It’s been the silver lining in the dismal polling the Coalition has copped in the past five months: voters still seemed to like Opposition Leader Sussan Ley.

Not any more.

Ley’s performance rating has crashed in the latest Resolve Political Monitor with a brutal 14 percentage point fall in voters’ assessment of her performance, from plus 9 to minus 5, in just one month.

The slump in Ley’s personal performance rating is so pronounced that it is almost good news that the two-party preferred vote has remained unchanged at 45-55 – which would deliver another triumphant election win to Labor if repeated on polling day – and that, somehow, the Coalition’s primary vote crept up 1 percentage point to 28 per cent.

Anthony Albanese, on his first week off since the May election, will enjoy his holiday.

The findings follow a month in which Ley was forced to sack Jacinta Nampijinpa Price from the shadow ministry for disloyalty and for offensive comments to the Indian-Australian community, followed by leaks, public infighting and the eventual resignation of Andrew Hastie from his shadow home affairs portfolio, claiming he’d been squeezed out of the immigration debate.

But it could be worse for the Coalition’s first female leader.

Her predecessor Peter Dutton suffered a catastrophic collapse in his net performance rating from plus 5 in February 2025 to minus 24 in late April 2025, a 29 point net reversal in just two months.

What the latest numbers prove is that disunity is always death in politics.

Ley has actually done a reasonable job as opposition leader to date, given the Coalition now holds a historically-low 43 seats in the lower house, Anthony Albanese and Labor are riding high with a massive majority, and she has already managed to avoid a formal divorce of the Coalition parties.

But that will count for nothing if the polling slump continues, even as Ley works to present the opposition as a credible alternative government.

As one of Ley’s allies said on Sunday, “this is what happens when people decide to blow things up, there is collateral damage”.

Conservative opponents of the moderate Ley will likely weaponise these results – and One Nation’s strong primary vote of 12 per cent – to argue the opposition must move to the right ideologically and that Ley is not the person to lead the Coalition.

Her supporters, in turn, will likely argue that Australian elections are won in the political centre ground, not by moving further to the right and fighting culture wars.

Further, they will argue her personal numbers have fallen precisely because of the agitation of conservative rebels in the party room, such as Price and Hastie, and that party leaders always take the polling hit when colleagues destabilise.

The survey also asked whether the Coalition should move to the right, politically, or to the centre ground. The verdict was evenly split: 32 per cent of Coalition voters wanted the party to move right, 33 per cent wanted the party to move to the centre, 12 per cent wanted no change and 23 per cent were unsure.

The opposition leader will soon unveil a revamped front bench and, in a little over a week, will deliver a second major economic speech that will lay down further markers about the Liberal Party’s agenda.

After moderate success in parliament last week pursuing Communications Minister Anika Wells over her handling of Optus’ Triple 0 debacle, Ley is focused on setting out an alternative agenda for government.

These numbers are not terminal for the opposition leader but if the trend continues, a challenge is inevitable.

One final thought: the survey’s finding that 58 per cent of voters want immigration slashed from current levels, including 57 per cent of Labor voters and 65 per cent of Coalition voters, is a warning and an invitation to both major parties to deal with the discontent that One Nation is already harvesting.

Both parties have already promised to rein in the numbers, but it has not cut through with voters and patience with generations of migrants coming to Australia is wearing thin, as it has across many western democracies.

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