It's a great relief to hear a prime minister back innovation and take a positive approach to the challenges that lie ahead. But far too much of the Turnbull agenda ensures we will lose our promise of a fair and equitable society along the way, writes Tim Dunlop.

As the year ends, it is worth noting that Malcolm Turnbull's biggest achievement as Prime Minister is that he has taken a much more mature approach to the way we discuss terrorism.

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks in Paris, it was an actual relief to hear the new Prime Minister take the opportunity to laud Australian multiculturalism and to say that, "The richness of our diversity is one of our nation's greatest strengths and we must protect and defend it dearly."

It was the perfect reminder of how much better off as a country we are with Mr Abbott removed from the top job.

Mr Turnbull also deserves some credit for the innovation statement. There is no doubt that we need to be preparing ourselves for a hugely changed economic environment, especially in regard to the future of work.

Sure, the statement didn't go far enough, but it was a relief to hear a prime minister take a positive approach to what lies ahead.

Again, the contrast with Mr Abbott and his let's-give-Prince-Philip-a-knighthood style of government could not be more stark.

But that's about where the good news ends. In ways central to the creation of a fair and equitable society, Mr Turnbull is failing badly.

The flipside of the innovation statement is that he is running around the country telling us all to be agile and creative and insisting that our future prosperity can only be ensured through innovation, but he is actually presiding over a Government that is wedded to dead-end policies and business-as-usual politics that puts the lie to his rhetoric of reinvention.

Take the recent revelation that an inordinate number of corporations simply do not pay any tax.

Despite decades of whining about how difficult it is to do business in our "high-cost" economy and constant complaints about what a disincentive our allegedly high tax rates are, it turns out that nearly 38 per cent of our corporate entities paid no tax at all in 2013-14.

Think about that.

While the rest of us - especially the least well off, including the unemployed - are lectured mercilessly about the need for mutual obligation, on the need to "give back" in return for our increasingly threadbare social safety net, our richest corporate citizens have been getting away with contributing precisely nothing to the national bottom line.

Now, if Mr Turnbull had used these revelations to announce a thorough redesign of the tax system so that such companies could no longer get away with such shirking, then that would be one thing.

But he didn't.

In fact, his Assistant Treasurer, Kelly O'Dwyer, defended the corporations, saying:

All of these companies are paying their fair share of tax and all of these companies are subject to our Australian taxation laws and our strengthened Australian taxation laws.

So apparently paying zero tax is their "fair share". Figure that one out.

Another development was the Productivity Commission's report into wages and conditions which, once again, in the tradition of WorkChoices, suggested that it would be a really good idea to cut weekend penalty rates for some workers while increasing the use of individual contracts that operate outside the award system.

Of course, Mr Turnbull says that the Productivity Commission report is just offering matters for discussion, but that's part of the problem. The range of acceptable discussion being offered is so protracted that it is almost inevitable that policy itself will be pushed in a direction where workers are punished and corporations are rewarded.

I mean, what alternative policies in this regard has the Prime Minister put forward? Precisely none.

It's the same old story: ordinary workers are being asked to shoulder the burden of less pay and decreased award protections, while large corporations are being allowed to operate in an environment where it is relatively easy for them to minimise - or reduce to zero - their tax obligations.

And it hardly stops there. Over Christmas, the Government announced that it would no longer pay the final two years of the Gonski education funding package, despite commitments given prior to the last election.

In the Mid-Year Economic Fiscal Outlook, they announced major cuts to various services under Medicare, most significantly in regard to pathology. The statement also included plans to cut "initiatives such as the clinical training fund, the rural health continuing education program" while axing "two aged care education and training programs" and "rationalise the function of six health agencies, including abolishing the National Health Performance Agency."

Oh, and a GST increase is on the table too.

At every turn, the options presented simply presume that it is the ordinary citizen who should sacrifice in the name of the gods of economic management - whether that be through cuts to wages, key services such as health and education, or via an increase in that most regressive of taxes, the GST - while corporations are given a free pass in their relentless pursuit of tax and wage minimisation.

All this means we are way past the point of merely worrying about broken election promises.

What is being trashed now is the social contract itself, the founding promise of democratic society that says a government will manage things in the best interests of the many, not just the few.

So as 2016 approaches, the overwhelming question we have to ask ourselves is clear: do we trust Malcolm Turnbull to deliver on that founding promise?

On the evidence we have so far, we would be very foolish to answer yes.

Tim Dunlop writes regularly for The Drum and a number of other publications. He is co-owner of Pidgin Podcasts. His new book, Busted Utopia: The Future of Work, Rest and Play will be released in 2016. You can follow him on Twitter.