There’s some very good reasons why Malcolm Turnbull is smiling

MALCOLM Turnbull is behind in the polls, but he has some very good reasons why he can’t wipe the smile off his face.

Happy days for the PM.

THE smile on Malcolm Turnbull’s face might be jarred by opinion polling expected to released Monday but the Prime Minister will still start the parliamentary year with a grin.

This is in effect the start of Parliament in an election year and no poll has put the Prime Minister in an election-winning position.

But he keeps smiling.

He used a Liberal Party fundraiser in Toowoomba, Queensland, on Thursday to get excited and positive about his big projects, constantly beaming at the friendly audience.

Mr Turnbull, who would probably like to be buried at Point Piper were it allowed, even managed a smile when the other member of his double-act, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, urged Sydneysiders to become refugees by selling up and heading for his New England electorate.

But the sources of the PM’s grin ate more substantial than Barnaby’s resumption of Vaudeville routines.

They include a secret — the boofy growth in government revenue which the PM believes will allow income tax cuts as well as corporate tax relief.

The revenue growth isn’t really a secret, just the details of its magnitude, which we will be told in the May Budget. The midyear progress report on the Budget last December is believed to have had highly conservative projections of tax receipts as against expenditure.

“An assumption of future tax cuts is already reflected in our revenue forecasts as we speak,” Finance Minister Mathias Cormann told ABC radio Friday, as he repeated a pledge to keep tax to 23.9 per cent of GDP.

It’s a long time since we’ve had a genuine tax-cut election.

Keep smiling fellas.

Another happy inspiration of the Turnbull grin is the discomfort of his opponents.

The extraordinary cache of cabinet files found in a Canberra junk shop sale made his internal Liberal critic Tony Abbott look bad, which Abbot fans were quick to confirm by blasting the ABC for reporting on the documents.

The Government recovered the cabinet files in a slow-motion ASIO swoop which began at 1am Thursday and ended with their removal from newsrooms 20 hours later.

The return, negotiated between the ABC and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, came after Mr Abbott himself acknowledged his anger: “Certainly someone needs to pay a price, there needs to be some consequence for what is a monumental lapse.”

Of greater significance to the Turnbull electoral ambitions is the disruption confronting Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

The Labor leader will have to manage one by-election in Batman and possibly two more in Longman and Fremantle — plus a possible Senate replacement — as the dual citizenship purge hits his ranks.

Mr Turnbull knows the strain of this process having dealt with the citizenship bungles of Mr Joyce and Bennelong MP John Alexander, both of which had to be resolved by special elections.

Mr Shorten also will have to face an ALP national conference in July where significant party divisions already are being previewed.

And he has to handle the incursions of the Greens into Labor territory, including Batman where the Greens could end a 67-year Labor run.

Bill Shorten faces a fight to hold onto the Labor seat of Batman at the by-election.

He has to at least feint further to the left on environmental, refugee and industrial relations policy to counter Green inner-city criticism without offending the Labor base in the suburbs.

Not easy.

The Prime Minister will highlight Mr Shorten’s predicaments in brutal fashion in the House of Representatives, and add to the personal taunts he has accumulated over the past six months.

A third source of the Turnbull happiness is the refinement of election themes.

Mr Shorten on Tuesday used a speech to the National Press Club to outline Labor’s target policy areas, and they largely were aimed at easing the ravaging of household budgets.

There was little detail, but John Howard didn’t cram much detail into the series of “headland speeches” he used as preliminaries before taking government.

Like Mr Howard, Mr Shorten set out a range of priorities, in part to establish he stood for something, a necessary preliminary before the next election.

And it was grim stuff about paltry wages, health insurance burdens and the like. He also offered a promise of a national integrity commission to, he said, restore confidence in politics and public institutions.

Malcolm Turnbull laughed at this, and at Mr Shorten, insisting the Labor leader was “no anti-corruption warrior”.

By contrast, the Prime Minister’s Toowoomba speech preparing for Parliament’s return was chockers with a year of promise delivery his broad assertion.

He gushed about big projects such as the Snowy pump hydro scheme, the promotion of defence industries, the reformed Trans Pacific Partnership, and big corporate tax cuts.

Now, not one of these big deals will deliver a dividend in under seven-to-10 years. Australian workers will have a long wait for pay packets and employment opportunities to improve courtesy of them.

And for Mr Turnbull to claim the TPP is the same as when pre-Trump America was a partner is rubbish.

You don’t take the USA out of an equation and expect the same calculation. That’s like presenting a bowl of chocolate and coconut and calling it a lamington.

But there was no questioning the Turnbull smiling positivity, which he obviously believes will be an election asset, or doubt his love of the grand plan.

“Our Enterprise Tax Plan, building an advanced local defence industry with the hi-tech jobs to support it, more export opportunities through our free trade deals, record infrastructure investment, reducing youth unemployment,” he itemised in his speech.

“2016 and 2017 were years of reform and this is the year we really start to see the rewards of that hard work.”