Time to go, says Newspoll:
Australians have abandoned Barnaby Joyce, with two-thirds of voters believing the Deputy Prime Minister should either resign to the backbench or leave parliament entirely, intensifying pressure on Nationals MPs to force their leader to step down over the love-child scandal.
After battling a wild political firestorm of its own making for more than a week, the Turnbull government has lost the electoral support it gained over the summer, the latest Newspoll, conducted for The Australian, reveals.
The Coalition’s primary vote has plunged two points in the past two weeks to 36 per cent, with disaffected voters moving back to One Nation.
Malcolm Turnbull has not escaped the wider fallout since he lashed Mr Joyce over his affair with a younger staffer and issued a ban on ministers having sexual relations with employees, with the Prime Minister’s personal approval rating sliding.
As the stalemate over the future of Mr Joyce continued at the weekend among warring Nationals, Newspoll found Labor had regained its convincing election-winning margin of 53 to 47 per cent in two-party-preferred terms after the Coalition had closed the gap to four points in the first Newspoll of the year a fortnight ago.
Mr Turnbull attempted to rescue the government from the crisis at the weekend, calling Mr Joyce to Kirribilli House in an effort to make peace with the embattled MP and describing the meeting as “frank and warm”.
The poll of 1632 voters taken between February 15 and 18 found Mr Joyce had lost the confidence of the majority of Australian voters, with 65 per cent believing he should quit as Nationals leader. Only 23 per cent backed Mr Joyce to remain in the job.
TPP:
Primary:
Much of the recent so-called improvement was not corroborated by other polls and was within the margin for error. That said, there is only one way for politics to read the results and that is that the Inbred Tomato has to go.
