Today’s Newspoll via The Oz comes in with the primaries running 40 (down 3) / 38 (steady) to Labor, washing out into a two party preferred of 54/46 the same way – a 2 point gain to the Coalition since the last Newspoll of 2009. The Greens are in on 12 (up 1), while the broad “others” are on 10 (up 2). This comes from a sample of 1144, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.9% mark. Welcome back all to the polling season!

The most obvious thing to point out is that this Newspoll is Abbott’s honeymoon – the new period after a leadership change where some artificially good satisfaction metrics usually show up. Yet, if we look at the net satisfaction ratings for each side over the last few years, Abbott kicked the Coalition back up into positive territory, but certainly didn’t bring the boost that Turnbull initially delivered.

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Yet, it’s not all bad for Abbott. If we compare the major personal debut metrics of the last 4 Opposition leaders using Newspoll, we see that he has the highest debut preferred PM ratings of the Coalition leaders this term.

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Worth mention is that the ALP primary vote of 40 in this poll is the lowest recorded by Newspoll going all the way back to November 2006! No other pollsters are showing that sort of drop this month, so there’s probably a bit of noise involved.  The other issue to come out is Rudd’s multi-month slide in satisfaction levels – something other pollsters have been picking up as well. It started in October last year and has been rolling on ever since, which you can see in the usual charts that come in like this:

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