More than half of voters don’t trust Albanese. Can he ever win them over?

Anthony Albanese spent three decades building up trust with voters. He lost it in a single day, spending his political capital to shake up the tax system. And now the receipts have arrived.

Voters are in no mood to forgive Albanese for breaking his word on negative gearing and the capital gains discount, even if they back lower house prices, according to this month’s Resolve Political Monitor.

The loss of trust in the prime minister since the May budget is a standout finding in this poll, and it raises the question of whether the prime minister will be able to restore Australians’ faith in him in time for the next election.

Asked whether they trusted Albanese, more than half of respondents said no.

A third of voters – 34 per cent – said they didn’t trust him before the broken promises (most of them support One Nation or the Liberals), and another quarter – 23 per cent – said they had lost trust in him because of the budget’s broken promises. That’s 57 per cent who don’t believe him any more.

That leaves another quarter of respondents – 26 per cent – who still trust him – while the remaining 17 per cent are undecided, which is still not a vote of confidence.

It’s the 23 per cent of people who stopped believing Albanese after the budget who will most concern Labor, as they’re the persuadable voters the party needs to win back.

In the lead-up to the last federal budget and facing growing pressure internally and externally to do more on housing policy, Albanese faced a break point: he could continue to insist that changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax breaks would not make much of a difference to housing supply and house prices, or he could break his word.

In perhaps the most significant decision of his prime ministership to date, Albanese calculated that he had to go back on his election pledges and spend his political capital.

These findings underscore just how much that decision has cost him.

The Resolve poll also found that 41 per cent of respondents were less likely to vote for Labor because of the broken promises, while 39 per cent said the breaches would have no impact, or they were unsure. Only 20 per cent were more likely to vote Labor.

The converse of these findings in the Resolve poll is that 59 per cent of voters support lower house prices, a figure that has remained static – and in favour of Labor’s changes, at least in theory – since the budget was handed down four months ago. Support for the individual measures has remained strong in the Resolve poll too, with the ratio of voters who support the tax changes opposed to those who don’t running at roughly two to one.

As Resolve pollster Jim Reed notes, Labor’s primary vote is holding up but the prime minister’s personal standing is on the slide.

“It looks like people are fairly happy with the fall in house prices to date, but have had their faith in the PM shaken by the broken promise that helped get us there.”

The situation is salvageable for Albanese. John Howard’s nickname, “Honest John”, was not meant as a compliment, yet he kept winning elections. That’s because while voters knew that Howard wasn’t always truthful, they did trust him to act in their best interests.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott made the fatal mistake of breaking promises by unveiling a horror budget in his first year, before he had time to build up currency as a safe pair of hands.

This prime minister waited four years before unveiling a budget of similar ambition and broken promises, with the gamble being that with two years until the election, he had time to recover.

It is a gamble that by the time the next election rolls around, the tax changes will be bedded down, the price slump in Australia’s property market has settled and interest rates may even be headed south.

And just like Howard, Albanese made the judgment that voters would come to see that he had acted in the national interest with these tax changes, even if they didn’t agree with them.

It’s a heck of a bet to have placed, and this poll shows the prime minister’s personal standing has a long way to go before recovering.

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