“Well, we were in free fall, obviously,” Angus Taylor told 2GB. Host James Willis cut in: “You still are.”
The exchange followed two new polls. The question Willis had put to the Opposition Leader was what a record-low primary vote of 17 per cent said about his leadership. Taylor’s answer was that the Coalition has “some real work to do to rebuild trust with the Australian people”. He went on: “And that takes time. It takes discipline. It takes hard work.” He also called the party’s position something like a heavy tanker, one that is no longer plunging, and said the election remains a long way off.
What the polls showed
The Australian’s Newspoll and the Redbridge poll in the Australian Financial Review, both published Monday, put One Nation at 29 per cent, a slight dip. That support did not head back to the Coalition. Labor picked it up, rising to 33 per cent in Newspoll and 30 per cent in Redbridge. In Newspoll, the Coalition now sits lower than it did in February, when Taylor replaced Sussan Ley as leader.
The larger swing in Redbridge was personal: One Nation leader Pauline Hanson’s satisfaction rating fell 10 points.
Reaction inside the Coalition
Taylor said he had “never attacked One Nation voters, and I never would”, and that Labor was his main target. Shadow minister Maria Kovacic framed the task as two jobs: “to stop One Nation in the same way it is our job to get rid of this Albanese Labor Government”. She called Taylor’s refusal to attack One Nation voters an important distinction, since they are Australian voters the Coalition must persuade.
Ted O’Brien, who was Ley’s deputy and stays in the shadow cabinet, drew on 20 years in business. He said the lesson was not to change fundamentals over “daily fluctuations in the stock exchange”. Of the polls, he said: “Any politician would be a fool to not look at the polls, but they’d also be bigger fools to read too much into it.”
Nationals leader Matt Canavan described himself as a “glass half-full sort of guy” but conceded the electorate is restless. Drawing on a short stint as a jackaroo, he said the first job is to get the herd moving. “And the herd is moving,” he said. “It’s just not going through the right gate for us at the moment.” He pointed to the party’s plan to lower taxes.
Labor’s response
Senior Labor ministers noted the numbers but steered back to the modest tax cuts that start on Wednesday. Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek called the results a “modest improvement”. Environment Minister Murray Watt said polls would move both ways over the next two years.
On the small slide in One Nation support, Watt offered an image: a shopper who grabs a product for its label, then reads what is inside and puts it back. One Nation, he said, promises to stand up for battlers, but voters are seeing through it and “it would be a lot worse under a coalition between One Nation and the Liberal Party”.
