Voters appear willing to give Angus Taylor a chance as the new Opposition Leader, as he prepares to unveil his overhauled front bench.

Taylor toppled Sussan Ley in a spill last Friday and has spent his first days in the role outlining key policy battles, including a renewed focus on immigration and economic management.

Conservative Liberals Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Sarah Henderson and Andrew Hastie are among those expected to return to the Coalition front bench after resigning or being sidelined from senior positions by Ley.

Nampijinpa Price used a podcast appearance to lobby for a greater role in Taylor’s team, claiming she had previously been thrown under the bus by her colleagues.

“I’m back baby, I’m back” she told the Karl Stefanovic Show podcast.

“I was having a breather, but I’m back. The fire’s back.”

But the firebrand senator refused to apologise for claiming Labor was bringing in Indian migrants because they’d vote for the party – controversial remarks that partly led to Ley dumping her from the front bench.

The first poll released since Ley was ousted shows a small uptick in support under Taylor’s leadership.

With respondents asked where their vote would sit under both Taylor and Ley, support for the Coalition was three percentage points higher under the new leader than his predecessor.

Under Taylor, 23 per cent of voters said they’d put the Coalition first on their ballot paper – a tie with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

The Resolve survey, published in the Nine papers, was conducted in the final days of Ley’s leadership and the first days of Taylor’s.

One Nation had primary support of 27 per cent in the latest Newspoll, conducted before the leadership change. The Coalition languished on 18 per cent.

Taylor has also written to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, calling for a joint audit of government spending run by Labor and the Coalition.

“Record levels of government expenditure are contributing to higher inflation, upward pressure on interest rates and a growing public debt burden that will ultimately fall on future generations of Australians,” he wrote.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers blasted the demand for an inquiry as a predictable stunt.

“Angus Taylor is the architect of the Liberal Party’s policy for higher taxes on workers, bigger deficits and more debt,” he told Nine’s Today program on Monday.

“He is precisely the last person that anybody should be taking lectures from or advice from when it comes to the state of the budget.”

Taylor has indicated a more hardline approach to immigration, signalling a focus on protecting Australia’s “way of life”, likely through some form of tougher vetting of prospective migrants.

“That means shutting the door… on people who are the wrong people who come to this country, who don’t accept our basic beliefs,” he told Today.

Former senior immigration official Abul Rizvi said Taylor’s pointed tough-on-immigration stance appeared to be directly influenced by One Nation’s rise.

“He reads the polls as closely as anybody,” Rizvi said.

However, he noted there were also strong character requirements already for migrants looking to enter Australia. They were tightened by anti-hate crime laws introduced after the Bondi terror attack.

Labor had also tightened the previous Coalition government’s policies on student and working holiday visas, which drove a big increase in migration to Australia in 2022-23, Rizvi said.

“Mr Taylor may have forgotten his government also introduced fee-free student visa applications and fee-free working holiday maker applications,” he said.

“The Labor government were slow to reverse those policies, but they did get rid of them.”

Taylor and deputy Jane Hume also vowed to offer lower taxes, a renewed focus on housing affordability and the end of an “ideological approach” to energy policies.

-AAP