After a damaging week for the government, Newspoll has more bad news – the Coalition’s primary vote is languishing at 35% and Labor has managed to hold on to a 54%-46% lead on two-party-preferred terms.

It is the third Newspoll that has awarded Labor an eight-point advantage.

The Coalition’s primary vote dropped from 36% to 35%, while the number of people dissatisfied with the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, grew from 56% to 59%. Support for Labor remained steady at 37%.

But Turnbull retains his 41%-33% lead as preferred prime minister over Bill Shorten, who also had a slip in his satisfaction rating among voters.

The poll follows a week in which the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, and Nationals deputy leader, Fiona Nash, were ruled ineligible to sit in parliament by the high court.

There were also calls for the employment minister, Michaelia Cash, to resign after one of her advisers admitted to tipping off media about federal police raids on the offices of the Australian Workers’ Union.

The events overshadowed what was meant to be a second week of selling the national energy guarantee to voters.

But the energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, said the “shenanigans” in parliament this past week should not distract from the government’s achievements. The prime minister was doing an “outstanding job” and was the right person to the lead the Liberal party, he said.

“Let’s not forget that Bill Shorten, embarrassingly for him, did a victory lap after the last election,” the energy minister said in Jerusalem on Sunday (local time), after a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum with the veterans’ affairs minister, Dan Tehan. “I think he’d be best advised to not repeat that mistake again.”

Tehan brushed off the Newspoll figures, saying the next election was still 18 months away.

“We’ve got a full agenda that we have to implement the next year and a half and that’s what we’re hell-bent on doing,” he said.

Turnbull, after being delayed by the high court decision, is due to arrive in Israel late on Monday, two days after originally planned.