I haven't done a federal polling roundup for a long time, because most of the time at present we are only getting Newspoll. However, last week saw the quarterly batch release of Essential's new poll results and there is actually enough information out there to make it worth sneaking in a general if slightly dated polling review in the small window of spare time I have between the ACT and Queensland election counts. My previous comments about federal polling (or mostly, the Australian's lousy coverage thereof) were here.
This year we saw very little of a common polling trope in previous years - fevered speculation about whether the government of the day would get a "Budget bounce". Actual budget bounces are rare, but the extremely well-received 2019 Budget not only saw an immediate lift of about 0.6% in aggregated polling for the Coalition, but also either coincided with or kickstarted a longer recovery that continued through the campaign. We now know that all that polling was wrong, but we don't know if it was wrong by the same amount all along. In any case, 2019 was another example of the strongest evidence (such as it was, since it could be coincidence rather than causation) for the Budgets that most help government polling usually occurring in a Coalition government's election year.
Newspoll recently recorded a 51% 2PP for the government before the Budget and a 52% after it, which people unfamiliar with the idea of random statistical noise may have taken as evidence of another Budget bounce. However, the evidence from Essential weakens if not completely negates the evidence for the bounce, depending on how Essential is interpreted.
