As opposition leader, Tony Abbott often compared winning an election to climbing Mount Everest.
Since taking over, Malcolm Turnbull has found governing just as difficult, thanks in no small part to the hamfisted way Abbott and Joe Hockey went about it once elected.
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Budget gives poll bounce
The budget lifts the government in the latest Fairfax-Ipsos poll, but Labor still leads, Mark Kenny explains.
Off the back of the most left-leaning, interventionist budget ever handed down by a Coalition government in Canberra, Turnbull now has a net approval rating of 1 per cent – small but positive. His second, "corrective", budget also has a net approval rating of 1 per cent. This might be a coincidence, but the two numbers are hardly unrelated.
Abbott caused wanton brand damage by breaking freshly made election promises with feckless abandon. Voters remain wary. Some will not forgive. Others will not believe.
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Half of all voters, an abnormally high number, think they'll be worse off.
Either way, by emphasising the very ingredient missing in 2014, "fairness", with $75 billion to fund new public works and government acquisitions, a multibillion-dollar "arrogance" tax on big banks, the embracing of "the full Gonski", and the guaranteeing of Medicare and the NDIS, the Coalition has given mainstream voters plenty to appease, if not please.
Labor-lite it may be, but Turnbull's calculus is that most voters live in the middle ground, and it is to them that he has shifted his attention, hoping to rebuild his party's battered image.
But there are concerns, such as Bill Shorten's 13-point improvement in his approval rating, and the fact that the Coalition would still lose decisively on these numbers (53-47) were an election to have been held over the weekend.
Still, the tax-and-spend-big government budget, and several policy pivots in recent weeks may have arrested the slide.
Conservatives will complain that Turnbull's formula is one of over-correction, producing a perverse existential irony: more people may now support the Liberal Party because it is has stopped being the Liberal Party.
Nonetheless, there's no gainsaying that the Coalition's all-important primary vote has climbed by a statistically significant 4 percentage points since March.
The shape of the 2017-18 budget shows that for Turnbull and even the more conservative figures around him – such as Mathias Cormann, Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton – the penny has finally dropped.
Another leadership change is unthinkable. As such, their survival depends on Turnbull's success, and his success depends on first restoring and then capitalising on the reason they switched leaders in September 2015.
Turnbull was the anti-Abbott.
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