Please Watch Malcolm Turnbull’s Totally Normal Reaction To Another Bad Poll
Behold, a man who is not stressed at all about his impending political demise.
Today Malcolm Turnbull’s Coalition government lost its 29th consecutive Newspoll.
Normally, the government’s performance in a poll would be extremely boring news, but this time it’s pretty special, because Turnbull famously cited Abbott losing 30 Newspolls in a row as a justification for rolling him and taking over the Prime Ministership. Now his made-up rule has come back to bite him: in two weeks Turnbull will likely also lose his 30th consecutive poll, technically opening the door for another #Libspill.
How’s Turnbull dealing with the pressure? Not well, actually. At a press conference this morning he responded to a question about it by transforming into a bizarre, grinning automaton yelling words like “jobs” and “happy” while Peter Dutton winced in the background.
At least, I think Dutton was wincing. That may have just been his resting facial expression.
The weird meltdown happened when a journalist mentioned the latest Newspoll was “not good news”, at which point Turnbull cut off the rest of the question to ask “why are you smiling, then, if it’s not good news?!”
“You’re so pleased!” he went on. “I know why! Because you’re so happy about all the jobs we’ve created! Because you are not distracted by polls! You know that we have created 420,700 jobs in Australia in the last year!”
“But what about your job, Prime Minister?” the poor journo tried to ask, but Turnbull just barrelled on. You can watch the full clip below, if you too would like to be blown away by the Prime Minister’s totally normal and not at all panicked enthusiasm for jobs and growth.
Ask the PM about Newspoll #29, and stand back and watch #auspol pic.twitter.com/xOPM6LF44d
— ABC Politics (@politicsabc) 25 March 2018