Newspoll: Liberal civil war will end in burial rites

Malcolm Turnbull is watching the Coalition’s hold on power disintegrate before his eyes.

Voters are turning against the Coalition in numbers not seen for two years, destroying the government’s primary vote and putting Bill Shorten on the path to The Lodge.

The Coalition cannot repair the damage until it decides who to blame for the wreckage.

With Tony Abbott running rampant over the past four days in an attempt to rally conservatives to his flag, cabinet ministers hold the former prime minister responsible for weakening the government at the very time it hoped to win back voters.

Yet Turnbull has taken another blow to his personal support. His lead over Shorten as preferred prime minister has shrunk another few points. His net satisfaction rating has sunk to minus 30 compared with minus 20 points before Christmas.

Yet Abbott’s timing has clearly worked against the Prime Minister and the government.

Turnbull has hammered Shorten in parliament, intensified pressure on Labor over energy security, scrapped the unpopular Gold Pass for politicians and ­secured a toughening of the Australian Building and Construction Commission that should have his own side of politics cheering.

All this was overshadowed when Abbott emerged on Thursday night with a message that re­ignited the grievances over the government’s direction.

One Nation is surging ahead in a jaded electorate, lifting its primary vote from eight to 10 points in three weeks and now equalling the electoral appeal of the Greens.

This Newspoll and the last show that 29 per cent of voters would not give their first preference to either Labor or the ­Coalition. It is a dangerous time for any major party to send conflicting signals about what it should stand for.

The timing of this poll was no surprise given the resumption of parliament today. The Newspoll schedule for the first part of this year was finalised last month, with the polling dates set down to ­coincide with sittings.

Just as the first poll of the year was published on February 6, the day before parliament resumed for the year, this poll was timed to ­coincide with parliament’s return today.

The result shows what Labor found five years ago: the more a party conveys disunity over its leadership, the more it weakens its leader’s net satisfaction rating and drives down its primary vote to the point where it cannot hold power.

The mystery is that Abbott ­repeats Kevin Rudd’s moves against Julia Gillard but seems to expect a different result.

Disunity is death and all sides of a party’s civil war end up in the same mass grave.