None of the above: Poll reveals Victorian flight from major parties

Support for the major parties in Victoria has crashed to the lowest level on record, as the state enters an election year with an unpopular premier and an opposition haemorrhaging votes to One Nation.

The latest Resolve Political Monitor conducted for The Age over the first two months of this year confirms the depth of voter malaise towards the long-term Labor government and the damage done to the state opposition by the federal Coalition’s implosion, with 42 per cent of respondents flagging an intention to support a minor party or independent candidate.

If these numbers were produced at the November state election, it would represent an exodus of more than 470,000 voters from the major parties since the 2022 poll, and most likely produce a hung parliament. When the Andrews government was first elected a decade ago, 80 per cent of Victorians voted for one of the major parties.

Support for the ALP is flat-lining at 28 per cent, a figure unchanged since the last survey was conducted in November and December last year. Support for the Victorian Coalition has cratered from 39 per cent in the last survey to just 30 per cent, the lowest level since August 2023.

One Nation, after securing a mere 0.22 per cent of the vote at the last state election, is now polling at double figures, with 11 per cent of respondents saying that if an election were held today, they would plump for Pauline Hanson’s party of grievance. This poll marks the first time the Resolve Political Monitor has specifically included One Nation as a primary vote option for Victorians.

Support for the Greens is unchanged at 12 per cent.

Resolve pollster Jim Reed said the survey demonstrated that One Nation, a party whose impact has been largely confined to national affairs, was starting to make its mark in state politics, including Victoria. He said the rise of One Nation in Victoria had come almost entirely at the expense of the Coalition, which needs to win 16 additional seats in November to secure a lower house majority.

“This is not good news for the opposition at all,” he said.

“At this stage, the One Nation vote is simply making the Coalition’s task of job of winning enough seats even more difficult by taking away vote and not returning it all on preferences. If [Victorian Premier Jacinta] Allan retains power she’ll have Hanson to thank.”

One Nation’s vote would need to climb “significantly higher” for the party to win lower house seats in their own right, Reed said.

“The process has been slower because the One Nation leadership is in Canberra, their key issues of immigration and net zero are federal, and they simply don’t have the same presence in Victoria as elsewhere,” he said. “But it’s started, and the trend behind this snapshot clearly indicates it has some way to go.”

There are also troubling signs within this survey for Labor, with the results suggesting that, after two years in the state’s top job, Allan is badly on the nose with voters.

Her net satisfaction rating of -37 makes her less popular than her predecessor Daniel Andrews, whose last public appearance was in Beijing sharing a stage with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. As a point of comparison, Donald Trump had a net rating of -41 when Resolve this month posed a question about the US president.

Only one in five survey respondents nominated Allan as their preferred premier. This is Allan’s lowest score on this measure since she assumed the party leadership from Andrews in September 2023.

The survey of 1100 respondents – which does not publish a two-party preferred figure – was conducted across two tracks between 12-16 January and 8-14 February.

The first track coincided with Victoria’s destructive bushfires. The second was conducted amid further revelations by this masthead about the extent and cost of corruption on the government’s Big Build construction sites, as well as turmoil in the federal Coalition ranks.

A senior ALP figure, speaking anonymously to detail internal matters, said the extent of Allan’s unpopularity with voters would normally be grounds for a leadership challenge, but there was no prospect of this happening before the election. “There is no appetitive to move on her, none,” they said.

This leaves Victorian Labor resigned to the task of campaigning for an unprecedented fourth consecutive term behind a leader who has so far struggled to resonate with the electorate.

Opposition Leader Jess Wilson, by contrast, is liked by voters. Her net positive rating of 14 makes her more popular than Brad Battin was during his leadership.

However, this has not stopped the flight of Liberal supporters to One Nation, a party yet to announce its candidates, a state leader or the policy platform it plans to take into the Victorian election. Its only current member of parliament is Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell, who became One Nation’s first Victorian representative when she was elected to the upper house in 2022.

A senior Liberal Party figure said while One Nation was campaigning in Victoria largely on a vibe, the Victorian opposition was copping brand damage from the Liberal and National party wars in Canberra which last week culminated in Angus Taylor toppling Sussan Ley as federal Liberal leader.

“It is absolutely federal backwash,” they said. “Our brand federally is in the toilet.”

Some of the reasons offered by survey respondents to explain their voting intention suggest that Labor’s re-election prospects are suffering a double whammy from Allan’s leadership and the legacy she inherited from Andrews.

Only 18 per cent of respondents said they were more likely to vote Labor because of Andrews’ legacy, compared to 45 per cent who said they were less likely. More surprisingly, the completion of the long-awaited West Gate Tunnel and Metro Tunnel projects were also net negatives for the government.

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