Poll shows Labor faces hefty defeat in NSW

New South Wales Premier Kristina Keneally. Photo / Getty Images

CANBERRA - Disastrous new polling for Premier Kristina Keneally has all but sealed the New South Wales Labor Government's fate.

Without an unprecedented reversal, NSW will next month join Victoria and Western Australia as conservative jewels.

Defeat at the March 26 election would leave Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania as the only survivors of Australia's previous wall-to-wall state Labor Administrations - and Queensland still remains in doubt.

Premier Anna Bligh's rock solid handling of floods and a cyclone have lifted both her stocks and hopes of Labor keeping power in Brisbane in the northern state's next election, due before the end of June next year.

But doubts remain that her performance will be sufficient to overcome widespread dissatisfaction with a Government that has been in power since 1998, and whose pre-flood primary vote in December was only half that of the Opposition.

In NSW, where Labor has held office for 16 years, Keneally is fighting an all but hopeless campaign for a Government scarred by scandals, mismanagement and a revolving door of premiers and ministers since Bob Carr's decade-long run ended in 2005.

Keneally took over in December 2009 after three years of Morris Iemma and one of Nathan Rees, and looks set to fall to O'Farrell, floored by a pendulum that began scything two years ago with massive swings to the Opposition in a series of byelections.

At next month's elections, Keneally also goes to the polls with a swag of untested candidates, following the decision of 24 Labor MPs not to re-contest their seats.

Only seven Opposition MPs, and one Greens, have retired.

Yesterday a Nielsen poll in the Sydney Morning Herald gave further bleak tidings for Keneally: a Coalition two-party preferred lead of 66 per cent to 34 per cent, an 18 per cent swing that would hew the number of Labor MPs in the Lower House from 50 to as few as 13.

Nielsen's research director, John Stirton, told the SMH that the "astonishing" poll had revealed the biggest two-party preferred lead any party has had, state or federal, in Nielsen's 39-year history.

Keneally's approval rating sat at 36 per cent - three points lower than that of the 39 per cent recorded by Rees in his sole Nielsen appearance, and well behind O'Farrell's 55 per cent.

The SMH said O'Farrell's rating, up 11 points since the previous Nielsen poll, was the highest for a NSW Opposition Leader since Labor took power in 1995.

O'Farrell also led Keneally as preferred premier by 52 per cent to 38 per cent.

The Nielsen poll also showed that - unlike other recent elections - disenchanted Labor voters are not moving to the Greens.

Despite a shift in policy emphasis, the Greens' vote has remained steady at about 13 per cent, while the gap between the Coalition and Labor has widened.

Voters appear to be completely switching sides.

"If the result translates directly into seats in Parliament, it would be a historic victory for the Coalition," Stirton said.