We are now firmly into budget season. Five weeks tomorrow we’ll see the document itself.

On Friday the prime minister secured the passage of company tax cuts for companies with revenue of up to $50 million. This was not the government’s entire plan, of course, but it was much better than had been recently expected. As such, it was widely seen as a win for Malcolm Turnbull.

That is a fair judgment. No, it doesn’t make him a stellar leader, or suddenly change the fortunes of the government. As I noted on Friday, economically it’s a damp squib, and it’s no surprise that treasurer Scott Morrison couldn’t answer when pressed on the economic dividend. But Turnbull has been working to present himself as a quietly-getting-things-done PM, and getting some of the tax cuts passed, along with the process changes to the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA), will add to that impression, or at least to the narrative Turnbull can tell about himself.

When Turnbull delivered his own verdict on his first 12 months in office he had a number of proposals to point to, but no real achievements. Six months later, I’d say his achievements are paltry, with nothing memorable or attention-grabbing, but at least – with superannuation changes, company tax cuts, the RDA, MP expenses reform, and the first omnibus savings bill – they are no longer literally nothing.

The budget is Turnbull’s chance to add to that list, and perhaps even to grab people’s imaginations.

One of the difficulties Turnbull and Morrison face in doing that is ensuring the budget isn’t completely overshadowed by the past.

At present, much of the chatter is around what the budget will keep and jettison from budgets past – the so-called zombie measures. Today there was a report that cuts to Family Tax Benefit (FTB) payments would be abandoned. Given the government’s vulnerability to Labor’s helping-the-rich-hurting-everyone-else attack, this seems politically sensible.

The big item in this genre is the remainder of the company tax cuts, those for really big businesses. Turnbull, on Friday, and Morrison, on Sunday, indicated that they remained “committed” to the tax cuts, and would press ahead with them before the next election if the Senate could be brought around. Given the Senate’s change of heart on the $50 million threshold, Morrison said, he remained an optimist.

Still, language in politics is a tricky thing, and it’s worth noting that the minister for social services, Christian Porter, also used the word “committed” when talking about the FTB cuts. “Committed” is something you can be right up until the moment you’re not. Turnbull and Morrison have left themselves less wiggle room than Porter, but it’s still not unthinkable that they walk away from the tax cuts, saying that they remain committed “in principle” (or some other confected phrasing), but what with the Senate being what it is …

One way or another, I tend to think these issues should not be mysteries by the time we arrive at budget night. The space should be cleared for the government to write a new chapter. It can’t afford to remain occupied with sewing up ancient plot twists. Morrison has been talking a lot about the challenges facing renters – not just those wanting to own a home – and it’s that type of action, colonising new political ground, that is going to be needed.

The government is arguing that the same need for resolution should be true of Labor: the Opposition must, Morrison says, make clear its position on the now-legislated portion of the company tax cuts. Yes, if politics were a pure forum for the pursuit of policy. My feeling is that Labor won’t, though, knowing that the pressure (and even that word is probably an overstatement) will soon subside. I will be surprised if we get clarity this year.

Substantively, today made clear how complicated a task the budget is. New data showed house prices continuing to grow at crazy rates. Meanwhile, retail sales fell. In other words, things are all over the place. Morrison says his number one priority for the budget is growth, followed by ensuring the government “continues” to live within its means – two aims that are sometimes opposed.

Morrison’s stocks have fallen a long way since he took on the job of treasurer. Expectations of this budget are already sky-high: it is coming to be seen as Turnbull’s last chance to save himself. Difficulty, too, is high, even without that added burden. Neither Turnbull nor Morrison will be getting much rest in the next five weeks.

In other news

POLITICS Our ethnic face The Australia of Pauline Hanson’s second parliamentary term looks very different to the Australia of her first George Megalogenis “Hanson remains, at heart, an anti-migrant politician. Her supporters may not see themselves as bigots, and certainly many are attracted to her party for reasons other than race. But she will remain electoral poison for the Liberal Party when almost half the population is either born overseas (28%) or has a parent who was a migrant (20%). The equation is relatively straightforward: the voters Hanson offends on the question of race will usually exceed those she inspires.” READ ON

POLITICS Sky’s the limit Latham’s sacking reveals the hypocrisy of the free-speech crusaders Mungo MacCallum “Lovable Mark Latham, the people’s friend, has been unceremoniously canned just for doing his job – for insulting, offending, humiliating and generally badmouthing precisely the kind of people the Murdoch mob hate: the namby-pamby do-gooders who just won’t tell the truth about the way Muslims, feminists, gays and lefties in general are destroying the fabric of the nation.” READ ON

FILM Race, celebrity and power in ‘OJ: Made in America’ The Oscar-winning documentary is a powerful examination of the OJ Simpson trial and race relations in the US Anwen Crawford “If the murder trial of OJ Simpson were a fiction, you would accuse its author of plot twists beyond the bounds of credibility. And in a sense it was a fiction, a worldwide media spectacle in which the ugly reality of murder was subsumed by an unreal extravaganza of fame and scandal.” READ ON