Guilt by association as NSW politicians take a dive along with national parties

At first glance, the latest Resolve Political Monitor presents two conflicting sets of numbers.

The primary vote of both major parties is in major decline. Almost half of voters polled say they would cast their ballot for a minor party or independent if an election was held today, and the combined Labor and Liberal vote is lower than it’s been since tracking began in November 2021.

And yet, on the flip side, both party leaders – Premier Chris Minns and the opposition leader Kellie Sloane – are fairly popular. Minns has a net likeability rating of +18, Sloane’s is +8. The premier in particular compares well to other Labor leaders. Anthony Albanese has a net likeability rating of -15. Jacinta Allen’s in Victoria is -36.

Likeability – obviously – doesn’t necessarily translate to voter preference. But it helps to explain why politics in NSW is quickly becoming a game of guilt by association.

Both parties believe their soft vote is the result of contamination from their unpopular federal counterparts, and are seeking to set up the March election accordingly.

After reports last week that the federal Coalition frontbencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price shared an inflammatory social media post containing false claims about “importing” Indian migrants, the NSW Labor government issued a statement condemning it.

“The Minns Labor Government is calling for the Liberals and Nationals to explain why they keep targeting Australian-Indians,” it thundered, calling on NSW opposition leader Kellie Sloane and the state Liberals to “join with Labor in rejecting attempts to single out Australian-Indians for political gain”.

Nothing wrong with that, but it’s interesting that nowhere in the statement did Labor mention Price being a federal Senator from the Northern Territory.

On the other side of the coin, the Liberals under Sloane have spent plenty of time tarring Minns with the prime minister’s brush. Her budget reply speech last month attacked “Anthony Albanese’s broken promises on capital gains tax”, and accused the Minns government of allowing federal Labor to rob NSW over infrastructure funding.

The Herald’s latest Resolve Political Monitor presents a clear explanation for why they are so desperate to tie their opponents to their federal colleagues, and put some distance between themselves and their own. For both parties, primary votes have plummeted during this term of government, but the timing for each dovetails with their federal colleagues’ own troubles.

The NSW Coalition’s vote has tracked fairly consistently with their federal colleagues since about August 2024. Between then and February 2025, the Mark Speakman-led party hovered around a reasonably healthy 38 to 37 per cent primary vote, roughly similar to the results Peter Dutton’s federal opposition were receiving.

Then the federal election happened. After Dutton’s disastrous campaign, where the Coalition received just under 32 per cent of the primary vote, the NSW vote also began to decline precipitously, from 36 per cent in April to 32 per cent in June and then finally 28 per cent in November, before Speakman was deposed as leader.

The same has proven true for Chris Minns’s government.

From a low of 29 per cent in February 2025, Labor rode the coattails of Anthony Albanese’s resurgent, re-elected government to record a 38 per cent primary vote in July last year, its best result since September 2023.

But despite Minns himself receiving a sharp increase in his personal likeability following the Bondi massacre, he has not been able to avoid the taint applied to federal Labor. From a primary vote of 37 per cent in December and January, Labor has recorded 29, 32 and 29 per cent in the three subsequent polling windows.

The accepted wisdom is that most voters don’t pay a lot of attention to state politics until something goes wrong, and the positive, particularly for the Coalition, is that there is still time to turn the parlous results around.

Not a lot of time, though. Labor overtook the Coalition in October 2022 and stayed there until the election five months later.

But the overwhelming impression from recent NSW polls is that, while voters don’t mind what’s on the package, they aren’t particularly thrilled by what’s inside. If either party wants to change that they will need to do more than tarring their opponents with a Canberran brush.

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