He may struggle to get budgets passed, and he may have come across as a bit of a dill droning on about his GP surcharge in front of an audience of G20 world leaders but … actually, that’s the end of that sentence.
Our Prime Minister is prone to gaffes, fumbles, boondoggles and the like, and the nation seems to be getting fed up – the latest polls show that only half of Australians consider Tony Abbott to be “competent” at his job.
This is the worst result for a Prime Minister on record.
Now, this needs to be taken with a slight pinch of salt. For one, the figures come from a Fairfax survey, and they’re certainly no friends of Abbott’s. For another, records only go back two decades, to the era when Paul Keating was in the top job.
However, it’s still worth noting some recent comparisons to see just how poorly Tony’s faring in the eyes of the electorate.
53% of participants in the same survey believed that Julia Gillard was a competent Prime Minister in the months before she was deposed. Kevin Rudd‘s big swinging dick was at 65% in the period before he lost the last election.
Even opposition leader Bill ‘Who?’ Shorten is sitting at 58%, a higher competence rate than Abbott, and, as the Herald gently pointed out, he “doesn’t administer anything” in his current role.
While politicians are hardly paragons of trust, ranking somewhere between used car salesmen and Pedestrian.TV bloggers, Abbott’s trust rating sits at a pretty shabby 36%, while Shorten’s is at 44%.
While the Coalition’s approval rating has fallen only very marginally, Abbott’s personal approval rating has plummeted, which again suggest that people are losing faith in his ability to lead.
He may have called the opposition “ferals” last week, but the public seem to be taking a slightly different view.
Photo: Stefan Postles via Getty Images
