…the latest Newspoll survey reveals the government remains well behind Labor, only one-third of people believe the Prime Minister is in touch with voters and 77 per cent consider him arrogant.
While Mr Abbott has been savaged by leaks and a motion from his own partyroom earlier this month to remove him as Prime Minister, today’s Newspoll shows it is Mr Shorten who has suffered a sharp markdown in his performance.
His disapproval rating has jumped to the highest level since he became Labor leader.
47-53 is a sharp recovery with the usual caveat of only one poll. Resolving the leadership issue has returned to Libs to their previous losing position.
It’s hard to see ongoing improvement from here but who knows? Seven MPs anyway:
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Seven ministers who voted for Tony Abbott in the failed spill motion are now prepared to help remove the Prime Minister if he cannot revive the government’s fortunes and recover his position in the polls.
The ministers have discussed the timing of any potential move on the Prime Minister, and favour waiting until June – after next month’s NSW state election and the May budget.
Waiting until after the Budget makes no sense at all. Then the new leader will be saddled with the Abbott budget or have to reframe a new one.
Meanwhile, the heat on Peta Credlin is turning molten, also from The Australian:
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The party’s honorary treasurer, Philip Higginson, has issued an extraordinary warning to the Prime Minister and more than 20 other members of the party’s federal executive to end the “conflict of interest” caused by Ms Credlin’s marriage to the Liberal Party federal director, Brian Loughnane.
Mr Higginson told the party’s most senior leaders on Sunday night that he might step down because of his frustrations. He called on them to show the “necessary courage” to end an arrangement that was threatening the government.
“I am overwhelmed daily by the sheer vitriol, and pent-up animosities, and enmities that exist, and we are all personally affected by it and contributing to it, the longer the conflict of interest exists,” Mr Higginson wrote.
I don’t see how a Credlin exit helps now either. The party will be seen as the plaything of Rupert Murdoch and it means Tony-unplugged, which we all know will end in tears.
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
