Labor and Liberals suffer guilt by association as both take a dive with national counterparts
The latest Resolve Political Monitor presents two seemingly contradictory sets of numbers.
There is a huge decline in primary votes for both major parties. Almost half of voters surveyed say they would vote for a minor party or an independent party if the election were held today, and the combined vote for Labor and the Liberals is lower than it has been since November 2021, when tracking began.
But on the other hand, both party leaders (Prime Minister Chris Minns and opposition leader Kellie Sloane) are hugely popular. Minns’ net likeability rating is +18, Sloane’s is +8. The Prime Minister is doing very well, especially compared to other Labor leaders. Anthony Albanese has a net favorability rating of -15. Jacinta Allen’s value in Victoria is -36.
Likeability – of course – does not necessarily mean voter preference. But it does help explain why politics in NSW is fast becoming a game of guilt through unity.
Both parties believe their soft votes are a result of contamination from unpopular federal counterparts and are trying to time the March elections accordingly.
Following reports last week that federal Coalition leader Jacinta Nampijinpa Price had shared an incendiary social media post containing false claims that Indian immigrants were being “imported”, the NSW Labor government issued a statement condemning it.
“The Minns Labor Government is calling on the Liberals and Nationals to explain why they continue to target Australian Indians,” thundered NSW opposition leader Kellie Sloane, who called on the state Liberals to “join Labor in rejecting attempts to exclude Aussie-Indians for political gain.”
There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s interesting that nowhere in Labor’s statement does it mention that Price is a federal Senator from the Northern Territory.
On the other side of the coin, the Liberals under Sloane spent plenty of time tarring Minns with the prime minister’s brush. In his budget response speech last month he attacked “Anthony Albanese’s broken promises on capital gains tax” and accused the Minns government of allowing federal Labor to rip off NSW on infrastructure funding.
Herald’s The latest Resolve Political Monitor offers a clear explanation of why they are so desperate to bind their opponents to their federal counterparts and put some distance between themselves and them. Primary votes have fallen for both parties this term of government, but the timing for each dovetails with their federal counterparts’ own problems.
The NSW Coalition vote has tracked fairly consistently with its federal counterparts since about August 2024. From then until February 2025, the party led by Mark Speakman hovered around a fairly healthy 38 to 37 per cent of the primary vote, roughly similar to the results received by Peter Dutton’s federal opposition.
Then the federal election took place. After Dutton’s disastrous campaign, in which the coalition received just under 32 per cent of the primary vote, the vote in NSW also began to fall precipitously; It fell from 36 percent in April to 32 percent in June and eventually to 28 percent in November before Speakman was ousted as leader.
The same was true of Chris Minns’ government.
Labor achieved its best result since September 2023, from a low of 29 per cent in February 2025 to a primary vote of 38 per cent in July last year, following the resurgent and re-elected government of Anthony Albanese.
But despite a sharp rise in Minns’ personal sympathies following the Bondi massacre, he could not avoid the stain inflicted on federal Labor. Labor received 29, 32 and 29 per cent of the vote in the next three election cycles, following an initial vote of 37 per cent in December and January.
The accepted view is that most voters don’t pay much attention to government policies until something goes wrong, and the upside is that there is still time, especially for the Coalition, to reverse the difficult results.
There isn’t much time, though. Labor took over the Coalition in October 2022 and remained there until the election five months later.
But the overwhelming impression from recent NSW polls is that while voters don’t mind what’s on the package, they’re less than thrilled with what’s inside. If either side wants to change that, they will need to do more than tar their opponents with the Canberra brush.
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