The Coalition has taken another hit in the polls after a week of infighting, with Labor leading 55% to 45% on a two-party-preferred basis in the latest Newspoll.

As support for the government tumbles, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has doubled its primary vote to 10% since November, now matching the Greens.

Labor extended its two-party-preferred lead from the 54-46 finding of the previous month’s poll after a week in which the former leader Tony Abbott openly attacked the record of his successor, Malcolm Turnbull, and was in turn savaged by his party colleagues as “self-indulgent” and “destructive”.

On Sunday Abbott’s former chief of staff, Peta Credlin, warned that the former prime minister would not stop his insurgency against Turnbull’s leadership because the Liberal party was in trouble and needed to become more conservative or risk losing votes to One Nation.

The Coalition’s primary vote has fallen to 34%, a drop of five points since October, but disaffected voters appear to have favoured One Nation and other minor parties, with Labor holding steady on 37% over the same period.

Almost one in three voters said they would choose neither of the two main parties, with One Nation and the Greens both on 10% and a further 9% selecting other minor parties.

Turnbull remains ahead of the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, as preferred prime minister, with 40% favouring him, compared with Shorten’s 33%.

A separate poll in George Christensen’s seat of Dawson put One Nation level-pegging with the LNP on primary votes, the ABC reported. The ReachTEL poll gave the LNP 30.4% of the vote, compared with 30% for One Nation, in the Queensland seat held by the rightwing LNP MP.

On Monday morning, finance minister Mathias Cormann told Radio National it was “not a surprise after the internal conversations that we’ve had through the media in recent days – people will mark us down for that”.

Cormann was also asked about a report in the Australian that a group of conservative Liberal MPs known as “the deplorables” held regular phone hook-ups after the 2016 election to co-ordinate a strategy to attack Turnbull on several policy fronts.

According to the report the group initially included Kevin Andrews, Michael Sukker, Rick Wilson, Andrew Hastie, Zed Seselja, Ian Goodenough, Cory Bernardi, Nicolle Flint, Jonathon Duniam, Craig Kelly, Scott Buchholz and Tony Pasin, but many members left believing it to be a vehicle for Abbott’s political ambition rather than to advance conservative policy.

At a press conference in Canberra, Cormann said he had not heard of the grouping but said it should be called “the magnificent” rather than “the deplorables”.

On Radio National Cormann said there was “nothing wrong with discussing policy matters internally” and denied their intention was to return Abbott to the leadership or force his return to cabinet.



“It doesn’t sound like that was the agenda of most of the people involved – it certainly isn’t at present.”

Since Abbott unveiled his conservative manifesto for the Liberal Party on Thursday he has been isolated by his colleagues, with only Abetz defending his intervention and Kelly defending the policy suggestions to cut immigration and the renewable energy target.