It’s barely had a run, but a fascinating Ipsos Mackay poll for Meet the Press released on Sunday put Labor in front as better economic managers.

The ALP hasn’t stolen John Howard’s crown yet. The polls found more voters believe federal Labor would be the better economic manager — 39% to 36%. A high 25% of voters remain undecided.

Where their votes fall will be crucial — but the Government can’t draw much encouragement from a second Ipsos poll which found 24% of voters saying they were more likely to vote Labor as a result of the rate rise.

Yesterday, Galaxy found that only 32% of voters believe that the $17.3 billion surplus announced last week is a product of “good financial management” – instead, 51% believe the Government has “mainly achieved this surplus through tax rates being too high”.

And the news just gets worse and worse for the PM. A third poll, from Burson-Marsteller, asks punters if they have firmly decided who they will vote for. Seventy-seven per cent say yes – 56% of these for Labor and only 34% for the Coalition.

John Howard’s strategy of picking off the marginals with targeted announcements already looks opportunistic. It looks as if he is making scrappy, piecemeal policy rather than policy that is part of a coherent whole.

This creates two further risks – first, that it makes the Prime Minister look desperate and, even more worryingly, that the more he pork barrels, the more he destroys his own reputation for sound economic management, his strongest suit.

This raises a very spooky spectre from the past. The PM’s pork may well remind voters of the indecent spending he presided over as Treasurer in the dying days of the Fraser government. This, in turn, throws the light back on the tensions within the Government.

As Van Errington have told us, Peter Costello, frustrated at being overruled by the free-spending PM in expenditure review committee meetings before the 2001 election, would throw his hands in the air and exclaim: “What is the point of these meetings?”

The Treasurer also said in his interviews that he would “have to foot the bill and that worries me, and then I start thinking about not just footing the bill today but if we keep building in all these things, footing the bill in five and 10 and 15 years, and you know I do worry about the sustainability of all these things.”

Costello has dismissed his boss’s performance as treasurer in the Fraser government. That’s all grist for Labor’s mill.

And so much for economic management credentials.

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