Scott Morrison is not one of Australia's more popular politicians, with only 2 or 3 per cent of voters generally preferring him as Liberal leader.
But if he harbours a secret ambition to become prime minister one day, Monday's opinion poll contains a strong clue for how he may be able to achieve it.
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The budget lifts the government in the latest Fairfax-Ipsos poll, but Labor still leads, Mark Kenny explains.
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Budget gives poll bounce
The budget lifts the government in the latest Fairfax-Ipsos poll, but Labor still leads, Mark Kenny explains.
Tax the big banks. More. And keep increasing the tax, as the British have done, year after year.
The government's decision in last week's federal budget to apply a new tax to the biggest five banks is a tremendously popular one.
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Seven out of ten people – 68 per cent to be exact – surveyed for the Fairfax Ipsos poll support the tax.
But doesn't the Liberal party, supposedly the party of capital, risk upsetting its own voters by hitting the banks? On the contrary, Coalition voters are even more strongly in favour of the tax than the general population, at 74 per cent.
It's rare to find such strong support for any political decision.
The big banks are now considering whether to launch an aggressive advertising campaign against the tax.
Morrison's response to this threat may well be that of the vigilante cop, Dirty Harry: "Go ahead, make my day."
The big banks were heedless and arrogant enough to allow themselves to become an election issue last year.
The government began calling their chiefs for regular public grillings and Labor wants to go further with a royal commission.
The banks' shock and outrage at the tax suggests they didn't learn a thing from the experience.
The people see the banks as fat, arrogant, exploitative, a government-protected species among wildlife of the business jungle, finally getting a little comeuppance.
A new age of international populism has created just the right conditions for a banker bloodbath.
To bring it on, the banks need only to start an aggressive campaign to whinge about the unfairness of it all.
The more firmly Morrison stands up to them, the more popular he will become.
The banks are right that it's not good policy – the tax rate of 6 basis points (or 0.06 per cent) raising $1.6 billion in revenue a year – is entirely arbitrary.
The government could have structured it as a super-profits tax or applied some other rationale, but instead fell back on simple fairness to justify the new impost.
And the public embrace of the bank tax is based on precisely this principle. It's part of the larger pattern of this budget, where the government has tried to apply fairness to many of its decisions.
Australians are big on fairness. Even when it costs them money personally. Proof of this is the poll finding that only 20 per cent of respondents say the budget will make them better off personally.
Yet 42 per cent, a plurality, believe that the budget is fair overall. Voters don't even mind paying a higher Medicare levy.
This defies the political orthodoxy that voters don't care about anything other than their own narrow, selfish interest.
Australians are prepared to support some difficult measures, even at their own expense, so-called sociotropic voting, so long as they believe it's being done fairly and sincerely.
It's a lesson that the big banks would do well to learn for themselves.
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