TERRY MCCRANN

utter, but cripplingly expensive, uselessness of socalled renewable power.

With (big) business and so-called business leaders desperate to help them – all in the cause of so-called ‘certainty’. Despite the basic fact that there could be no certainty – given both Shorten and the stupidity of the NEG – the only certainty that the NEG was ever going to deliver was the certainty of the grave.

The company tax cut is a little different. We will all suffer a price as a consequence of our rate staying at 30 per cent when the US has gone down to 21 per cent and we are such a large needer of foreign investment capital.

But neither big business – and in particular the BCA – nor the government either understood why the cut has become an absolute no-no or tried to develop an alternative which would have got a modified version through the Senate.

Shorten was able to build a devastatingly effective critique of the tax cut as a $17 billion handout to the big and wicked banks.

The minute he did so, both Turnbull and Morrison and the business leaders should have realised the cut was cactus.

It’s almost impressive how totally stupid both were. Let me try to frame it in words they might – dimly – understand. Did you really think you could not run a royal commission into the banks in parallel with a campaign to give them $17 billion? That also puts to the ‘get-out’ they never saw and obviously never seized: exclude the banks from the tax cut.

Now no big – or even slightly big – business gets the cuts. That’s one of the great all-time self-inflicted own goals. In many cases individual companies can blame their own chairmen and CEOs.