Bill Shorten opens a lead as
preferred Prime Minister as the government is hammered in the opinion
polls. Nielsen's John Stirton puts the poll in context.

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Tony Abbott has stumbled in his attempts to sell his budget,
asserting wrongly that the Howard government "took a big hit in the
polls too" after delivering its first budget in 1996.




Rather than take a hit, the Coalition actually experienced a
bounce from what was the best received budget in a decade, despite one
in three voters thinking they would be worse off because of the tough
measures it included.






Treasurer Joe Hockey and Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Mr Abbott has wrongly claimed that former PM John Howard took a big hit in the polls after delivering a tough first budget in 1996.
Treasurer Joe Hockey and Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
Mr Abbott has wrongly claimed that former PM John Howard took a big hit
in the polls after delivering a tough first budget in 1996. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen






The first post-budget Newspoll in 1996 showed a three
percentage point increase in the Coalition's primary vote, to 50; a lift
in Howard's approval rating, from 47 to 51; and an increase in his lead
over Kim Beazley as preferred prime minister to a score of 53 per cent
against Beazley's 24.




The message from Newspoll and the AGB McNair poll published
in Fairfax newspapers was that a majority of voters saw the 1996 budget
as fair, despite it breaking pre-election commitments. The Age Poll saw
the Coalition holding its primary vote and slightly increasing its
two-party preferred lead over Labor.



Much of the commentary at the time made the point that
Howard's hand in negotiating tough measures through the Senate was
strengthened by the movement in the polls. Such was the impact that
Howard, who until then had been very cautious about speculating on a
second victory, defined the Coalition's task as about "locking in good
government".



The numbers in the polls after the first Abbott budget tell a
very different story, with the Fairfax-Nielsen poll showing the
Coalition primary vote slumping to 35 per cent (down five); Abbott's
approval falling nine points to 34; and Bill Shorten for the first time
in front as preferred PM.



The story in Newspoll, published in The Australian, is very similar.



The achievement of Howard and Peter Costello was to sell the
same message that Abbott and Joe Hockey have been arguing both before
and after the release of their budget – that the state of the books
after the removal of a Labor government was so bad that very tough
medicine was required.



The difference is that they did not have advance warning of
the extent of the problem (it was Costello who introduced the charter of
budget honesty and its pre-election fiscal outlook); they broke fewer
pre-election promises; and the general consensus was that their budget
was hard but fair.



The last two points are critical. While Abbott's daily
four-point pre-election mantra including fixing the budget, he
explicitly ruled out increasing cost of living pressures by increasing 
taxes or introducing new ones.



The toughest judgment of all in the Fairfax-Nielsen poll is
that Abbott and Hockey failed to live up to their promise that the pain
would be shared evenly, with 63 per cent of voters describing the budget
as unfair.



The message from Abbott on Monday is that there will be no
retreat from the "careful, thoughtful, measured" response to Labor's
"debt and deficit disaster", but the challenge is immense.



No wonder the Prime Minister is adapting a phrase from
another former Liberal PM, Malcolm Fraser, and saying: "We never said it
was going to be easy."