +19. The top half of that table is an endless procession of Rudds and a couple of honeymoon-period Lathams (in each case against Howard), but then we find something different. When Howard, Beazley and the pre-election Hewson were leading their Oppositions to excellent polling, they were much more personally popular than Abbott is now. Howard was around +20, pre-election Hewson averaged +15 and Beazley about –1. Abbott at an average –14 is doing almost as badly as leader of a strongly preferred Opposition than the post-defeat John Hewson (-16). So, as far as Leaders of strongly preferred Oppositions go, Abbott is about as bad as a discredited lame-duck leader who had lost the unloseable election, who was only seat-warming until a replacement could get the numbers, and whose opponent was probably the least popular Prime Minister while in office in all of Australian political history. Furthermore, the worst of Hewson’s numbers in the sample came as Hewson’s unpopularity dragged his party down to the point where it ceased to hold such commanding leads, and he then had to be replaced.

Yet another useful metric is the Opposition Leader’s netsat lead over the PM. On this measure, the top half of the table is dominated by Rudd against Howard, Howard against Keating and Hewson against Hawke. Two of these Opposition Leaders won and the third at least saw off the opposing PM. In the bottom half of the table we find Hewson against Keating (both before and after the election) and Beazley against Howard. And right at the bottom, occupying seven of the bottom eleven positions, including the equal worst on record, we find Tony Abbott. In the polls in which the Coalition has led 55-45 or better, Abbott’s average netsat lead has been 11 points, compared to a median for all such favoured Oppositions of 38. In one he even managed a netsat deficit.

There are not many conclusions that can be drawn from this and none of them are good news for Tony Abbott. One possibility is that the government’s position in the polls is really entirely its own doing, that even Barnaby Joyce could be leading 57-43 at the moment and that the Leader of the Opposition’s bad-boy political-troll act is not making the government suffer but simply immaterial to the government’s hugely self-inflicted misery, a yapping irrelevance that is a potential deadweight on the Coalition’s chances should Labor ever snap out of it and start getting anything right.

Another option (a more likely one in my view) is that Abbott is making the government’s and Gillard’s ratings crash through his continual polarised attacks (in particular because they foolishly choose to comply with his wedge tactics and policy goalposts then fail to deliver), but he is dragging himself to the outer circles of opinion poll hell in the process, because he is not a good enough leader to know any better way. That’s all well and good if the government collapses on the floor of the House and is forced to a snap election the Opposition would obviously win, but failing that, where will he be after another eighteen months of this, and is there anything the Coalition can do to make the voters actually like their leader?

Perhaps the government will collapse on the floor of the House one day, any day. You’d hardly trust a government with such a dubious service delivery record to keep itself in power in a fragile situation, and ousted former PMs are unpredictable critters. But the current assumption that a single sparrow falling (Craig Thomson for example) means the end of the Gillard Government is not necessarily sound. If it came to it, I strongly suspect that Labor could peel off one of the other side’s current 74 to serve as a replacement Speaker (with Peter Slipper being the most obvious candidate) thus giving it a majority of one on the floor. How they would ever get their replacement Speaker elected is another matter, but as a guide to what can be possible I recommend Anne Twomey’s detailed and lively account of a New South Wales parliament exactly a century ago where a majority was lost from pretty much the same position and the government lurched from crisis to crisis and survived to be reelected. By comparison to that, what we have seen so far in this Parliament is chickenfeed. The Coalition has to be careful that its tactics for trying to wrest office do not turn the voters against it.

While carping about Abbott and Gillard is fast becoming a national pastime (one I am happy to join in with; I was in the recent Newspoll sample and gave them both a hearty “disapprove”) there is often a rosy tint to the nostalgia for past conflicts. Comparing the Coalition’s attempts to bring down the Government on the floor of the House, I have seen some people make comparisons to the Senate instability that eventually brought down the Whitlam government. They argue that it is the same thing all over again except that Whitlam and Fraser are legends while Abbott and Gillard are pathetic political mice. Well maybe, but at the time many voters probably saw Gough as a blundering radical headstrong clown and Fraser as a gutter opportunist propped up by corrupt Premiers. I look back semi-fondly to the Keating/Hewson times as days of old when knights were bold and elections were fought over issues, but in reality they were not world-beating party generals as this article has shown. Perhaps in 2050 AD, scribes will look back on today and eulogise the carbon courage of our first female Prime Minister, or how the Monk’s madcap methods saved the Australian economy, and decry the boringness of their own manicured political times, and wonder why we were not more enthused about such “fascinating” leaders. Dear future history, we are telling you that while they may have seemed exciting from your big-picture distance, from a day-to-day perspective they were tedious and timid.

First published: 2011-09-02 04:16 AM