Facing wipeout in Victoria, Labor is doubling down on anti-One Nation ads (and it’s not working)

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The chances of a Coalition majority are increasing, but Labor's new attack ads show the party is sticking to its message, regardless of its effectiveness. The post Facing wipeout…

Things are looking grim for Victorian Labor ahead of the state election.

With a recent poll not only indicating a near-wipeout for the third-term state government led by Premier Ben Carroll, but also suggesting Carroll’s own seat could be one of the dozens of Labor seats which fall, things could be far worse for the government than initially thought. Despite an increasingly likely Coalition majority, Labor has doubled down on its anti-One Nation messaging, despite little evidence of it making an impact in its favour.

The recent DemosAu poll, as Rachel Withers discussed yesterday in Crikey, shows the Liberal–National Coalition well ahead on primary votes at 33%, while One Nation sits in second place statewide at 21% and Labor at just 18% — just half of what Labor got in 2022. But most notably, the Greens were just one point behind Labor at 17%, well within the margin of error, but by far the worst polling result for the government throughout this term.

It’s worth remembering that so far, this poll is an outlier, and a Resolve poll released later on the same day had Labor at 22% and the Greens at 13% — but it still showed the same broad picture of a Coalition well ahead and Labor slipping to third place. A RedBridge/Accent Research poll released yesterday didn’t give the government any better news either, with a 57–43 two-party-preferred lead for the Coalition that would very likely put them into majority government territory and reduce Labor to a seat count somewhere in the 20s.

If that DemosAU poll turned out to be close to the final results — and that is a massive “if” — Labor would experience a wipeout at levels comparable with New South Wales in 2011 (when it won 20 seats) or even Queensland in 2012 (when it won just seven). It puts some of Labor’s safer metropolitan seats, previously thought to be unlikely to flip, in the spotlight, such as Mordialloc (8.2% margin against the Liberals), Point Cook (8.3%) and Clarinda (10.2%).

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