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How much longer can the Libs live with Turnbull? They are being hammered on every front and it’s only going to get worse. As David Crowe points out and it’s a powerful but simple cut through, populist message. Mr Squillionaire, Harbourside mansion, giving tax cuts to big business while cutting penalty rates for struggling workers. In the US, Trump is about to cut business tax from 30+ % down to 15%. The same or similar cuts in the U.K.
It’s not just what Turnbull is doing now, it’s the way he has put the government in this position by trashing Abbott’s landslide majority and now he has absolute no room to move.
In a word he’s stuffed and it’s all his own work.
“….You can vote for Malcolm Turnbull and see big business (taxes) cut and penalty rates get cut, or you can support Labor and you can see your penalty rates being protected, you can see the minimum wage get a proper increase,” he said.
 
This is a powerful message and it is working. The government reels from this onslaught of pure populism delivered in the language of grievance. Labor taps into the frustra­tions of Australians with limited job prospects and finds it is all too easy to paint the Prime Minister as a millionaire who does not care.
 
Labor is buoyed by the polls and supremely confident, knowing it can sidestep questions about its own threadbare economic plans with its lethal lines about penalty rates and company tax cuts.
 
Activist groups such as GetUp! are not waiting for polling day to target marginal electorates on issues such as racial discrimination, suggesting they are better prepared for another election than anyone on the conservative side of politics.
 
The BCA and other business groups fight back using the Queensberry Rules: lodging submissions, lobbying ministers, holding press conferences in a Parliament House courtyard. Ministers are exasperated with business leaders who will not fund an advertising campaign to make the case for the enterprise tax plan. Yet this week’s Ipsos poll in Fairfax newspapers showed 44 per cent of voters back the full company tax cut while 39 per cent do not. That support base could have been expanded with the right campaign, but it is probably too late now.
 
Shorten is pumped up by the success of his “privatising Medicare” scare campaign from last June and now replicates the tactic on every front. One example: Labor relies on the thinnest foundations to blame the government for a cut to penalty rates for hairdressers. “Malcolm Turnbull confirmed that he cannot guarantee that further penalty rates in other industries won’t be cut,” Shorten said on Wednesday….” Shorten keeps Turnbull on the ropes with help from Abbott