It says a lot about the ineptness of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull that a man renowned for having a tin ear – Tony Abbott – has a far better grasp of the realpolitik, and is urging the Coalition to dump its corporate tax cut plan in favour of reducing immigration:
“There are no votes in company tax cuts”…
“What I want to focus on are the things that matter to voters, and voters want their power prices down, that’s why we should pull out of Paris, voters want their lifestyle to be getting better, that’s why we need to scale back immigration, to ease congestion, to take the downward pressure off wages and the upward pressure off housing prices…
“When you are adding through immigration alone a city the size of Canberra every two years, is it any wonder that people are stuck in traffic jams all day”…
“In terms of the raw numbers of immigrants, they’ve never been higher… Most of those people are coming in because businesses want to bring in labour and because universities want to bring in students. Businesses want to bring in labour because they want to keep their labour costs down. And universities want to bring in students because it boosts their revenue”…
“We need to get the Australian government back in control of not just illegal migration…but legal migration”…
“One of the things you learn as leader over the years is don’t set yourself up to fail, don’t set tests for yourself that are going to be very hard to pass.
“I guess 30 Newspolls is another one.”
“When the voters send you a message, you’ve got to listen”.
“I don’t want to change the leader, I want to change the policy.
“If you change the leader without changing the policy you just jump out of the frying pan, into the fire.”
Wise words. Abandoning the company tax cuts and slashing immigration is the only chance the Coalition has to win the next election. The former is deeply unpopular in the electorate, whereas the latter has been proven through all recent opinion polls to be overwhelmingly popular.
