Angus Taylor has had a spring in his step since the budget, and his team has a sense of purpose and unity that was missing through the first year under Sussan Ley and David Littleproud’s fractious leadership.
Labor has given him the ammunition too, breaking major promises on changing capital gains tax, negative gearing, and trusts.
But there is a problem for Taylor and his team that isn’t going away and, indeed, is getting worse each month. His diabolical poll numbers.
Taylor was chosen to replace Ley because support for Pauline Hanson and One Nation was surging. Instead of checking that surge, support for One Nation continues to rise.
So how long does the opposition leader get to turn the ship around?
A journalist asked Taylor just that question on Monday: “You gave Sussan Ley less than a year in the job before saying that the Coalition would have to change or die. How long do you give yourself to restore your party’s position?”
Taylor would not answer the question, instead touching on the usual Liberal talking points like the need for cheaper houses, lower taxes and the importance of trust.
“We’ve got to rebuild trust on the way to the next election. I’ve said that a hundred times and I’ll keep saying it,” he said.
It was a classic politician’s answer.
But it was also precisely the sort of response that does not win over the Australians saying they are fed up with politics and politicians. They are the voters, in record numbers, turning to Hanson’s “anti-politics” instead.
One Nation has now moved past the official opposition in a slew of opinion polls, including the Resolve Political Monitor last month.
In that poll, published on May 17, support for Labor fell three points to 29 per cent, One Nation rose to 24 per cent and the LNP recorded a primary vote of 23 per cent. Subsequent polls, including Newspoll and Redbridge surveys, have reported One Nation’s primary vote has now passed both Labor and the Coalition, which trails third with primary vote results below 20.
Although she did her best to fix the issues facing the Liberal Party, Ley was seen as too much of a centrist by many, particularly those party members who tend to watch Sky News After Dark and attend branch meetings.
The party’s base is far to the right of mainstream Australia and, therefore, believed that installing the more conservative Taylor as leader would be a sensible move.
Taylor, his newly installed federal president and mentor Tony Abbott and others in the opposition leader’s orbit insist he will lead the Coalition to the next election. They add that there is plenty of time to go, that Taylor has stabilised the party’s polling and that this was always going to be a slow rebuild.
That is all fair. The opposition leader got a bounce in the polls when he was first appointed, and has already put out more policy detail than Ley managed to in her time in charge.
But in a month or two, the government will pass its tax changes and the caravan will start to move on. Taylor can’t campaign for the next two years on the 2025 budget.
He doesn’t plan to. The opposition leader is doing his level best to make the tax changes a proxy for his real plan – taking down Albanese over broken promises. Trust will be the battleground.
Abbott successfully campaigned for three years on Julia Gillard’s broken carbon tax promise. Taylor reckons he can succeed the same way. But two years is a long time when few people are listening to Taylor and his hard work is helping his political opponents, One Nation.
Trust takes time. Realistically, Taylor has until the end of 2026 to start lifting the Coalition’s primary vote. If he can’t manage it in that time frame, he’ll be fighting a losing battle.
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James Massola is chief political commentator. He was previously national affairs editor and South-East Asia correspondent. He has won Quill and Kennedy awards and been a Walkley finalist. Connect securely on Signal @jamesmassola.01Connect via X or email.From our partners
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