After Labor’s 2025 election win Labor Party President Wayne Swan said that Labor’s win was ‘wide but shallow’.

Our latest poll backs him up with most voters believing Labor does not deserve to be in office while at the same time still saying they would vote Labor for a Labor government at an election.

I’ve learned a lot from watching Wayne Swan over the years when he has run Labor campaigns. He’s someone who knows how to make his own luck, but he’s also been the beneficiary of luck. This Labor government also appears to be lucky.

Labor says the Coalition has a woman problem. They certainly do in our poll, but it’s not the one Labor is pointing at.

Our poll was taken while Sussan Ley was Leader of the Opposition. That was their first piece of luck. Her approval across the board was only 7 per cent with 65 per cent disapproving rating.

Most tellingly, her net approval with Coalition voters was -52 per cent, which is worse than it was with Labor voters at -37 per cent (although there was undoubtedly a factor for Labor supporters of not wanting to interrupt their enemy while they were making a mistake). Only 1 per cent of One Nation voters approved of Sussan Ley, compared to 86 per cent who disapproved.

So, that is the Liberal Party’s first so-called ‘woman’ problem…

The second comes in the shape of the former Fish and Chip shop proprietor from Ipswich, Pauline Hanson… At the time our poll was taken, One Nation was the second largest political party by vote in the country, and as far as I can tell, still is.

This splits the vote on the right.

42 per cent of voters said they usually vote Coalition and only 4 per cent usually vote One Nation. With the Coalition on 21 per cent and One Nation on 22 per cent and Labor steady there has obviously been a major transfer of votes from mostly the Coalition to One Nation.

Worse for the Coalition, not only does Hanson get a higher net approval rating overall than Ley at -22 per cent, but 59 per cent of Coalition voters approve of her (versus 11 per cent for Ley) and only 19 per cent disapprove (versus 63 per cent for Ley). Coalition voters also think One Nation deserves to be in government before their own party. Only 16 per cent of Coalition voters agree their side deserves to be in government versus 60 per cent who disagree. 22 per cent of Coalition voters agree One Nation deserves to be in government versus 54 per cent who disagree.

Overall, Labor wins the contest of who deserves to win an election with a net of -7 per cent agreeing they do. One Nation is on -44 per cent and the Liberals on -80 per cent.

Of course, we don’t know how the change of Liberal leadership to Angus Taylor will be read by the electorate, but it is easy to see why the party room moved on Ms Ley.

Analysing elections on the basis of the two-party preferred vote in this situation becomes complicated because you aren’t really sure which two parties are going to be left at the end of the day, and it will vary depending on which electorates you are looking at.

We did two party-preferred analyses – one with the Coalition versus Labor and one with One Nation versus Labor. Labor won against the Coalition by 54 per cent to 46 per cent, but by 56 per cent to 44 per cent against One Nation. If One Nation stays ahead of the Coalition, Labor’s job gets 2 per cent easier – a huge margin in federal elections.

I don’t think anyone has seen this sort of dynamic in elections since the DLP split in the ALP in 1957, which arguably kept Labor out of power for 15 years. Albanese has got very lucky. Of course it’s not the same, because the DLP funnelled second preferences to the Coalition, but One Nation at the moment could even supplant the Liberal Party.

According to our polling voters are looking for stability, and with One Nation and the Coalition level pegging, or One Nation in front, the centre right doesn’t look like stable whereas Labor does, a sentiment which is expressed by many Labor voters.

When we look at the polls, there is also a lot of hatred of One Nation with supporters being described as ‘racists’, ‘stupid’, and ‘bigoted’ by left-of-centre voters. The party is also unsettling to swinging voters, increasing the chances of them directing their first preference to Labor or Greens and away from the Liberal Party if it has an association with One Nation.

Climate change disappeared as an issue during the federal election, mostly because the argument was over technology – nuclear versus wind and solar – rather than whether it was real. It is back in this sample and most likely to be associated with Greens.

Greens and ALP voters are also worried there is a rise in fascism and racism, and inequalities in wealth. This is tangled-up with concerns about the USA, which is almost the only time foreign affairs was mentioned by any group.

Conservative voters are worried about cost of living, inflation, debt, spending and productivity, values and social cohesion. Immigration is the word most closely associated with them.

Control is also a key word – as in the government has lost control – for Coalition voters and it is closely clustered with economic and practical issues.

Labor, Coalition, and minor right-wing party voters are all concerned about the economy, although Labor voters think it is generally going well, while those on the right think it is going poorly. The middle ground is filled with the issues of energy, power, and housing, which is where you would expect the political debate to concentrate.

The Liberals have now changed leader, so that makes some of this analysis irrelevant, but at a deeper level nothing has changed. The centre and right votes have split because Liberal voters recognise more Liberal values in One Nation than the party they have an historical tribal allegiance to – the Liberals. This can’t be clawed back easily and has been in the making a long time.

The split, where the vote is shared with a party many Australians viscerally hate, also makes the first preference vote for the Liberal Party difficult if the only way they could feasibly come to government is in some sort of an arrangement with that party.

Labor’s vote might be ‘wide but shallow’, but it is hard to see it evaporating or being breached under the current voting split on the right. It’s not really anything that Labor has done either, it is a development caused by strategically inept Liberal and National parties losing support to a party that says what a lot of voters want to hear and has been consistently saying that for 30 years.