‘Diabolical out there’: Coalition fails to gain ground as One Nation falters

A senior Liberal has suggested the party needs to rebrand amid “diabolical” polling as Opposition Leader Angus Taylor insists he needs more time to turn his party’s fortunes around.

Twin polls showed on Monday the Coalition had failed to capitalise on a stall in One Nation’s momentum, with Pauline Hanson’s popularity plunging after her sprawling National Press Club speech in which she declared multiculturalism a “failed policy”.

The comments caused problems for both Hanson and Taylor, who last week struggled to articulate their visions for Australia.

Hanson’s net favorability dropped 10 points in the past month, according to The Australian Financial Review’s Redbridge survey, while Labor retook the primary vote lead, gaining two points to 30 per cent. One Nation dropped two points to 29 per cent, but the Coalition did not benefit from the minor party’s slide, falling to 18 per cent. Taylor’s personal rating slid five points to minus 9.

The Australian’s Newspoll showed similar gains for Labor, from 30 to 33 per cent, while One Nation dipped from 31 to 29 per cent. Again, the Coalition failed to gain any ground, falling to 17 per cent.

Pressure has been mounting on Taylor after this masthead’s Resolve Political Monitor earlier this month showed the Coalition had crashed to a record low primary vote, while his inability to say he supported a multicultural Australia last week left his colleagues questioning his communication skills.

On Monday morning, Taylor repeated seven times that it would take time to rebuild the public’s trust in the Coalition.

“The voting public is angry. They’re angry with everything and everyone at the moment, and understandably so,” he told radio station 2GB, after last week claiming he had stemmed the collapse in his party’s vote.

“You can breach trust in an instant, in an absolute instant, but it takes time to rebuild it. You can’t turn around the tanker in a few months. We have to just keep working and plugging away at axing Labor’s toxic taxes, at scrapping net zero, at ending mass migration, at putting Australians first.”

Coalition frontbencher Melissa McIntosh said the polls showed the Liberal Party needed to rebrand.

“You can’t keep getting poll after poll saying that it’s diabolical out there and just ignore it,” the opposition NDIS spokeswoman told Sky News.

“It doesn’t mean that you change your foundations, but [it] certainly might be time for us to relook at how we express ourselves externally, and that takes a lot of work inside the party to go back to our roots and then to look at our messaging and our communications to the Australian public.”

McIntosh said the blame should not be put on the opposition leader.

“We’ve got some decent policies coming out. Angus is working super-hard to get the party on track to be releasing our policies,” she said. “We’ve got to look at what else is going on.”

Liberal deputy leader Jane Hume said there was no appetite in the party room for leadership change. Hume said Taylor would “absolutely” be the leader at the next election when asked on ABC Radio National.

“It’s about 17 weeks now [since Taylor took the leadership], and in that period of time, we’ve been pretty upfront that we’ve got a long road to go,” Hume said.

Nationals leader Matt Canavan said while the electorate was “restless”, he was staying positive.

“The first thing you’ve got to do is get the herd moving, and the herd is moving. It’s just not going through the right gate for us at the moment,” he told Seven’s breakfast show Sunrise.

As One Nation’s momentum in the polls slumped for the first time since it started rising late last year, actor Paul Hogan slammed the minor party’s leader after Hanson named him as an ideal Australian.

“Bring back Paul Hogan and Norman Gunston … these are the essential features of Australian monoculture, and there’s nothing remotely exclusionary about them,” Hanson told the Senate last week.

The actor told The Australian Financial Review that Hanson was living in the past.

“She’s a pelican, yeah. Outrageous, so racist. It sounds very much like this stupid boofhead over here, [Donald] Trump,” Hogan said from Los Angeles.

“How can it be a monoculture? We’re all migrants, except the Aboriginals, who as far as we know, have been [in Australia] for 60,000 years.”

Environment Minister Murray Watt said on Monday Australians got a “bit of a reality check” after Hanson’s speech in which she also attacked workers as lazy.

“They got to see that, as much as people are under pressure at the moment, things could get a whole lot worse under One Nation,” Watt told ABC TV.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.