Three members of one family, including a toddler, have died after a truck and a car collided in regional Victoria.

Emergency services were called to the crash at the intersection of Eurambeen-Streatham Road and Mount William Road at Stoneleigh, west of Ballarat, shortly after 9.30am.

Police said a car carrying three generations of the same Geelong family allegedly drove through a stop sign at the intersection and into the path of a B-double truck.

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The car was t-boned by the truck and spun on its wheels multiple times before coming to rest on its passenger side, according to police.

The driver, a 41-year-old male, a 31-year-old female passenger and their three-year-old boy died at the scene.

A woman who was trapped in the rear passenger seat of the car, believed to be the child's grandmother, has been airlifted to the Alfred Hospital with life-threatening injuries.

The male truck driver suffered minor injuries and was taken to Ballarat Base Hospital in a stable condition.

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He lives locally to Stoneleigh and was returning the empty truck, which usually transports potatoes, back to the depot at the time of the crash.

He has been fully cooperative with police and had right of way on the road, police said.

The area has been cordoned off and the surrounding roads blocked as part of the emergency response.

Detective Inspector Craig McEvoy said there were warning signs hundreds of metres before the intersection.

"The truck driver is shaken as you'd expect, he's with family and friends," he said.

Speed is not believed to have played a part in the crash at this stage, McEvoy said.

"It's a terrible scene," he said.

McEvoy said "catastrophic injuries" and "significant damage to the car" meant police had been unable to move the deceased from the scene as of 3pm.

Any witnesses or anybody with vision is urged to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or online.

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While the Coalition's very public internal fractures have caused it to flounder in the polls, one often overlooked party has quietly gained a surge in support, bolstered by a "laser-focused" agenda and unimpressed voters. 

The latest Resolve poll for Nine's newspapers showed the Coalition scraped a two per cent increase of the primary vote after bottoming out at 27 per cent in September.

Meanwhile, One Nation has remained steady at 12 per cent after seeing its numbers rise to their highest point since the federal election.

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Resolve's Jim Reed said voters are abandoning the Coalition for One Nation due to Opposition Leader Sussan Ley's inability to address the root cause following weeks of infighting over net-zero and Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce openly flirting with the idea of defecting to One Nation.

"The Coalition are viewed as disunited and focused on themselves, so they've got to get their house in order in terms of leadership and unity, competence in prosecuting a case against Labor and having an alternative policy suite," he told 9news.com.au.

"One Nation's vote is at its highest point now, and it's mostly come from the Coalition, mainly because they're acting like an opposition.

"They're highlighting government weaknesses that are relevant to people in immigration and energy policy, and prosecuting the case for a different path."

The Coalition's failure to reach an agreement has brought Ley's leadership into question from her own party members, forcing Angus Taylor to deny growing speculation that he would challenge her position. 

Joyce is considering leaving the Nationals for One Nation, after citing policy differences and his strong opposition to net-zero, threatening to take some voters with him.

Hanson has invited him over, saying he is more aligned with her right-wing party than the Nationals.

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Monash University's head of politics, Associate Professor Zareh Ghazarian, said voters are no longer apprehensive about supporting non-major party candidates if they sense division and disunity.

"The Liberal Party seems to be really struggling with what it wants to be in Australian politics," he said. 

"You've got other parties, for example, like One Nation, which I think has become more prominent because they've got a very laser-focused policy agenda, and people know what that party is seeking to achieve in a policy sense."

Analysts and politicians alike have long recognised a shift in voter sentiment away from the major parties towards minor parties like the Greens and One Nation, and independents.

Together, the minor parties and independents have 20 seats in the Senate, not far behind the Coalition at 27 and Labor at 29.

The story is a little different in the House of Representatives, where Labor has a commanding majority.

But 10 independents retained their seats in the House in this year's federal election, continuing to solidify themselves as legitimate alternatives.

They played a significant role in the 2022 federal election, snatching several once-safe Liberal seats and helping create the largest crossbench in Australian history.

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Ghazarian said some voters believe minor parties and independents can be more effective at representing clear policy concerns rather than Labor and the Coalition.

"There is fragility. There is a bit of brittleness within the party system and within the electoral system, as in voter preferences," he said.

"And it is a warning to the major parties that they must work very hard to maintain the support that they have and to potentially build on it.

"Otherwise, we're seeing that voters are very happy to support non-major party candidates."

But Reed warned that major parties still take the lion's share of the primary vote, with Labor at 33 per cent and the Coalition at 29 per cent, leaving the centre as the place where elections are won and lost. 

"We've got to remember that One Nation is still very much a minor party and that the likes of Hanson and Joyce are still not well-liked, but they are effectively appealing to a minority and making gains because of that," he said.

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Former prime minister Paul Keating has revealed he told Gough Whitlam to either sack Sir John Kerr or have the governor-general arrested during the dismissal, a move he admitted could have escalated the crisis into a conflict between the police and armed forces.

In an interview released by the Museum of Australian Democracy today to mark the 50th anniversary of Whitlam's dismissal in 1975, Keating said he put the advice to the then-prime minister in the immediate aftermath of being sacked by Kerr.

"I said, 'Kerr has expropriated the… queenly powers of the monarch'," Keating said.

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"'He may have done it with the monarch's knowledge, but he may not have done it.

"'I think you're entitled to say to the Queen that you recommend the appointment of a different governor-general' … while this problem was not of the Queen's making, it was of the Queen's need to resolve it.

"So my proposition was that Gough should ask the Queen to accept his advice about the appointment of a new governor-general, and in the event that Kerr resisted, I said to Gough I thought he should be put under police arrest."

Keating, who went on to serve as prime minister from 1991-1996, conceded that course of action could have put the police at odds with the Australian Defence Force.

"I said, 'The only thing you'd have to be sure about, Gough is, of course, Kerr is technically the commander-in-chief of the soldiers'," he said.

"'Do not end up in a fight with the police.'

"In other words, you'd have to have the soldiers with you for this to happen…

"That's what I certainly would have done if I'd have been prime minister."

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He added that Whitlam would then have to call an election.

The future treasurer and prime minister was the most junior member of Whitlam's front bench at the time, having been appointed minister for northern Australia just three weeks earlier.

He said Whitlam was "a bit shocked" by his advice, and didn't give it much consideration.

"He said, 'Thank you, you know-all, for that advice'," Keating recalled.

"He wasn't of a mind to take the advice. He was a constitutionalist, Gough, he wasn't into blood and gore."

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Half a century after the controversial dismissal, debate continues over Kerr's decision to sack the Whitlam government, after the Coalition, led by then-opposition leader Malcolm Fraser, blocked supply in the Senate for weeks and demanded a fresh election.

It remains the first and only time an Australian government has been dismissed.

Speaking to ABC radio this morning, Keating's successor as prime minister, John Howard – who was given his first cabinet position by Fraser following the dismissal – said Kerr had been left with no choice but to sack Whitlam.

"Kerr… was the meat in the sandwich between two very powerful, determined men who each behaved in their own way in a very ruthless pack," he said.

"I felt that the action Kerr took was the only one that could have resolved the situation, absent either Fraser backing down in blocking supply or Whitlam advising a general election for both houses of parliament."

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However, current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese – who announced the government will commission a new statue of Whitlam to mark 50 years since the dismissal – gave a scathing appraisal of Kerr in a speech last night.

"Make no mistake: November 11th, 1975, was not a 'constitutional crisis' – it was a partisan political ambush," he said.

"There was no real precedent – and no legitimate pretext.

"The opposition orchestrated a parliamentary gridlock over the budget and then secretly prevailed upon the governor-general to break it by sacking the prime minister…

"But in truth, the opposition had preyed upon Sir John Kerr's desire to be at the centre of events."

Keating, for his part, was even blunter.

"In every respect, it was a coup. A coup by an individual," he said.

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