Polling crashes to earth
The landscape-shifting Federal Budget only dropped in May, and although it will likely to take a couple of years for the impacts to be felt more fully, the early signs of household wealth starting to fall are now just beginning to flow through to polling.
Source: The Australian
Real per capita household income has already been steadily falling in Australia since 2022, and this week's Newspoll saw the ALP Primary voting intention fall to the lowest level in the almost 15 years since April 2012, at 27 per cent.
Newspoll has generally been one of thee stronger pollsters for Labor, but this puts them at about parity on a 2PP basis, with the primary now now approaching the all-time low poll of 26 per cent for Julia Gillard recorded in 2011.
The Australian newspaper reported that the primary vote for the government has fallen from 37 per cent to 27 per cent over the past 12 months, mainly due to immigration concerns following the terror attack in Bondi and the fallout from the unpopular Federal Budget.
Unfortunately for the government, with productivity in the gutter and inflation still floating well above the central bank's target, it appears likely that there will be several further blows to sentiment over the year ahead.
Source: ASX
All four of the major banks are now calling for a September interest rate hike to a cash rate target of 4.60 per ent.
Even ahead of that consumers will face something of a rude shock as fuel prices continue their charge higher towards $3/litre.
It seems a near-certainty that the next Federal election be the positioned as a referendum on tax and immigration, with the opposition parties likely to propose reversing the tax reforms for trusts, capital gains tax, and negative presented in the 2026 Federal Budget.
In the housing market, it is being fairly widely discussed that a significant proportion of property development companies are teetering on the brink of insolvency, with further interest rate hikes looking likely to push insolvency notices into record high territory.
