Albanese’s in the box seat with just a fortnight to go

The election is now Labor’s to lose, after momentum swung behind the opposition after last week’s interest rate rise.

In 2019, despite Labor being convinced they were headed for victory, Bill Shorten and his team could never quite pull away from Morrison and his relentless, brilliantly effective scare campaign. This time around, despite an uneven campaign and relentless media barracking against him, Albanese increasingly looks like he’s sealing the deal.

The two-party preferred number in the Ipsos poll in the Financial Review can safely be ignored — the election won’t even be close to 57-43 (William Bowe explains the calculations here). What that poll does show is what today’s Newspoll also reveals: Labor picking up on its primary vote, the Coalition falling on its primary vote, and Morrison’s approval numbers falling and Albanese’s rising. All within the margin of error — but all going only one way.

In fact the real story of Newspoll over the last six weeks has been that an early drop in Labor’s primary vote bottomed out three weeks ago and has been rising ever since. What might particularly spook the Coalition about the Ipsos poll is a big fall in the Coalition primary vote, and Others picking up two points — suggesting that voters are switching to independents.

With two weeks to go, an increasingly toxic Morrison needs something extraordinary. In last night’s shambolic, farcical leaders’ debate, he tried to do to Albanese what Keating did to John Hewson on A Current Affair in 1993, and bully him off his game. But Albanese was up to the task — and doesn’t have the collection of giant targets on his back that Hewson, or Bill Shorten, had. Morrison has only one more debate to force Albanese into a disastrous error that will maybe turn undecideds off Labor. And how many voters will even be watching?

And all the time, tick tick tick, teal independents are eating away at the Liberal heartland. The Coalition/News Corp strategy of demonising independents seems merely to have given them much-needed publicity and profile, boosting name recognition and confirming that they represent a case for change. They might have been best advised to follow Bob Carr’s successful playbook against Kerry Chikarovski in New South Wales — simply never mention your opponent. Instead, Morrison has attacked from afar, too scared to venture into those seats, some of which have never been held by anyone other than Liberals.

Doubts still remain for Labor — especially in Queensland, where the expectation is a sizeable lift in the primary vote that will deliver seats, but where One Nation and United Australia Party preferences are hard to predict. And both Morrison and the media will spend the next 12 days throwing everything possible at Albanese. But the goal of a long campaign was to enable Morrison to run down Albanese’s lead. Time’s running out to reverse a gap that’s widening, not shrinking.