Cost-of-living pressure will not automatically shift votes to the Coalition, as culturally aligned voters begin drifting toward alternatives that project conviction and stability.

Every political cycle, someone rediscovers the old rule: when household budgets are hurting, voters punish the government of the day. It’s a tidy theory. It’s also increasingly wrong and under Angus Taylor, the Coalition is about to find out the hard way.

Let’s go back to the pandemic. A genuinely destabilising global crisis landed on Scott Morrison’s desk. Every instinct in the conventional political handbook said the incumbent should bleed. Instead, Morrison surged. Why? Because when people feel genuinely threatened, not just annoyed, but threatened, they don’t reach for the protest vote. They reach for whoever looks like they’re in charge of the situation. Competence, or even the convincing projection of it, becomes the only currency that matters.

The Coalition never absorbed that lesson. Not once.

What they took from the pandemic and from everything since, was a purely transactional instinct: oppose loudly, amplify grievance, and wait for the government to stumble. They concluded that the attack had worked, rather than the more uncomfortable truth: that governments collapse under the weight of their own mistakes. The Coalition didn’t win that argument. Labor eventually won it for them.

Now here comes the fuel crisis. Prices up. The weekly shop hurts. The drive to work hurts. The conventional expectation, if you’re running on autopilot from a 1990s political strategy manual, is that Albanese wears it at the ballot box.

But the psychological architecture of the Australian electorate has shifted in ways the Coalition’s current leadership still doesn’t fully grasp.

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