Newspoll: a miserable Coalition mob with little hope of sunlight

Malcolm Turnbull and his deputy, Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop. Picture: Kym Smith

The Coalition partyroom is a divided cabal torn between hope and despair and rendered immobile as it convulses over its future.

This is a condition that now crosses factional lines. The myth of a conservative mutiny has been broken. The Prime Minister’s broader support base among moderate MPs is also fracturing.

There are those who are still willing Turnbull to succeed, clinging to a cogent belief that Bill Shorten is disliked, distrusted and therefore beatable. But a larger number are now resigned to a ­defeat, having lost confidence in Turnbull’s ability to be the one to do it. No sensible Liberal will be doing cartwheels over a one-point gain in the two-party-preferred vote to 48/52 when the primary vote is stuck at 38 per cent.

Rarely has the Coalition primary vote dipped to the levels they are at now.

In 2007, on a primary vote of 42 per cent, the Howard government was turfed out of office in the Ruddslide. In 2010, Tony Abbott had to concede a hung parliament to Julia Gillard with a Coalition primary vote of 43 per cent.

It took a primary vote of 45 per cent in 2013 to finally return the Coalition to government.

The exception, which is hardly cause for sanguinity, was 1998 when John Howard and a formidable Coalition campaign team managed to retain government on a primary vote of 39 per cent by sandbagging enough marginal seats. In that election, One Nation polled upward of 8 per cent. The Coalition limited its losses to 14 seats and won by eight seats.

With One Nation now back in the frame, and with its declaration last week that it would preference Labor last as punishment for what it did in the Queensland election, the dynamics have changed.

This would be all well and good if the Coalition under Turnbull could also afford to lose 14 seats — which, coincidentally, is the exact number it stands to lose on a 2PP of 48-52.

But the Coalition does not have that luxury because the Howard-sized buffer delivered by Abbott in 2013 was squandered in 2016.

Thanks to the electoral redistributions in Victoria, the ACT and one coming in South Australia, the Coalition will now notionally get to the election starting blocks potentially up to three seats behind.

The point is that serious political strategists will tell you that a Turnbull-led Coalition cannot win an election unless it moves its primary vote back up into the low- to mid-40s. This would require clawing back the five to six points it has lost since the last election.

The polls, all 30 of them, suggest this is not going to be an easy task. Clearly, whatever it is that the Turnbull government is selling, no one is buying it.

Having lost 30 Newspolls on the trot, many may rightly ask what it means. All one can say is that it means less than 31, to be sure, which Turnbull is also likely to achieve.

So, for the meantime, the Prime Minister will remain where he is and the Coalition will remain where it is — in trouble.