With one sitting week to go before the pre-budget hiatus, there is a growing sense around the halls of power that Malcolm Turnbull is finally starting to get somewhere.
A less unfavourable Newspoll on Monday helped. It is a measure of how dire things had got – and a reminder of the importance of expectation management in politics – that trailing Labor by four points has somehow put a spring in the government's step.
![Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull: Problems threaten to dog him to the next election.](/web/20170331123618im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/4/w/6/c/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gv5g5i.png/1490501646085.jpg)
It's the trend that matters at this stage of the cycle and an upward move not only breaks the descent, it suggests continued improvement can at least be hoped for.
As always, much will turn on the budget. But experience of the politically tremulous Turnbull operation, suggests its success will turn as much on the period leading up to it.
A repeat of the 2016 shemozzle, where bold tax reform ideas were floated and sunk within days of each other, would be enough to wreck the budget politically, even if its measures were themselves well designed.
On top of the poll, Coalitionists feel last week's internal resolution of the long-festering 18C versus free speech row, has given the Prime Minister some degree of protection on his right flank where critics were mustering with lethal intent.
Of course, the term "internal resolution" is used advisedly here. Let's be clear. There was never any electoral pressure to "fix" the nation's alleged free speech deficit.
Thus, neutering section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act following a disreputable, frequently sub-intellectual, debate that had studiously avoided mention of the pro-free-speech section, 18D, should be seen for what it was: a triumph of elite frenzy over the common good, an ideological solution in search of a practical problem.
Don't take the word of a Canberra bubble-dweller. Listen to the gritty regional truths of a rough-hewn conservative, Barnaby Joyce: "It is an issue, but I'll be frank, it lives in the extremities of the bell curve. Where do you meet those people [who care about 18C]? At party meetings. They are absolutely blessed people and they are terribly politically involved and they have an intense interest in some of the minutiae of debate. They come into your office to rant and rave about it, all four of them."
Bullseye. Labor obviously thought so, which is why Tony Burke read the Deputy Prime Minister's words into Hansard.
As late as Monday evening, most Coalitionists attending a full ministry meeting knew nothing of Turnbull's decision to accommodate the salon-right of his party on 18C, interpreting his stated desire to "move on" from same-sex and 18C, as simply his wish to get back to the budget – oh, and running down South Australia and Victoria over renewable energy.
So when the PM told a subsequent cabinet meeting he proposed to scotch "offend", "insult", and "humiliate" from the act, to replace them with "harass", hardliners were delighted.
Turnbull's pragmatism was informed by his recognition that there was no moving on from 18C in the minds on right-wing zealots, no silencing these people without trying for the change they demanded even if blockage in the Senate was likely. It was gesture politics in service of gesture politics. But it was smart too. Turnbull reasoned "why should I lose skin opposing the change when the Senate can take the rap?"
Voters might see it differently though.
This charade is Turnbull's lot now as he governs between an inflexible party room and a bemused electorate. We see it on company tax cuts, where despite his "jobs and growth" mantra, only those cuts at the small business end can pass the Senate.
Marriage equality had its version, too, with the plebiscite pursued vigorously in Parliament, even with its fate in the Senate known.
Clearly, the pro-equality Turnbull hoped he would be able to leave it at that. But as Mark Wahlberg's character in Deepwater Horizon reminds us just minutes before a colossal oil platform blowout, "Hope's not a strategy."
The political shelf-life of the same-sex manouevre has lasted only months, before beginning to stink up the government fridge.
So much so that even hardline marriage equality opponents such as Peter Dutton are discussing a plan B. Anything to unlock the problem that threatens to dog Turnbull all the way to the next election.
Dutton has even floated the idea of a voluntary postal vote as a non-legislative path to satisfying the plebiscite commitment. It's a radical idea, and procedurally non-viable. But it is indicative of the recognition that Turnbull is in a bind between hardliners in his party room, who will not allow a parliamentary vote, and majority public opinion.
The budget challenge of tax-and-spend options is bad enough without such distractions. And that's before we even get to the fight Turnbull has just started with ethnic communities on allowing so-called hate speech. That alone could sink the government.
Or the fact Turnbull and Treasurer Scott Morrison have already started to shift the housing problem back towards the states after initially flagging that an affordability package would be a central feature in this budget.
Mark Kenny is national affairs editor.
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