Polling update

Because the reaction to the May Budget appears to have been both quick and significant, I have loosened the day-to-day innovation term in my Gaussian Random Walk model from 0.1 to 0.15 percentage points. This term is the standard deviation of the day-to-day change in underlying voting intention: a larger value lets the modelled series move more rapidly in response to genuine shifts. It also means the model is less able to filter out noise, and the median lines will not be as smooth as they were previously. 

Primary votes

The aggregation tells a story of a fracturing major-party vote. Labor's primary has fallen almost continuously across the year, sliding from the high 30s to a current median of 27.9 percent, well below its 34.6 percent result at the 2025 election and the lowest point in the series. The Coalition has fared no better, drifting down from around 30 percent to 20.6 percent, with a notable step-change late in the year and only a brief plateau through autumn before resuming its decline.

The clear beneficiary is One Nation, whose primary has surged from roughly 8 percent to 28.5 percent, overtaking both major parties at the very end of the period and tracking above its 6.4 percent election result by a wide margin. The Greens have been broadly stable in a narrow band, lifting modestly to about 12.5 percent, while the "Others" vote has eased from the mid-teens to around 10.8 percent. In short, support has drained out of both Labor and the Coalition and flowed substantially to One Nation, leaving a contest where three forces now sit within roughly seven points of one another rather than the familiar two-party structure. 

The One Nation house effects are unusually wide. They span from about minus 4.2 (Wolf & Smith) to plus 2.5 (DemosAU MRP), a far larger spread than for the established parties. Pollsters disagree markedly on One Nation's level, so the headline 28.5 figure rests on reconciling genuinely divergent house readings and deserves more caution than the others.

Further suggesting some caution on the One Nation result. Three pollsters have shown an unusually large shift towards One Nation over the period, compared with the mean trend across all pollsters. 

The practical reading is that the major-party story is robust, but the One Nation surge is where the model and the pollsters are least settled, so the precise endpoint there should be treated as the softest number in the set.

Labor's two party preferred vote share

Against the Coalition, Labor's 2pp has declined from about 56.7 percent in mid-year to a current median of 52.7 percent on the pollster series, a fall of roughly four points and a clear drop below its 55.2 percent result at the 2025 election. The synthetic-2025 variant tracks slightly lower throughout and ends near 52.0 percent. The decline is gradual and fairly monotonic rather than driven by any single break, and the credible intervals stay comfortably above 50, so Labor leads the Coalition with reasonable confidence even at the current low point.

The more striking story is the ALP-versus-One-Nation contest. That synthetic line started far higher, around 64.5 percent, because One Nation began the year as a minor force, but it has collapsed by roughly 13 points as One Nation's primary surged, landing at about 51.0 percent, the lowest of all four variants. The pollster-reported ONP variant tells a similar story and converges to a comparable endpoint. So the two contests that looked very different in mid-2025 have now drawn together near 51 to 53 percent, all pointing the same direction: down.