Aggregate: 52.7 to Labor (+0.2 in two weeks since last completely pre-Budget reading)
Labor would easily win election "held now"
Voter budget ratings are historically about average
Commentary around the 2017 federal budget has been even more focused than normal on one of the Australian beltway polling obsessions, the idea of a "budget bounce". The Coalition's moves on the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the announcement of a bank levy, in particular, were seen as bold moves to seize the middle ground from Labor in an attempt to make the Government popular again. Some even saw this as a threat to Bill Shorten's leadership of the Labor Opposition.
That at least a temporary bounce was widely anticipated (and also widely seen as the aim of the game) is one thing, but another has been the common blight of house-poll myopia in which commentators from particular stables obsess over the single-poll-to-single-poll changes in the poll their network commissions, while ignoring both the aggregated cross-poll trend and even the longer history of their own poll. In the case of Newspoll, it didn't help the Government that their previous result (48-52) was a shade on the friendly side of the recent run of polling, thus setting a pretty high benchmark for any budget bounce to be assessed by News Ltd scribes from.
