August 15, 2011
Opinion
AUSTRALIA seems to want a rematch between Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull in bad times and in good, for richer and for poorer.
Today's Herald/Nielsen poll shows that, in the event of another international economic crisis, Australian voters would rather be led by Tony Abbott than Julia Gillard.
But they'd prefer Rudd or Turnbull than either. In a crisis, 15 per cent said they'd want to be led by Gillard, 21 per cent by Abbott, and 29 per cent for each of Rudd and Turnbull.
Prefered leaders ... Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull. Photo: Andrew Meares
It's a vote of no confidence in a prime minister who has lost public trust and an opposition leader who is a successful insurgent but not presenting himself as an alternative prime minister.
During the economic calm of the past months, the electorate has repeatedly said it wanted the previous leaders rather than the current ones.
But now they have also signalled that they think Rudd and Turnbull would be the best leaders to manage in a storm, too.
It's impossible to know whether this is based on nostalgia or impressions of competence.
Rudd led the government's response to the global financial crisis of 2008-09, while Turnbull was the man opposing him. Turnbull gave Rudd early support but grew increasingly critical as Labor increased stimulus spending. Neither survived to lead his party to an election.
The prospect of an economic crisis loomed larger last week with a US slowdown, debt traumas in the EU and US, and extreme volatility on world markets.
"It very much reflects that voters are not happy with the current leaders," the pollster, Nielsen's John Stirton, says. "Both party leaders have major disapproval ratings."
It's also a reminder, Stirton says: "People forget how popular Rudd was. He only had one bad poll in four years" - grounds enough for his party to remove him.
''And Turnbull was reasonably popular all the way through until the OzCar scandal."
Today's poll registers the unpopularity of both Gillard - disapproval rating of 57 per cent - and Abbott, 52.
But it also shows a small improvement in the standing of the Gillard government and its leader. In particular, Gillard gained 4 percentage points in approval and in her standing as preferred prime minister, a shift which just noses above the parapet of statistical significance in a poll with a margin of error of 2.6.
This might be the effect of the Abbott absence. With the opposition leader on holidays for two weeks, his daily diatribe against the government and its carbon tax proposal has been absent too.
This did nothing, however, to change support for the carbon tax, which remains steadily unpopular with 56 per cent of voters against and 39 for.
In any case, it is only grounds for a sigh of relief for Gillard that support has not continued to fall, rather than evidence of a reversal of fortunes. The reversal that the voters seek, it seems, is to turn back time, a feat that even politicians haven't yet mastered.
