The Prime Minister has faced repeated questioning about his own job security amid poor polling, a fierce opposition campaign over broken promises in the budget, and Labor inroads at state elections in Victoria and South Australia.

Mr Abbott has flagged a ministerial reshuffle ahead of the next election but is determined to remain as leader, saying the nation needs “stability and continuity” following years of Rudd-Gillard government infighting.

Mr Abbott today urged Australians against taking “a glass half empty approach”, saying his was “not the first government to have a rough patch in the polls”.

“The Howard government, the Thatcher government, the Reagan government all had rough patches in the polls, and I’m not the first leader to be subject to a bit of speculation,” he told Seven’s Sunrise.

“But I think that the public are also focusing on performance and this is a government which has fundamentally kept faith when it comes to the big commitments we made to the Australian people.

“There are a lot of things which people have said and frankly a lot of these so called commitments were commitments that people attributed to us post the election.”

Newspoll last week registered Mr Abbott’s personal approval rating at a five-month low, with 33 per cent satisfied and 57 per cent dissatisfied, for a net disapproval rating of 24 per cent.

On two-party-preferred terms, Labor led the Coalition by 54-46, a trend confirmed in subsequent published polls.

Mr Reagan’s lowest ebb in popularity as US president was in January 1983 when he registered 41 per cent approval and 47 per cent disapproval, for a net disapproval rating of 6 per cent, according to New York Times/CBS News polling.

Mr Reagan left office in January 1989 with 68 per cent approval and 26 per cent disapproval, for a net-positive rating of 42 per cent.

A British opinion poll in 1981 — two years into Mrs Thatcher’s prime ministership — rated the Conservative leader the most disliked prime minister of all time. However two years later, after the Falklands War, she was swept back into power.

Mrs Thatcher was ousted as British prime minister in November 1990, with published opinion polls giving Labour a 21-point lead over her 11-year-old Conservative government.

Mr Howard managed to recover from a low point in June 1998 with satisfaction numbers of 28 per cent and a dissatisfaction rating of 59 per cent.

He won an election four months later with less than 49 per cent of the two-party vote by holding on to key marginal seats such as Lindsay and Parramatta in his home state, NSW.

In March 2001 Howard was again in trouble, according to his personal satisfaction ratings. Again his satisfaction rating was just 28 per cent, but this time his dissatisfaction rating had risen to 64 per cent.