One in Five Trust Albanese. The Other Four Know Better

One in five voters still trust Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. That's the number from the latest Resolve Political Monitor, and it's the kind of figure that should end a career in any system that actually answered to the people it governs. This one just sends the caucus into a huddle.

The government's primary vote sits at 28 per cent, still ahead of One Nation on 25 per cent and the Coalition on 22 per cent. Read that again. The party running the show can't crack a third of the vote, and it still leads. Three machines, none of them trusted, trading places at the top of a ladder most people never asked to climb.

Who Has the Power

The trust collapse has a name: the Marrickville Golf Club. A $6 million grant went to the club in the prime minister's own electorate of Grayndler, and according to one analysis it has hurt him badly. Of those polled, 22 per cent said they had lost trust in him over the issue. Another 43 per cent, up 9 percentage points since September, said they didn't trust Albanese before the Marrickville grant saga surfaced.

So the grant didn't invent the distrust. It confirmed it. Public money, a golf club, the prime minister's backyard. People did the arithmetic themselves.

The likeability numbers are no kinder. Albanese recorded minus 19 percentage points. Treasurer Jim Chalmers recorded minus 11. Only one minister in the government posted a net positive score: Health Minister Mark Butler, at plus 1 per cent. One point. That's the high-water mark of public affection for an entire government.

What They're Calling "Order"

The commentary offers the insiders' answer. The Labor caucus, packed with first-termers, has little choice but to lock in behind Albanese and Chalmers. Lock in. Nobody's asking whether voters want that. The caucus will close ranks because that's what the apparatus does when the public's verdict arrives.

The prescription is familiar too. Find real savings, starting with next month's mid-year budget update, so pressure on the Reserve Bank to keep raising interest rates eases. The Reserve Bank expects inflation to stay higher for longer. Every household feeling that squeeze is being told the fix is a government spreadsheet, delivered by the same people who just lost the room.

The commentary compares Albanese to former Liberal prime minister John Howard, whose numbers crashed more than once over four terms. Six months before the November 2001 election, a leaked memo from then-Liberal Party president Shane Stone revealed voters found Howard "mean and tricky". The predicted thrashing never happened. The lesson, as the commentary frames it: Albanese doesn't need to be liked, he needs a residual level of trust, and has to rebuild it with four out of every five voters. Twenty-five years on from 2001, the pitch to the powerful is the same. Voters don't have to like you. They just have to hold their noses.

The Election Trap

Columnist Sean Kelly, a former adviser to prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, runs the numbers on whether Albanese can win again. He points to Andrew Hastie, who acknowledged inflation's dominant role in the "absolute smashing" Donald Trump's Republicans received in the American midterms. Hastie said the "economic frame" was "critical ... People feel worse off after tariffs and after the war in Iran, and Donald Trump has said a few times now that he doesn't really care."

Someone who doesn't really care, and a war that made people poorer. The people paying for those decisions never got a vote on them.

Kelly cites a study showing governments facing elections within two years of an inflation peak double their chances of defeat. The RBA now says the peak arrives in December. The likely election is May 2028, about 18 months away, well inside the danger zone. Kelly adds the new forecasts may also be wrong. Nobody knows what the political landscape will be, he writes, and he floats Hastie as a possible Liberal leader who seemed to suggest he might back Labor's changes to housing taxes, though he's been more critical since.

That's the whole menu. A government whose own voters don't trust it, an opposition leader who might agree with it, and a forecast that might be wrong. Kelly says Labor must take seriously voters' developing concerns about its character as a government, and quotes Albanese from the past: "There's always a plan."

There's always a plan. Just never one that starts with the people paying for it.