Good news has been a long time coming for Ted Baillieu, Victoria’s Opposition leader. But it finally arrived this morning with a Nielsen poll showing the Coalition making up significant ground to trail Labor by just 53% to 47%, two-party-preferred.

The Age seems in no doubt as to its significance, with state political editor Paul Austin telling us that:

The message from this poll is clear: after a decade of Labor dominance, this year’s state election is shaping as a contest.

That’s a lot of weight to put on just one poll, but part of the reason is that it chimes so well with the instincts of the state’s pundits (including yours truly), most of whom have felt for a while that November’s election should be much closer than the available evidence had suggested. Statistically, today’s poll could be an outlier, but it’s actually the past few polls, showing much larger Labor leads, that have attracted disbelief.

Come the election, Victoria’s Labor government will be 11 years old, and it has had its fair share of policy difficulties over the past couple of years. But while similarly long-lived Labor governments in New South Wales and Queensland are in all sorts of electoral trouble, John Brumby seems to have lived a charmed life until now.

So how close is Baillieu? At the 2006 election, the Coalition (who weren’t actually a coalition at the time) won 45.5% of the two-party-preferred vote. That gave them 32 seats out of 88 (29 Liberals, 9 Nats), plus one conservative independent (Craig Ingram in Gippsland East, who may well retire, in which case the Coalition will almost certainly win his seat).

A uniform swing of 4.3% would net the Coalition another 10 seats (up to and including Ripon on the pendulum). That would be enough to give Labor serious trouble, since the Greens are expected to win at least one inner-city seat as well, forcing Labor to rely on them for a majority. One more seat somewhere, either to the Opposition or the Greens, would put Labor in a minority.

So the upside for Baillieu is that the pendulum is not loaded against him the way it is for his counterparts in NSW and Queensland (there is also a forest of seats waiting if he can push the swings above 6% — seven with margins between 6.3% and 6.7%). The downside is that even this sort of swing is well above the 1.5% that Nielsen is currently crediting him with.

The importance of today’s poll is not what it shows about present voting intentions, but the way it might shift the debate towards according more credibility to the Opposition, leading more voters to start taking them seriously.

With four-year fixed terms, and with Canberra hogging so much of the limelight, it’s hard to drum up much interest in state politics until immediately before an election. That makes it tough for the Opposition, but it also allows Baillieu to hope that last year’s polls are pretty meaningless, and that when people finally do start to focus on him, they might find they like him.