If the government is unable to come up with a fast and creative way to ensure Australian workers receive promised tax cuts of up to $1080 in the 2019-20 financial year, Scott Morrison could be one of the first prime ministers to break a major election promise before the declaration of the poll.
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The tax cuts, a headline feature of Josh Frydenberg's April budget, are one of the few items the Morrison government can claim a clear mandate for after waging a five-week election campaign long on attack advertising and short on policy detail.
Labor had agreed to match the cuts. There seems little doubt if the 2019-20 budget had been put to the Senate rather than sidelined until after the election they would have been passed, regardless of likely objections from the crossbench.
This is why Mr Morrison's post-election announcement it is now "very unlikely" he will be able to convene the new Parliament before July 1 has come as such as a surprise. Unless the legislation passes the Senate before the end of the current financial year they can't take effect in the next.
The cuts, worth billions of dollars and to have taken effect from July 1, would have doubled as an economic stimulus at a time when economic growth is slowing, there are concerns about future employment trends, house prices are falling, wages are static and the Reserve Bank is on the cusp of an interest rate cut. All of this has the potential to knock a significant amount of paint off a newly re-elected Prime Minister who is still basking in the afterglow of a historic election victory.
The obviously unintended consequence of the Coalition's election year timing, the issue is an unfortunate distraction for Morrison and Frydenberg at exactly the time they should be explaining the consequences of their unexpected return to office to those who put them there and the almost equal number who didn't.
Beyond the tax cuts, the other budget measures and some late fleshing out of its environmental policies, the Coalition has been deliberately vague on what it has in mind for the next three years.
It would be foolhardy of the conservatives to over-egg the magnitude of their win.
While this may have been politic given the high price Labor has paid for its frankness with the electorate, it is no longer good enough. The election's issues, which included the environment, health, education, energy policy, refugees and national security, have not gone away. It would be foolhardy of the conservatives to over-egg the magnitude of their win. They will, at best, get 77 or 78 seats in the lower house and have to negotiate with a mixed bag of crossbench members in the upper. That crossbench is already flexing its muscle with One Nation and Centre Alliance Senators indicating they may oppose the full $158 billion tax relief package.
Morrison, Frydenberg and McCormack have definitely not been given a mandate for sweeping right-wing reforms. This has been far from a repeat of 1975, when Malcolm Fraser took 91 seats to Labor's 36, 1996 when John Howard took 94 seats to Labor's 49, or even 2013 when Tony Abbott took 90 seats to Labor's 55.
The best that can be said is the electorate is not in love with either the Coalition or Labor and that, after a hard-fought campaign, the Morrison government edged over the line.
If, as Morrison has pledged, this is a government that will govern for all Australians, it cannot ignore climate change, social justice, Indigenous reconciliation and the many other issues flagged over the past six weeks.
Given the divisiveness that marked the campaign, the emphasis moving forward should be on a truly inclusive approach to sustainable economic growth, national unity, social justice and equity.
