CANBERRA, April 8 (Xinhua) -- The Australian government is still trailing the Opposition before May's general election according to opinion polls.
The latest Newspoll and Fairfax/Ipsos polls, both of which were published on Monday, revealed that the governing Liberal-National Party Coalition (LNP) trails the Opposition Australian Labor Party (ALP) on a two-party preferred basis.
According to Fairfax the ALP leads the LNP 53-47, an improvement for the opposition from 51-49 recorded in mid-February.
However, according to Newspoll the government's position has improved from trailing 54-46 in mid-March to 52-48.
The polls were released about six weeks before a prospective general election, which Prime Minister Scott Morrison is widely expected to call for May 18, according to local reports.
"We're not taking anything for granted ... I'm not going to focus on the polls, what I'm going to focus on convincing people, one on one if I have to, about the superiority of Labor's vision," Tanya Plibersek, the ALP's deputy leader, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on Monday.
"People who meet (ALP leader) Bill Shorten and are watching politics closely like him very much. And the difficulty of being Opposition Leader is that you're holding the government to account, and that's a very negative role.
"I would back Bill Shorten who's spent his working life in work places with ordinary people."
The polls were taken after Treasurer Josh Frydenberg delivered his proposed Federal Budget for financial year 2019/20, which included more than 100 billion Australian dollars' worth of tax cuts for 10 million workers earning up to 126,000 AUD per year.
In Shorten's budget reply speech on Thursday night, he instead proposed bigger tax cuts for 2.9 million workers earning less than 40,000 AUD per year.
Newspoll found that the net satisfaction with Frydenberg's budget, measured as the difference between those who rated it as good and bad, was the best for a budget since 2008.
It also received an "extremely good" rating from the highest proportion of respondents since Newspoll started asking about the budget in 1999.
The Fairfax/Ipsos poll revealed a similar result, with 41 percent of respondents saying the budget was fair compared to 29 percent who thought it was unfair.
Both polls recorded identical results in the better Prime Minister stakes, with 46 percent of respondents to both picking the incumbent Morrison as their preferred PM compared to 35 percent for Shorten.
Morrison was expected to call the election recently, telling reporters in Sydney on Sunday that he would not act with "haste", noting Shorten's "impatience."
"The election will be called in April, and the election will be held in May," he said.
"That impatience is born of arrogance. He believes he should have this election already and he believes he's already won it.
"He assuming of the Australian people their support, I assume nothing when it comes to that."
