Does Scott Morrison really want to win the next election? Because, right now, he seems to be doing nearly everything he can to guarantee a thumping loss.
Mostly, by caving into the noisy green lobby in the inner-cities of Melbourne and Sydney, and ignoring the vast swathes of voters in Queensland — the very voters who saved his backside at the last election.
I asked recently if Morrison had thrown away the next election by jumping on the “Net Zero” bandwagon. The latest polling from Queensland suggests that I broke Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.
Monday marked the last feasible date for a federal election to be called this year. There was no Newspoll that day, but the Essential Poll out yesterday will have Coalition strategists sighing with relief that we won’t be heading to the polls until somewhere between March and May next year. For the Essential shows a shocking collapse in the approval of the Prime Minister in Queensland, the state that delivered the election to Scott Morrison in 2019.
The percentage of people who approve of the job Morrison is doing as Prime Minister plunged by close to a quarter from 60 to 46 per cent, miles outside the margin of error.
An optimist might argue that the poll is an outlier, a mere blip. But the sheer weight of the numbers suggests that something is going on in Queensland, and it won’t be good for the Coalition.
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of Queensland to the Coalition’s chances of success.
A stronger than expected result in Queensland at the 2019 election got Scott Morrison across the line. The LNP won 23 of the 30 seats in the state. The net two seat swing allowed the Coalition to regain the majority in the House of Representatives lost after the by-election brought about by Malcolm Turnbull’s resignation.
Coalition strategists need Queenslanders to stick with them if they are to win the next election, particularly after unfavourable boundary redistributions in Western Australia and Victoria.
But if Queenslanders believe the Prime Minister has sold them out on coal, things are going to get very volatile.
Spectator Australia
This is the simple maths that seems to have escaped ‘Scotty from Marketing’.
Morrison clearly believes he can buy off the green-left in the media, the leafy terraces of Melbourne, and the harbourside mansions, by posing as a sudden convert to the “Net Zero” cause. A Road to Glasgow conversion, as it were.
Are Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg really so stupid? Nothing is ever good enough from a Coalition government, for the climate loons. Just ask Malcolm Turnbull. Three of the last four prime ministers have been crushed at the ballot box after bending over backwards to appease the green-left.
Morrison won the last election by ignoring the headline-grabbing boomer retirees and dreadlocked unemployables of Bob Brown’s anti-coal caravan and listening instead to the Queenslanders who lined the streets of a country town to jeer at them. Now, he’s turning his back on the very people who kept him on the government benches.
Hat tip: taking the taxes of mining communities, to subsidise EVs for green greybeards, while destroying the economic foundation of those communities, is not exactly a stellar vote-winning strategy.
Climate pandering has never won an Australian election — that’s not about to change in a hurry.
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