The coalition could be on track for a historic electoral wipeout as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton denies he’s resorted to sandbagging his own seat.
A dire YouGov analysis released two days before Saturday’s vote predicted the worst coalition result in nearly 80 years and an expanded Labor majority.
It came on the same day as Mr Dutton walked back another policy, this time on curriculums, while the prime minister was treated to a rockstar reception at a public school.
The opposition leader started Thursday in his home electorate of Dickson, where he’s under siege from Labor and a teal independent challenger.
Labor believes the Queensland seat, the most marginal in the state, is winnable despite being held by the Liberals for 24 years.
Mr Dutton said he wasn’t in his electorate because he was worried, but rather because of an annual Red Shield Appeal breakfast he always attended.
People used to call Dickson “the one-term curse” with members routinely having their political careers cut short, but he’d worked hard to represent his community, he added.
While the opposition leader is tipped to keep his seat in the latest tranche of polling, YouGov predicted the coalition would suffer its worst lower-house seat result since 1946 and Labor to govern with an expanded majority.
Its modelling points to an 84-seat win for the government, well above the 76 needed for an outright majority.
Under this scenario, the coalition will drop to 47 seats: a net loss of 11.
The prime minister said he didn’t put his faith in the polling, learning his lesson from Labor’s 2019 shock defeat to the Scott Morrison-led coalition in defiance of predictions.
“We take nothing for granted,” he told reporters in Perth on Thursday.
“No prime minister has been re-elected in this country having served a full term since 2004. We have a mountain to climb.”
But there was one school of thought Mr Albanese was happy to harp on at Winthrop Primary in the Perth-based electorate of Tangney, which Labor took from the coalition in 2022.
He seized on another coalition backtrack after Mr Dutton abandoned a pledge to change the school curriculum due to children being “indoctrinated”.
“The current school curriculum was put in place by the former (coalition) government, not us, but they looked for culture wars in every corner that they can find one, every dark corner,” Mr Albanese said.
“Having said they would rail against the curriculum, that it wasn’t appropriate, now they are saying they won’t touch the curriculum.”
Mr Dutton previously mentioned the Commonwealth being able to condition school funding when asked about influencing state governments over what was being taught.
“We don’t have any proposals,” he said on Thursday when asked about changing the curriculum.
“What we’ll do is we’ll work with parents to reflect what they want to see in the education system.”
Opposition government efficiency spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price seemingly contradicted his stance just hours later.
“With the conversations I have had with our shadow cabinet minister, Sarah Henderson, there is a plan to ensure that schools are no longer ideologically indoctrinating children,” she said.
“Peter Dutton is absolutely and utterly all about ensuring our children in this country receive an education and aren’t indoctrinated.”
It’s the latest policy ambiguity in a coalition campaign marred by walk-backs, including ditching planned changes to work-from-home arrangements for the public service.
Labor leads the coalition 52.9 per cent to 47.1 per cent on a two-party preferred basis, YouGov said.
The two-party vote is roughly in line with other polling, but the coalition’s primary vote has tracked as high as 35 per cent, according to the Resolve Political Monitor published in Nine newspapers.
About one-in-four eligible Australians have already taken advantage of early voting ahead of the election.
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