Labor leader Bill Shorten has gone back more than 30 years to dismiss polls showing six out of 10 voters prefer Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister.
"Frankly, if a drover's dog had replaced Mr Abbott, there was going to be a lift in the polls," he told reporters in Canberra on Thursday, mirroring a phrase Bill Hayden used in 1983 after he was toppled by Bob Hawke for the Labor leadership.
A ReachTEL poll for the Seven Network shows Mr Turnbull leading Mr Shorten 62 per cent to 38 per cent as preferred prime minister, almost reversing the margin the Opposition leader had over Mr Abbott.
The coalition has also drawn level with Labor in a six-point turnaround of the two-party preferred vote.
Liberal backbencher Dennis Jensen, who voted for Mr Turnbull in Monday's leadership ballot, also anticipated a poll bounce and is confident it will hold for some time yet.
"People have taken the news of having a new prime minister very well," he told reporters.
But Labor frontbencher Mark Butler doesn't think the numbers will stack up in the long term.
The government may have found a more suave and debonair salesman, he said, but it hadn't changed "the rotten policies that Australians have rejected over the last two years".
"Bit by bit, though, over the last 72 hours, we've seen the details of the Faustian pact that Malcolm Turnbull has agreed with the hard right of the Liberal Party and the National Party," Mr Butler said.
Labor MP Nick Champion told Sky News that the Liberals replacing Mr Abbott with Mr Turnbull was like "drinking a can of Coke after being bitten by a brown snake".
