Turnbull getting the job done

  1. 58,797 Posts.
    lightbulb Created with Sketch. 726
    Mathias Cormann to the fore to seal Malcolm Turnbull’s tax deal

    Mark Riley | The West Australian
    Saturday, 24 March 2018 9:42AM

    In the days after the last election, the prospect of this Government getting any contested legislation through the Parliament seemed about as likely as Barnaby Joyce winning the husband of the year award.
    The double dissolution failed miserably in its aim of cleaning out the ragtag Senate crossbench.

    All it did was swap the former bar room scene from Star Wars for a new colourful collective that looked like a political collision between the Munsters and the Addams Family.

    But 20 months on, the Government has managed to chalk up an impressive slate of legislative wins against the odds.
    Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull got his Bill through to effectively break union control of firefighting volunteers in Victoria. Then came a more unlikely victory, securing Senate support for the reinstatement of the Australian Building and Construction Commission and the Registered Organisations Act.

    Next came his media reforms, abolishing the so-called “two-out-of-three” and “reach” rules, again against the initial weight of numbers.

    And then the most unlikely victory — same-sex marriage.
    The process wasn’t pretty, to say the least, but it was pretty effective.

    But the biggest economic reform this Government has been able to negotiate through the Parliament is, without doubt, its tax cut for small and medium-sized businesses.

    The Turnbull Government just needs two move votes to get company tax cuts over the line
    That defied the odds not only by getting through, but also by increasing the threshold for those businesses covered by the change from those with turnovers of less than $10 million to those under $50 million.

    The passage to victory demonstrated the art of the deal in a way that would have made Donald Trump proud.
    Nick Xenophon took things to the wire, holding out until the absolutely final moment.

    We can now see that it was all about Xenophon’s grander political ambitions. He obviously thought it would help secure him seats in the South Australian Parliament at last week’s election. And, equally obviously, he thought wrong.
    Oops.

    The point of all this is that politics is a transactional business. Everything in this game comes at a price. And Turnbull has proved himself to be an accomplished deal maker in a tough marketplace.

    But the piece de resistance, the chef d’oeuvre, les tripes du canard (the duck’s guts) would be securing passage next week of the second tranche of his “Enterprise Tax Plan”, the $35 billion tax cuts for big business.

    This time the chief negotiator is WA senator Mathias Cormann and he is slowly but surely whittling down resistance on the Senate crossbench.

    By week’s end he seemed to have secured seven of the necessary nine crossbench votes. The big breakthrough came in securing Pauline Hanson’s three One Nation votes on Thursday afternoon.

    Cormann needs two of the remaining four crossbenchers to support him. Xenophon’s remaining pair, Stirling Griff and Rex Patrick, have given a blanket No. That leaves Derryn Hinch and the new South Australian senator, Tim Storer.

    Now, stay with me on this: Storer was elected on the Xenophon ticket but quit to become an independent before being sworn in last Monday to replace NXT’s Skye Kakoschke-Moore, who was punted by the High Court for being a dual citizen.

    Days of Our Lives has nothing on the Australian Senate.
    Storer is a bit of a mystery.

    Government strategists are unsure whether he wants his first action to be such a monumental one. There is a sense, though, that he would like to vote the opposite way to the Xenophon senators, if only to poke Nick in the eye.

    The most positive thing is that he is talking to the Government. Normally in politics if someone is engaging in discussions it means they are looking for a reason to say Yes.

    Cormann now needs to find that reason.

    Hinch is talking, too. But in true Hinch fashion, no one is entirely sure what he is saying.
    He first suggested he would support the Bill as long as the tax cuts didn’t apply to the banks. This might give him a populist platform to explain his support, but in legislative terms it is completely nuts.

    As Turnbull reminded Hinch none too subtly on Thursday, the big four banks and Macquarie are already paying a $6 billion special levy. To make them effectively pay five percentage points more in corporate taxation than every other business on top of that would be ludicrous.

    Hinch is also asking that big business essentially sign an oath in blood that the tax cuts will feed into wage rises.
    The Business Council tried to do that this week with a letter, signed not in blood but ink, promising that the benefit would flow through to workers.
    Hinch said that was too “kumbaya” for him.

    So, Cormann has four sitting days next week to find what Hinch’s price really is and whether Storer has one.
    And if he succeeds in doing that he won’t only be the father of the year, he’ll be Turnbull’s best mate for life.
    Last edited by Justis: 24/03/18
 
arrow-down-2 Created with Sketch. arrow-down-2 Created with Sketch.