Tony Abbott has predicted the Coalition will win the Canning byelection, dismissing suggestions that his leadership is in trouble.
Asked whether he would step down as leader if the Coalition lost Canning, Abbott said “well we’re not going to lose the Canning byelection”.
“We’ve got an outstanding candidate, we have run a strong campaign and I think that the people of Canning are going to ask themselves who is going to look after them.”
On Sunday, Abbott was opening the final section of the grand gateway road project in Perth as reports persisted that his leadership was in trouble.
A Galaxy poll reported in the Sunday Telegraph suggested a 10% swing away from the Liberal candidate Andrew Hastie. The Coalition currently holds the seat by 11.8%.
Unsourced reports regarding leadership tensions have persisted from late last week with the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, as the leading candidate but the prime minister would not countenance what he described as “Canberra insider gossip”.
“I just want us to have a very strong result [in Canning],” Abbott said, when asked about it on Sunday. “I’m just not going to get into this kind of what would be a good result, what would not.”
Abbott would not say whether he would go back to the electorate before the vote.
“I’m not going to get into travel schedule predictions, if you’ll excuse me, but certainly you can be confident that over the next few days I will be beaming as much goodwill and support that I can this way.”
The immigration minister, Peter Dutton, also predicted the government would build momentum to beat Labor at the next general election off the back of a win in Canning.
“It will be a tight race all the way up to election day but I do believe very strongly that we can defeat the Labor party and I believe that we will,” Dutton said Sky News.
“And we start to focus on that after the Canning byelection, once we are successful there. As I say byelections are always difficult. There will be a swing but we will win Canning with a very good candidate, we will continue to build momentum from there until the next election. If we do that, then we can defeat Labor.
Dutton refused to answer questions about Abbott’s support in the Coalition party room.
“The only thing I would say is the prime minister has the strong support of the party,” said Dutton on Sky News. “He does that because he is a better man than Bill Shorten.
As parliament resumes this week, Australian government officials will travel to the Middle East to begin the process of taking 12,000 Syrian refugees from “persecuted minorities”. Officials will meet the UN high commissioner for refugees as part of that process.
Dutton was forced to apologise for joking about the effects of climate change on Pacific island nations in a week when Tony Abbott was urged to back stronger targets to address climate change at the Pacific Islands Forum.
Labor’s deputy leader, Tanya Plibersek, said Dutton’s explanation that it was a private conversation was not good enough.
“What he should have to account for is that the prime minister is just back from the Pacific Islands Forum where Pacific leaders were saying they face an existential threat right now,” Plibersek told the ABC.
“They’re not worried about what climate change will do to their nations in the future, they’re worried about the fact that the storm surges are eating away at their nations, that they can’t grow crops, that they can’t get fresh water, that we’re seeing climate change refugees leave their homelands. That’s what’s worrying about these comments.
“Peter Dutton thinks that’s a joke and Tony Abbott laughs along with it. Not the fact that they were caught, that’s not the problem. The problem is that they don’t care that these Pacific island nations are facing an existential threat.”
