Polls: focus on manufactured fights sees steady movement to Tony Abbott 2.0

Tony Abbott has made no secret of his formula; talk about things voters talk about. Photograph: POOL/Reuters

Four public opinion polls thus far have tracked voter reaction to last week’s budget.

ReachTEL, Galaxy and the Newspoll have all produced a two-party preferred measure putting Labor still ahead at 53% or 52% – and the Coalition trailing at 47% or 48%.

Ipsos, published by Fairfax Media, is the slight outlier in this group, producing this morning’s post-budget two-party preferred figure of 50/50, and the “level pegging” headlines.

If we look at Ipsos data over the course of this year, the key measures seem a bit more volatile than other major newspaper polls. This doesn’t make the poll wrong – it just underscores the constant that gets buried in the headline chasing exercise of reporting poll surveys week by week: there is always a margin of error in any polling.

If we consider the headline post-budget poll numbers through the prism of their own discount factor (Newspoll is 3%, plus or minus, Ipsos is 2.6%, plus or minus) – they are actually all within spitting distance of one another.

In any case, people who conduct and watch polls for a living always tell us individual polls don’t matter, trends matter.

So let’s take a look at the trend.

This chart showing a compilation of pollsgives us a year-long view. It shows two-party preferred numbers recorded by Newspoll, Ipsos, Nielsen, Essential, Galaxy, ReachTEL and Morgan since last year’s budget.

The Coalition’s nadir in 2015 was the Prince Philip knighthood fiasco in late January. That was followed by the ignominy of 39 of Tony Abbott’s colleagues voting for an empty chair in February’s leadership spill.

Compilation of poll data from Newspoll, Ipsos, Essential, Galaxy, ReachTEL and Morgan. Photograph: Supplied

Since that near death experience, the prime minister has been intent on shoring up his own position.

Tony Abbott has made no secret of his formula.

He’s insisted the government talk about things voters themselves are talking about – the ice epidemic, domestic violence, childcare, national security – rather than focus on his shipwrecked and deeply unpopular policy agenda in the senate.

Abbott is ditching all the substantive policy fights he can defer for another day and focusing on manufactured definitional fights he thinks will be politically advantageous, like the one he’s stoking around “Labor’s secret tax plan for your super”.

Last week, his government produced an economic statement that all-but abandons the now toxic ideological effort of 2014, and looks for all the world like an election-year budget.

If you look at the aggregated polling data for the first half of this year, you can see a modest lift in the direction Abbott wants. The strategy is paying some dividends. There’s an incremental improvement for the Coalition over the first half of this year. Abbott himself is also improving in the preferred prime minister measure.

This morning’s Ipsos poll also suggests there’s work still to do. The prime minister has a way to go with women, who are not quite as sold on Tony 2.0 as men. The Coalition is also still in deep trouble in South Australia.

The prime minister’s current task is obvious.

He needs to consolidate his and the government’s political position further in the weeks and months ahead to give himself a springboard for an election, whenever that might come. And what better mechanism for keeping various internal mischief makers under control than letting it be known you want that option of seeing the governor general early?