The energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, has urged colleagues to “row together” as the Turnbull government approaches the milestone of what is expected to be its 30th negative Newspoll.
Frydenberg told the ABC on Sunday that Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership of the Liberal party was safe and he urged colleagues to rally for the good of the government.
“I say we’ve got to row together,” Frydenberg told the ABC.
“I say that we have a collective responsibility to our electorates, to our party members, to the country as a whole, to continue with delivering good government and to ensure that the Labor-Green left alternative is not given its chance.”
The comments come ahead of the next Newspoll, expected on Monday, and a new Guardian Essential poll on Tuesday. The poll trend has been stubbornly negative for the Coalition for over 12 months.
The next Newspoll has loomed as a milestone because Turnbull used Tony Abbott’s sustained poor showing in the survey as one justification for launching a successful leadership coup in 2015. Turnbull cited Abbott losing 30 Newspolls in a row as a reason to move against him as leader.
The man Turnbull vanquished in 2015 meanwhile told News Corp on Sunday the poll metric was Turnbull’s and it would be “for others to explain the rhyme or the reason in it”.
Abbott – who will take his annual charity bike ride through coal regions in Victoria this week – said the message he was getting from voters currently was “people want us to do better”.
“They want their government to do better and that’s the challenge for all of us whether it’s me, Angus Taylor, Kevin Andrews or Malcolm Turnbull. Our challenge is to be as good as we possibly can.”
Turnbull used a series of newspaper interviews late last week in an effort to insulate himself against a poor result. He expressed regret that he had invoked Newspoll as a metric in the leadership change, and urged colleagues to knuckle down and focus on the fight with Labor.
An Ipsos poll published by Fairfax on the weekend has Labor ahead of the Coalition 52% to 48% based on preference flows from the last election, but when voters were asked to allocate their own preferences the federal political contest was a dead heat on 50/50.
The last Guardian Essential poll had Labor ahead on the two-party-preferred bases 52% to 48%, and improvement on the survey before which had Labor ahead 54% to 46%.
