Parliament returns this week with for the last time before a make-or-break May budget defines the Turnbull government for the rest of its term, however long that may prove to be.
Yet the mixed signals keep on coming. After days of skirting around the issue of corporate tax cuts, for example, Malcolm Turnbull firmly announced late on Friday his government will keep fighting for the whole package. That's despite Treasurer Scott Morrison being noticeably less adamant in his recent pronouncements.
Perhaps Turnbull was inspired by his few days with the uncompromising Chinese Premier Li Keqiang. Democracies, as Julie Bishop likes to remind the region, are different and superior. Unfortunately, most are also proving increasingly dysfunctional in terms of making progress on difficult policies.
Li could certainly only be bemused by the concept of holding power without being able to exercise it due to the whims of a gaggle of crossbenchers and a system of federal and state co-operation most notable these days for the lack of co-operation.
Inevitable defeat
That leaves Turnbull not just confronting the inevitable defeat on corporate tax cuts in the Senate for all but companies with revenue under $10 million. It's also about continuing to champion those tax cuts for the rest of the year, but with no chance of that getting through ahead of the next election or being able to challenge Labor as it counts the money "saved" for its own spending.
This leaves little room to declare victory on behalf of all the small and medium-sized enterprises that will benefit, risking the inevitable political opportunism that means Labor and the crossbench will claim credit instead.
Turnbull's determination to press on regardless with the whole package will win plaudits from most big companies (if not David Gonski's ANZ) and the Business Council of Australia. It will obviously allow Bill Shorten to keep hammering at this all being $50 billion worth of unfairness. Labor will repeat the easy line that Turnbull is willing to protect his "mates" (big banks, multinationals, the big end of town, take your pick of "bad guys") at the expense of ordinary people struggling to pay the bills.
Political dead end
The economic logic of this may be totally spurious but the Turnbull government has been unable to persuade anything like a majority of voters it has the winning argument. If Turnbull remains committed to defending that position, he and Morrison will have to come up with a better way of selling a decade-long and relatively modest program of corporate tax cuts as the way to encourage investment and jobs now.
Alternatively, the economic leadership team will have to come up with a message that allows a graceful exit from what looks like a political dead end, until and unless Donald Trump changes the rules of the international tax game via huge corporate tax cuts in the US.
But given Trump's plans to gut Obamacare have now been gutted by his own party in Congress, the power of the Trump White House is looking similarly constrained by legislative logjam.
The most popular option –- one clearly encouraged by the Reserve Bank and various other economists in Australia as well as by Trump – is to announce major spending on inadequate urban infrastructure.
Increasing economic productivity
The promise to make their lives easier in terms of increasingly overcrowded transport systems will appeal to voters while the government can justify it on the basis of increasing economic productivity as well as jobs.
This still requires a change of the Coalition's position on debt of Olympic-sized proportions, including successfully making the distinction between good (productive) and bad (wasteful) debt. But as the public appeal of Turnbull's announcement on the Snowy Hydro scheme demonstrates, voters are in the mood for investment, including government spending, that can be promoted as "nation building".
Whether the Coalition will try this option as a major part of its budget strategy is not yet clear. What is clear to ministers and backbenchers is that more of the same won't make enough of a difference to alter the image of a government in big trouble and facing problems it can't fix.
Mutterings and speculation
That's already leading to dangerous mutterings about the friction between Turnbull and Morrison and speculation about ministerial reshuffles soon after the budget, making the next few months even more unsettled.
Many of the policy problems now at the forefront of debt have actually been brewing for years yet have only recently emerged as obvious policy crises, in everything from energy to housing affordability in Australia's biggest cities.
The government has built up expectations of decisive action on housing, for example, but with no agreement internally on how to deliver that. Expect more restrictions on foreign investment but there's still indecision about the idea of using superannuation to bolster deposits.
Bizarre, last-minute suggestion
Delivering on lower power bills and preventing blackouts is just as complicated, including the need to act in co-ordination with state governments that have no desire to do anything other than shift responsibility for their own failures.
The bizarre, last-minute suggestion to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to keep open Hazelwood, an old coal-fired power station in Victoria, reflects the impasse.
The Turnbull government at least has a more coherent counter to Labor's simplistic focus on the need to encourage more renewables. Turnbull has also sounded considerably more confident in attacking the contradictions in Labor's approach while also sounding tough on the gas companies that are exporting LNG.
But that's not going to lead to any reduction in the pressure or the price of delivering power for businesses and, to a lesser extent, for households.
The Prime Minister and Treasurer know the real heat is still being turned up on them.
