Labor backbenchers know they’ve got a huge task ahead to sell the Budget as polls show people think it’s the worst in decades.

But politicians on both sides of the aisle are feeling like they’ve finally got some bold policies to put to voters — and are convinced the other side has done itself a mortal injury.

Two polls published on Monday show voters are convinced the Budget will be bad for them personally and for the economy.

Angus Taylor jumped ahead of Anthony Albanese as preferred prime minister, 33-30, in the Resolve poll published in Nine newspapers, although more people (37 per cent) were undecided than backed either man.

But the parties’ primary votes were effectively unchanged from the previous Resolve and Newspolls.

The Prime Minister and Treasurer Jim Chalmers along with Cabinet colleagues faced another barrage of questions about how their claimed future plans can be trusted after last week’s Budget broke promises to leave property taxes unchanged.

Mr Albanese took his Budget roadshow to a housing site in Adelaide on Monday, where he stood alongside popular Premier Peter Malinauskas, before he jetted into Perth.

He managed to turn every question about the polls into an answer about “putting in place the right policies”.

Why were voters telling pollsters this was one of the worst budgets in decades?

“Well, my job is to put in place good policies to make a difference for people, that’s what we’re doing across the board,” Mr Albanese replied.

“My Government continues to focus on building more homes for Australians. It’s the right thing to do. It’s what the country needs. And what’s more, it’s what has always been opposed by those opposite.”

Dr Chalmers tackled the question directly when asked whether his plans were bombing.

“It would surprise me more if we got some sort of bounce in the polls from the difficult decisions that we took in the Budget . . . We don’t hand down budgets expecting to make some kind of big near-term positive difference to an opinion poll five days later,” he said.

“In the middle of a global oil shock which is putting pressure on people, in the middle of an unhinged scare campaign from people with a partisan or a commercial interest in this, and in the context of a Budget which is full of hard decisions and not handouts, I don’t think it’s especially surprising to see the sorts of polls that we’ve seen in recent days.”

Privately, several backbenchers conceded to this masthead that it was a big task to get out and explain the details of the changes to property taxes and minimum 30 per cent tax on trusts to voters.

In the 2019 election — the last time Labor took such propositions to voters — the idea that the tax plan was a cash grab from everyone took hold so deeply it couldn’t be dislodged.

This time, Labor MPs are banking on the fact there’s plenty time before an election for people to get a grasp on the changes.

“It’s not fatal to us,” one said of the polling results.

“Progressive change is always hard to achieve; our job now is to get out there and own it,” another MP said.

They anticipated the anger would calm down once people had time to talk to their financial planners and see that the changes either didn’t affect them, because arrangements in place before budget night are grandfathered, or weren’t as bad as the scare campaign made out.

“It’s one poll and we’ll keep doing our job of reminding people why we’ve made this decision,” Cabinet minister Tanya Plibersek told Sunrise.

She then got bogged down in questions around the new tax treatment of trusts after the Coalition branded a move to impose a 30 per cent tax on discretionary testamentary trusts a “death tax”.

There are more than 1 million registered trusts in Australia, of which nearly 819,000 are discretionary including about 304,000 used by small businesses, tax office data shows. Just over 10,500 are testamentary trusts, comprising both fixed and discretionary set-ups.

Liberals are thrilled to be in a fight back on their preferred ground of economic policy.

“What was very clear from all of the polling and more particularly from the conversations I’ve had since the budget with people around my own electorate and elsewhere, is that this budget is an absolute rotter, it’s an absolute stinker,” Mr Taylor said on Monday.

But pushed about why his party hadn’t clawed back any ground lost to One Nation, which still has a primary vote higher than the Coalition, he shied away from relying on polls.

“You may be obsessed with the polls, I’m obsessed with the Australian people,” he said.

Labor appeared to have played too hard to its base in delivering a “true believers budget”, one Liberal MP said, likening it to the Howard government’s hated, and ultimately fatal, WorkChoices industrial relations policy in its 11th year in office.

“This is them doing WorkChoices in year four,” the MP said.

Another said the real juxtaposition in tax policy — the hikes to property and trust taxes contrasted with Mr Taylor’s pledge to end bracket creep — reminded the party room why they were Liberals and what they were fighting for.

But it would be a mistake to assume that Labor’s apparent massive misstep would automatically translate into voters returning to the Coalition from One Nation.

There was also some frustration that the day after delivering his budget reply, Mr Taylor veered off the economic narrative and back into culture wars by committing that legislating to define biological sex would be a “first-term priority”.