Pre And Post Budget Federal Poll Roundup

2PP Aggregate 52.4 to Labor vs Coalition (term low, -0.8 since last week)

Shadow-2PP 52.9 to Labor vs One Nation (-0.6 since last week)

Labor would win election"held now" but most likely with only a small majority

This is my usual annual post about federal voting intention polling after the Budget, plus a summary of what's been happening in the months leading up.

The briefest summary of what happened in the months leading up is "not much".  In terms of my Labor vs Coalition two-party preferred aggregate, Labor dipped down to the high 52s in mid-January (off not a lot of polling at the time) but got back above 54 during Coalition leadership tensions in early February.  Since Angus Taylor replaced Sussan Ley Labor's 2PP has bobbed around the 53s with no real evidence of signal.

At the time of my last federal poll roundup there had been an accelerating move to One Nation on my estimate of a Labor vs One Nation shadow-2PP, one which eerily paralleled the way support for the No campaign accelerated during the Voice.  However since the end of January that trend has stalled with Labor's average value from specific polls running generally around the mid 53s.  (There is a very slight downward slope in the graph but it's statistically insignificant and may be affected by the house effects of particular polls, which I haven't adjusted for).  

The static nature of both the 2PP and shadow 2PP is not surprising given that in primary vote polling between the start of February and the Budget there was basically no movement for anyone.  There was just the slightest hint in the Budget leadup that the One Nation primary vote surge might finally be deflating.  

However in the five polls out since the Budget (Freshwater, Resolve, Newspoll, Morgan, YouGov - I'm disregarding the immediate post-Budget Morgan SMS poll due to concerns about that polling method) One Nation has increased its primary vote compared to the previous readings by the same pollsters by 1,2,3, 3 and 1 points respectively.  This very probably isn't coincidence, but it's impossible to untangle whether this is a reaction to the Budget, a bounce for an impressive win in the Farrer by-election or both.  Only Newspoll had Labor's primary vote over 30.  

The post-Budget polls

Once again I have no intention of replicating exact primary voting poll numbers available elsewhere.  What is not available elsewhere (especially with several pollsters now declining to publish 2PP estimates, or using respondent preferences only) is my last-election-based 2PP conversions, for whatever use they may be if the current Coalition/One Nation standoff survives til the 2028 election.  In the post-Budget polls, my estimates have Labor down in all five polls compared to their previous readings, to 51.7 (-0.7) in Morgan, 54.0 (-0.7) in Newspoll which tends to be stronger than others for Labor lately, 52.7 (-1.8) in Resolve, 50.3 (-3.1) in Freshwater and 51.9 (-2.6) in YouGov.  Resolve is pretty bouncy and Freshwater is in the naughty corner after a poor performance at the 2025 federal election so I wouldn't take all these as evidence that Labor has necessarily taken a large immediate hit, but there strongly does appear to be something.  My aggregate has Labor down 0.8 points from last week to a term-low 52.4 so far (which will become 52.3 tomorrow if there are no more polls today).  This is possibly a little harsh as it's been going backwards and forwards on the question of whether to consider Freshwater to have a house effect, so there's a case for it being 52.5 instead.

 Either way, it's a position from which Labor would probably still win a narrow majority, but might fall short if the Coalition and One Nation's demographic strengths in different areas complemented each other enough instead of getting in each others' way.  At this stage this is of little significance given, eg, that Labor were trailing on 2PP in early 2025 yet went on to win very easily.  However it does at least show some question marks starting to appear about how easily Labor will necessarily dominate a fragmented Right.   I also have Labor's shadow-2PP vs One Nation down by a similar amount post-Budget to 52.8.  

At this stage neither the Coalition nor One Nation has beaten Labor on my estimates in a single poll all term but that will probably happen someday.  Labor has had three polls so far that I have got as between 50-51 in the last month or so (the above mentioned Freshwater and mid-April Spectre and DemosAU polls).  

Governments falling slightly (on average about 0.4 points) in 2PP polling is the average response to a Budget, with the "Budget bounce" being an uncommon animal that is almost never reliably recorded outside Coalition government election years.  We'll need to wait a few weeks to see if this batch is the start of a more serious decline or if the damage from a Budget that's had some feisty reactions in polling is temporary.  I'll add in updates for any more polls that come out in the Budget cycle.

The Budget

This year's Budget is one of the more dramatic Budgets for a while, particularly because of the government doing what it said it would not do (ie anything) on negative gearing and capital gains tax.  This is especially sensitive because Labor is perceived (though the truth of it is debatable) to have lost the 2019 election by being upfront about its intentions and, unlike the Howard government with its change to supporting the GST, hasn't sought a mandate for changing its position.  At the same time, the Budget is being pitched as courageously tackling the damage that decades of perverse incentives have done to the housing market and the social rifts this has created, and making it easier for people under the age of 387 to buy their own house.  So what do voters make of all this?

Well if we judge it by the two leading Newspoll Budget questions, they think that it's a shocker!  On perceived impact on the economy, only 22% of Newspoll respondents rated it good, with 47% rating it bad, the net -25 rating being easily the second worst ever and the net -41 reading on perceived personal impact (11-52) being the third worst.   Graphically (on my increasingly scribbled over chart) it's not as out there as those famous (and also promise-breaking) stinkers in 1993 and 2014 but this is hardly what you'd expect from a dominant government.  And yet, of course, the Opposition is so struggling that voters dismiss (39-47) the idea that the Opposition would have done better.  

Digging into the other Newspoll questions voters also thought the Budget would make inflation worse (48-9), would have them paying more tax (39-7), was a step in the wrong direction for housing (38-27) and was "driving a wedge" between generations rather than "rebalancing the playing field" (47-26 with virtually no variation by age).  The same pattern repeats across all the polls; if you ask respondents what they think about the Budget overall or whether it will have a specific impact it gets the thumbs down.  

And yet, if you ask voters about what they think of the content of the Budget, as Resolve did, almost every measure included had a net positive rating, and in most cases a large one.  

This seems to be a standard feature of Budget polling, raising the question of whether many respondents actually have made any kind of broad attempt to think about the Budget or just use the questions to send signals about stuff they are grumpy about, including in this case politicians breaking promises.

Leaderships

This week Resolve had Angus Taylor ahead of Anthony Albanese as preferred/better (wording varies by poll) Prime Minister 33-30 and Freshwater had him ahead 41-40.   YouGov had Albanese ahead 41-38 and Newspoll 46-38.  Leadership satisfactions/approvals are uniformly quite bad for Albanese across the board: Resolve net -22, Freshwater net -19, Newspoll net -17, YouGov net -18.  Yet Resolve (net +8) and Freshwater (net +9) have Taylor quite well regarded while Newspoll has him at net -12.  Does anyone believe the strong ratings for Taylor from Resolve and Freshwater?  I don't; it reminds me too much of the previous term in which Peter Dutton frequently did quite well out of those two and we all saw how that ended.  

It's true that new and low profile Opposition Leaders have tended to historically do well on net satisfaction because they start with low negatives, but that tends to go with weak performances on Better Prime Minister unless the government is losing heavily (which this one clearly isn't).  I doubt that if voters really liked Taylor so much we would have seen so little recovery (maybe 2-3%) in the Coalition's primary vote from the worst end times of the Sussan Ley leadership.  Nor do I think the Coalition would have done so terribly badly in Farrer which is not so far from Hume.  For the moment I think that the methods decisions of some of the polls are unintentionally making one of the two party leaders look pretty good when the real public mood towards the majors and their leaders is a pox on both your houses.