Another month of polling indicates that the new three-way split in Australian politics is permanent: a tad under a third of the first-preference vote to each of Labor, One Nation and the Coalition.

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If support for One Nation had not surged, Labor's primary-vote position would be diabolical and the usual self-fulfilling destabilising talk about leadership change would be rife.

Without One Nation, all of the dissatisfaction with the Labor government would have resulted in a boost for the Coalition and Angus Taylor's leadership would be unassailable.

As it is, the right's vote is split and Labor, polling a paltry 28 per cent, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, with a net approval rating of minus 17, are seen as the likely winners of the next election.

The 28 per cent was mirrored in the YouGov poll and Morgan has Labor on just 25.5 per cent. Surely, these are government-losing figures. All three polls had One Nation between 24 and 16 per cent.

Yet, the government does not seem rattled, nor its backbenchers agitated. The reason, perhaps, is because the opinion pollsters have not been very active in testing the crucial question of how preferences would fall. They either ask the people they poll who would get their second preferences (in the absence of how-to-vote-card-guidance) or they extrapolate from the last election.

If the Coalition and One Nation do a deal on preferences, either nationally or in the bulk of seats individually, it could spell doom for Labor's majority or government altogether. That would be subject to how rigidly the voters stick to how-to-vote cards.

What little evidence we have suggests that a good many voters do not follow how-to-vote cards. In the Farrer by-election, only 62 per cent of the votes in the Coalition........

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