Turnbull still has time, just, but his critics will never give him clean air

The battle between Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull needs to stop for the Coalition to have a chance at the next election. Picture: Gary Ramage

This Newspoll loss won’t knock Malcolm Turnbull out, but if he can’t turn things around in the months ahead he should step aside for someone else to lead the ­Coalition into the next election.

While the headline from the latest Newspoll is that Turnbull has hit the 30-fails benchmark he set for Tony Abbott, the numbers also reveal Bill Shorten as an opposition leader who by rights should be too unpopular to win an election. However, if the Coalition ­remains divided, as it almost certainly will, Abbott in opposition taught us that even the most unpopular of opposition leaders can defeat a chaotic government, consumed by its own problems rather than the challenges the nation wants fixed.

No one could credibly claim destabilisation and sniping haven’t contributed to the polling woes Turnbull has faced, even if the lion’s share of the blame rightly rests with the Prime Minister.

Equally, John Howard proved that a government stuck in a polling rut can come back and win an unlikely election victory. Three months out from the 1998 election, Howard’s personal numbers were worse than Turnbull’s are now, and the Coalition’s primary vote was well down on today’s Newspoll numbers.

To be sure, Turnbull deserves time and clean air to repair the ­Coalition’s standing. He will get the former because there is no ­obvious alternative leader and the budget looms large, but critics will always deny him the latter.

If Turnbull can’t lift the government’s standing in the polls, a transition of the prime ministership would need to be on agreed terms, with Turnbull stepping aside to avoid the transaction costs always associated with a bloody coup.

I recall ahead of the 2015 ­removal of Abbott writing in this newspaper that Abbott should be left in the leadership despite his poor performance. Let him lose and become a one-term PM, ­because if he was removed the ­Coalition would fall victim to the same cultural quagmire that Labor suffered from when it replaced Kevin Rudd with Julia Gillard.

At the time those involved in the coup pointed out that was easy for me to say: I wouldn’t lose my seat in an election wipeout, and I didn’t have to deal with Abbott and, especially Peta Credlin, within government.

That context, insiders continue to argue, cannot be separated from the dramatic decision to emulate Labor by removing a first-term prime minister.

Labor only moved on from the Rudd-Gillard wars when both politicians brought the curtain down on their political careers, subsequently rewriting party rules to prevent such bitter showdowns harming the party in the future.

However, nobody could have anticipated the depths Abbott would sink to in order to damage Turnbull. Certainly not after his no-sniping pledge the day after he lost the leadership. Abbott’s ­extended dummy-spit has left Rudd looking like a loyal servant of the Gillard government.

There will be plenty of spiteful attacks directed at the PM this week, now that he has matched the benchmark used to oust Abbott. The harshest attacks will, of course, come from those who lost the most in September 2015.

But they all own the woeful Newspoll trend nearly as much as Turnbull does. The endless sniping and sabotage has contributed to the polling malaise — a sign that transaction costs attached to ­removing first-term leaders are to be avoided.

Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics at the University of Western Australia.