The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, will be under pressure with a new opinion poll showing the Coalition’s support has tumbled.
Labor has a 10-point lead over the Coalition with a two-party-preferred result of 55-45, a Fairfax-Ipsos poll published on Monday has found.
If an election were held last weekend, the government would have lost 24 seats.
The poll shows Turnbull’s personal approval rating has also dived five points to 40%, but he still narrowly leads against the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, as preferred prime minister.
The nationwide poll of 1,400 people, conducted from Wednesday to Saturday last week, follows the West Australian Liberal party’s disastrous state election result a fortnight ago.
The poll was conducted after the government announced proposed substantive changes to the Racial Discrimination Act on Tuesday and Malcolm Turnbull sought to contain backlash from ethnic groups over the plan.
The government had two legislative wins while the poll was in the field, passing its $1.6bn childcare reforms and a revised savings proposal worth $2.4bn to pay for it, including a freeze in the rate of family tax benefit for two years.
The findings mirror those of the most recent Guardian Essential poll, which found Labor had pulled 10 points ahead of the Coalition.
The Guardian Essential poll also charted a 16% rise in voters saying the Liberals federally are divided since the question was last asked in June 2016.
A Newspoll in the Australian last Monday showed a slight improvement in the Coalition’s fortunes, but still had Labor leading 52-48 on a two-party basis.
The Newspoll in February recorded the same 10-point gap as the Guardian Essential poll and the Fairfax Ipsos poll.
The Ipsos poll also showed a higher than expected level of support for the government’s company tax cut plan, with 44% supporting cutting the company tax rate to 25%, compared with 39% that oppose and 17% who are undecided.
Labor has attacked the $48bn tax cut package, particularly targeting the component benefiting big businesses earning more than $10m a year.
On Thursday the treasurer, Scott Morrison, confirmed the government will attempt to pass the package in full rather than separating the big business tax cuts from the bill.
• Australian Associated Press contributed to this report
