If business is miffed that the Coalition is going softly on tax cuts, they’re not showing it. But on the Coalition’s own timeline, it’s not at all certain they’ll be in power long enough to deliver the whole plan.
Former federal director of the Liberal Party Brian Loughnane was a champion of the template campaign and its focus on fundraising. General consensus was that this is all he could handle.
Immigration department officials are already exploring an arrangement with the Canadians. As it was put to me: ‘Turnbull has given the department a hunting licence.’
It was time to get serious on an issue that works like a treat for the Coalition … National security is, to use Malcolm Turnbull’s earlier assessment, all they’ve got.
Labor and the Liberals are eager to deny that they have a program of any comprehensive sort. Both parties appeal to depoliticised notions of competence.
It is 85 years since a first-term government was thrown out. But Victoria and Queensland state elections show that voters are more interested in performance than in precedent.
When the PNG Supreme Court declared that detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island was unconstitutional, here was an explicit opportunity to close the camps. but Turnbull did not take it.
Turnbull’s big effort to refloat the Liberal vote in South Australia may work. Much will depend on how forgiving the threatened car industry workers and their families are.