Angus Taylor’s leadership ‘obviously untenable’ as Coalition faces 2028 bloodbath

Angus Taylor’s future as Liberal Party leader is “clearly untenable”, according to the only pollster who accurately reported last year’s federal election.

National polls were initially kinder to Mr Taylor than they were to his predecessor, Sussan Ley, who oversaw both the Coalition primary vote and her own personal approval rating falling to historic lows in her nine months as leader.

That’s what prompted conservative factions, fearful of Labour’s double-digit lead and the rise of One Nation, to band together and move to oust the Liberals’ first female leader in favor of a man who has made a series of high-profile gaffes, from a self-congratulatory Facebook comment to claiming he went to Oxford University with American feminist writer Naomi Wolf.

This move worked; The first News Poll of Mr Taylor’s leadership showed the Coalition’s core support rising two points from what was then an all-time low of 18 per cent.

He also closed the gap in approval ratings with Anthony Albanese, pulling 37 per cent to the Prime Minister’s 45 per cent.

A few months ago, Ms. Ley was trailing Mr. Albanese by between 27 percent and 54 percent.

But since early March data, the Coalition’s primary vote has hit a new record low of 17 per cent and One Nation has continued to feast on disenfranchised conservatives, stealing Farrer’s federal seat left vacant by Ms Ley’s rapid departure from politics and nearly pushing the Liberal Party out of opposition in South Australia’s state election.

“The more voters see of Angus Taylor, the more they dislike him,” Paul Smith, YouGov’s director of public data, told NewsWire.

While every other major poll predicted either a narrow victory for Labor or a prorogation of parliament in last year’s federal election, YouGov modeling predicted a landslide for Labor with almost as many seats going into the red.

It has since partnered with Sky News to produce its monthly Pulse survey.

Mr Smith said: “It seems … their net satisfaction has progressively deteriorated and that’s because all they’ve gotten from Angus Taylor is a sense of being empowered to be leader of the Liberal Party without any idea of ​​what he actually stands for and that this is different and it will make their lives better.”

“The best thing for him so far is that voters haven’t really noticed who he is.

“The more they see, the more they say this man has no answers that will make my life better, they haven’t heard or seen anything.”

This week’s Resolve Political Monitor poll found the Coalition up three points to 23 per cent as One Nation dips following a month of scandals involving its longest-serving MPs, including leader Pauline Hanson.

Mr Taylor enjoyed a surge in the rankings of preferred prime minister, jumping from 16 per cent in June to 21 per cent in July.

But he was still well behind Mr Albanese, who rose four points to 33 per cent.

This week’s Pulse/YouGov poll showed that the gains the Coalition has made due to the influences of One Nation have done little to counter Labour’s dominance.

“The best-case scenario at the moment under Angus Taylor is for the number of parliamentary seats to be reduced to 10 to 12 seats,” Mr Smith said of the 2028 federal election, adding that those figures could be “lower”.

“This is clearly an untenable situation for his parliamentary colleagues.

“They need to decide what their message is to middle-class Australians whose votes they want to win back and elect someone who can articulate that.”

Mr Smith said One Nation had also “established itself as a permanent fixture in Australian politics for the foreseeable future”.

“But the real question is whether working-class voters who care about One Nation will vote for a leader who says he wants to make it easier for them to be removed because they haven’t worked hard enough,” he said.

“Our latest poll for Sky News Pulse shows that the decline in intention to vote for One Nation is highest among working-class voters by 6 percentage points, with Labor ahead of both parties in the two-party preference among working-class voters for the first time in three months.”

Mr Smith said that if Senator Hanson could not close that gap, “he will be the leader of an opposition that is larger than the Coalition but not close to forming a government”.

Mr Taylor this week refused to join forces with One Nation after senior opposition figures had tiptoed around the question for weeks.

Speculation had grown due to the coalition’s poor polling, but the Opposition Leader, appearing in the media on Tuesday night, said there was no chance of an alliance and One Nation would cause Australia “forever pain”.

“I rule that out,” Mr Taylor told the ABC at 7.30am, adding there were “no plans to form any coalition with One Nation”.

He continued to attack the policies of the populist minor party.

“As one nation, one government, it leaves us with pain forever,” Mr. Taylor said.

“They have a whole bag of policies that even a very small subset of them could lead this country into financial crisis, into higher inflation, into higher interest rates, into higher mortgage costs.

“This is not something Australians can afford when we are in the middle of an economic crisis created by the Labor Party.”