If a Victorian election was held last week, Labor would have won by a similar margin as when it was elected in 2014.
Seven weeks from the state election, a ReachTel poll of 1,239 voters conducted for Fairfax Media on 3 October gave Labor a 52%-48% lead on a two-party-preferred basis.
But the premier, Daniel Andrews, was only rated as a marginally better choice as leader than the opposition leader, Matthew Guy, at 51.3% to Guy’s 48.7%.
The poll found that younger voters aged 18 to 34 preferred Andrews – 57% of people in that group favoured him as premier. Meanwhile, 55.7% of voters aged 65 and older preferred Guy.
Labor was seen by 52.9% of voters as stronger than the Coalition on reducing cost-of-living pressures. But the Coalition rated more strongly on issues of law and order. Voters favoured the Coalition as better on this issue at 53.9% to Labor’s 46.1%.
Despite the latest crime statistics showing the criminal incident rate dropped by 7.8% in the year to June, the former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s comments about an “African gangs crisis” in Melbourne, echoed by Guy, seem to have affected voters. In January Turnbull said “growing gang violence and lawlessness in Victoria” was “a failure of the Andrews government”. Politicians and media have been accused of fear-mongering over the issue.
And despite Turnbull’s axing as prime minister six weeks ago, Guy’s popularity fell by only half a percentage point compared with July’s poll. Labor has also been affected by the red-shirts saga, which saw former Victorian Labor campaign staff arrested over the use of taxpayer money in campaigning for the 2014 election. The state’s ombudsman, Deborah Glass, in September found that Labor had been wrong to spend $388,000 of taxpayer funding during the campaign.
Nonetheless, the overall poll results suggest Labor is on track for re-election come November.
Support for the Greens barely shifted compared with the last Fairfax poll in July, at 10.9% compared with the previous 10.5%.
