Opposition leader Angus Taylor’s leadership questioned ahead of 2028 election

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

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

That was what drove conservative factionalists, fearing Labor’s double-digit leads and One Nation’s surge, to team up and oust the Liberals’ first-ever female leader in favour of a man with a string of high-profile gaffes, from his infamous self-congratulatory Facebook comment to falsely claiming he went to Oxford University with American feminist author Naomi Wolf.

The move worked, with the first Newspoll of Mr Taylor’s leadership showing the Coalition’s core support climb two points from its then-all-time low of 18 per cent.

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

Ms Ley was trailing Mr Albanese 27 per cent to 54 per cent just months earlier.

But since that initial 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 the federal seat of Farrer left vacant by Ms Ley’s swift exit from politics and almost pushing the Liberal Party out of opposition in South Australia’s state election.

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

While all other major polls were predicting a narrow Labor victory or a hung parliament at last year’s federal election, YouGov modelling forecast a Labor landslide almost down to the number of seats that turned red.

It has since partnered with Sky News to produce the monthly Pulse poll.

“The trajectory has been that … his net satisfaction has got progressively worse, and it’s because all they’ve picked up from Angus Taylor is a sense of entitlement to be the leader of the Liberal Party without a sense of what he actually stands for that is different and will make their lives better,” Mr Smith said.

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

“The more they come to they see, they say this guy hasn’t got any answers that will make my life better, and they don’t hear or see anything.”

This week’s Resolve Political Monitor poll found the Coalition rose three points to 23 per cent as One Nation took a tumble on the back of a month of scandals involving its longest-serving parliamentarians, including leader Pauline Hanson.

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

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

This week’s Pulse/YouGov poll also showed any gains the Coalition made due to One Nation’s fallout did little to address Labor’s dominance.

“Currently, the best case scenario under Angus Taylor’s leadership is that they’re reduced to 10 to 12 seats in parliament,” Mr Smith said of the 2028 federal election, adding that those numbers could go “lower”.

“That’s obviously untenable for his parliamentary colleagues.

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

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

“But what is very much in question is whether working-class voters who have been considering One Nation will vote for a leader who has said she’d like to make it easier for them to be sacked because they don’t work hard enough,” he said.

“Our most recent poll for Sky News Pulse shows that the fall in One Nation voting intention has been highest at 6 per cent amongst working class voters and the Labor Party has got in front of both two parties on a two-party preferred amongst working class voters for the first time in three months.”

Mr Smith said that if Senator Hanson could not plug that hole, “she will be a leader of an opposition that is larger than the Coalition, but nowhere nearer to forming government”.

Mr Taylor this week ruled out joining forces with One Nation after weeks of senior opposition figures tiptoeing around the question.

Speculation had grown out of the Coalition’s poor polling, but in a media appearance on Tuesday night the Opposition Leader said there was no chance of an alliance and that One Nation would inflict “an eternity of pain” on Australia.

“I’m ruling it out,” Mr Taylor told ABC’s 7.30, adding that there was “no plan to form any kind of coalition with One Nation”.

He went on to attack the populist minor party’s policies.

“One Nation would, as a government, leave us with an eternity of pain,” Mr Taylor said.

“They have a grab bag of policies, where even just a small subset of them would take this country into a fiscal crisis, higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher mortgage costs.

“That’s not something Australians can afford when we are in the midst of an economic crisis of Labor’s creation.”