CANBERRA, Aug. 13 (Xinhua) -- Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's popularity has taken a significant hit, according to the nation's foremost opinion poll.
The latest Newspoll published on Sunday night revealed that Turnbull's lead as preferred PM over Opposition Leader Bill Shorten was cut from 19 points to 12 points.
Voters' satisfaction with Turnbull's performance also fell, down six points to give the PM a net satisfaction rating of negative 19.
Shorten's Australian Labor Party (ALP) maintained a 51-49 lead over the governing Liberal National Party (LNP) on a two-party preferred basis, marking 38 consecutive newspoll losses for the government.
While the two-party preferred vote remained unchanged, the primary vote for both major parties fell by 2 percent for the LNP and 1 percent for the ALP.
The poll of 1, 607 voters was taken in a week where the political discourse was dominated by the government's signature energy policy, the national energy guarantee (NEG), and severe drought affecting much of the country.
The government's party room was set to vote on whether it accepted the NEG, which has been championed by Turnbull and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg, with several members of Parliament threatening to derail the policy.
Frydenberg on Friday secured an agreement from state governments to take the policy to the party room where he maintained it had "strong support."
"I am confident that come Tuesday, my colleagues will again move forward to the next stage of the national energy guarantee," he told reporters upon arriving in Canberra on Sunday.
"My colleagues are focused on one thing which is to reduce people's power bills, and rightly so, and we have turned the corner."
