Tax cuts now more popular than gay marriage, polls show

More Australians are now in favour of tax cuts for corporate Australia than were in favour of legalising gay marriage.

More Australians are in favour of tax cuts for corporate Australia than were in favour of legalising gay marriage.

More Australians are now in favour of tax cuts for corporate Australia than were in favour of legalising gay marriage.

This is surprising considering most Australians don’t like money going into anybody pockets other than their own.

Perhaps even stranger, if not completely counter-intuitive, is that many companies were far more excited about campaigning for gay marriage than they’ve been for tax relief for themselves.

But there it is. The world is a strange place and becoming stranger every day, as evidenced by the fact Bill Shorten is popular with no one other than Labor’s union base yet Australians seem prepared to make him prime minister.

There is no doubt that company tax cuts are now at the centre of the struggle, and Shorten will seek to test the electoral power of his ­argument in the upcoming by-elections. They were always going to be a hard sell for the government, but the latest polls showing 63 per cent support — compared with 61.6 per cent for gay marriage — suggest that Matthias Cormann, due to his relentless efforts, and Scott Morrison have begun to win the argument in the electorate.

In doing so, he has proven that people are capable of understanding the criticality of global competitiveness, considering most people are employed by things called companies, and that Labor’s crude strategy of tying banking atrocities to the tax cuts is a folly.

Accordingly, it is now not the voters that the government needs to keep convincing. Pauline Hanson’s economic explanation for why she killed her deal to support the tax cuts challenged logic.

In the same breath as claiming they were pointless unless introduced now, the One Nation leader said the government should get back to surplus sooner and use every cent it had to pay off debt.

The argument that the government should have followed Don­ald Trump’s lead and rolled them out in one fell swoop ignores one basic contradictory problem — his tax cuts are funded entirely by debt.

The only credible reason Hanson would have had was a fear that her supporters hated them and that the banking royal commission had turned them toxic.

This appears to be also lacking any basis in evidence, according to the polls. Even Labor voters are apparently more in favour of them than not — in principle at least.

So any suggestion the government is about to walk away from the company tax cuts because of Hanson’s whimsical ways is wishful thinking on the part of those peddling it. Malcolm Turnbull would have to walk over the limp, lifeless body of Cormann first.

It would also take a Rudd-like explanation for why it would be walking away from a signature policy that has been elevated to the greatest economic challenge of our time.