Given my rotten history with predictions, this is definitely tempting fate, but you could expect the government to back down and agree to a $500 million-threshold company tax cut if it can tempt Pauline Hanson into her eleventieth position on the issue. It’s a political no-brainer of such magnitude that even this government can’t fail to recognise its benefits.

Currently the government is stuck between staying committed to its massive handout to multinationals, which is unpopular and cramps its capacity to offer tax cuts to voters, and abandoning them and looking like it doesn’t believe in anything. Providing tax cuts for companies up to $500 million is a messy but solid compromise — it will deliver tax cuts to the great majority of Australian companies, cost far less over the medium-term than the full package, and allow the government to in effect declare victory and go home on the issue. No need to take the handouts to the next election and give Bill Shorten a line about a $17 billion gift to the big banks that he’ll gleefully use all the way to polling day. No pictures of multinationals celebrating their billion-dollar windfall. And room to offer more tax cuts.

The Business Council will jack up, and big business donations will slow, but it will upset Labor, which is counting on using the tax cuts as one of its main political weapons, to no end. 

Currently, however, the compromise isn’t on the table. Indeed, Mathias Cormann is entirely dismissive of the idea. “It was always designed as a ten year plan. I can’t see that legislating at that level [$500 million], and locking it in at that level, would ever then be able to be addressed successfully down the track. This now needs to be addressed as one package.”

Cormann is a true believer in company tax cuts. He’s been the leading advocate within the government of holding the line on the full package, even if it meets with defeat in the Senate, and then taking it to the next election if need be. He can’t be bargained with. He can’t be reasoned with. He doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until the cuts are passed. But others in the government, especially the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and Peter Dutton, who exercises a veto in a number of areas of policy, might not be quite so committed to the full package, especially if backbenchers start to question it.

The $500 million compromise might, for them, be a neat resolution to a political problem their opponents have adeptly exploited. And look, the government can retain a Tony Abbott-style “aspiration” to further lower company tax rates without having any specific plans to do so, freeing up funds to be shifted to personal income tax cuts that will be more competitive with Labor’s. And who cares about the Business Council, which is a Liberal branch office anyway?

When that happens, it will significantly reshape the political contest, and in the Coalition’s favour.