In 1983 Australia’s Labor Party leadership changed when then Opposition Leader Bill Hayden fell on his sword to a massively popular Bob Hawke. Hawke went on to win that year’s federal election weeks later. Hayden said just prior to his leadership spill that given the economic mismanagement of the conservative Liberal National Party coalition government (LNP), “A drover’s dog could lead the Labor Party to victory”.

Yesterday, a Resolve Poll, a federal opinion poll commissioned by Nine Entertainment’s news print mastheads Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, agreed. Putting the shoe on the other foot, it found the LNP in a winning position against the Labor government of Anthony Albanese and why not?

In a world that gave itself Trump, Biden, Johnson and Sunak, and possibly an enfeebled Biden or Trump again, how is Australia’s uninspiring Opposition Leader Peter Dutton any different?

In world politics where leadership originality and courage are vacuums, a tipping point has been reached where the issue outweighs the person—and today’s issues across the democratic West are about self-survival—of spending power, housing and national values. The kennel door for the drover’s dog is wide open.

Hence Resolve posited the LNP as runaway leaders on the issues of: Economic Management, National Security and Defence, Managing the Finances, Immigration and Refugees, Foreign Affairs and Trade, Crime and Social Behaviour.

The LNP led Labor on: Education, Transport Infrastructure, Industrial Relations, Keeping Costs of Living Low, Handling Natural Disasters, Housing Affordability and Rent. Yes, Industrial Relations!

And it tied on: Healthcare and Aged Care, Jobs and Wages.

Labor only led on: Issues Affecting Indigenous Australians (and what a vote winner that was in 2023’s Voice Referendum—the campaign to amend Australia’s constitution to recognise an indigenous say in parliament that never got off the ground). It led marginally on: Environment and Climate Change, Welfare and Benefits.

Does the Left really think that its anarchists screaming for a Free Palestine are a vote winner? To no one’s surprise but theirs, the electorate sees them in the prism of foreign policy, immigration, security, defence and crime. And in these, the electorate rates Labor a failure, guilty of the very flip-flopping that forced LBJ to quit over his hot and cold stewardship of the Vietnam War.

On October 7 2023, Australia’s radical Left Boomers and early Gen Xers of the PLO Arafat years woke to revel in their failed Palestinian fervour—their hatred of a multicultural, multi-religion, democratic Israel succeeding for the past 40 years a nasty thorn in their sides.

Yet, instead, they have only found themselves coerced into chanting “genocide” parroting Islamists whose sole aim is a global caliphate won by jihad, aka as the TikTokers have been taught to call it, “intifada”—all of them infidels whom the Islamists actually despise. What a cause for Labor to promote.

Each day Labor struggles to write its own narrative over homeland security, terror and law and order, the worse its polling will be.

Hence, Albanese is best to go to the polls now, lest his political future craters further like a Hamas tunnel complex, an Iranian-sponsored brand whose billionaires are laughing at him from afar in Qatar.

© 2024 Adam Parker.