Malcolm Turnbull has refused to rule out splitting the company tax bill to give companies earning up to $500m a year a tax cut but the bid to win crossbench support appears doomed after Pauline Hanson restated One Nation’s opposition to the package.

The Coalition has rounded on Labor for confirming it would repeal the tax cut for companies earning between $10m and $50m a year as it continues to lobby the crossbench to cut the rate to 25% for companies earning more than $50m a year.

With the government still four votes short, the compromise plan championed by senator Derryn Hinch has come back into play to provide the tax cut to 6,000 more companies but exclude giants such as the big four banks and the grocery duopoly.

But on Wednesday morning Hanson appeared to state a final position, telling 3AW radio that she and Senator Peter Georgiou had decided to vote against the bill. She added that the government should “take it to the next election, let’s see what the people say”.

Earlier, Hanson told reporters in Canberra she had spoken to the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, on Tuesday evening, but he had failed to persuade her while she made further demands on multinational tax avoidance and a new coal-fired power station.

On Tuesday Hanson struggled to defend her numerous positions on the company tax cuts. “I haven’t flip-flopped. I said no originally and then I said yes, then I said no and I stuck to it,” she told the Senate.

The government needs the four votes from a group of six senators still opposed to the cuts: Centre Alliance’s two votes, One Nation’s two, and independents Hinch and Tim Storer.



Hinch told ABC News Breakfast the government could get a “partial victory” if it cut the tax rate for companies earning up to $500m, as he first suggested in March. But he acknowledged senator David Leyonhjelm has threatened to pull out if the Coalition adopts that compromise.

On Sunday Cormann also appeared to rule out that option. “The same as we said we would not be splitting the personal income tax bills ... we will not be splitting the company tax cut plan from here,” he told ABC’s Insiders.

But at a doorstop on Wednesday Turnbull said he would not comment on negotiations with the Senate when asked about the $500m threshold.

“We don’t engage in public negotiations,” the prime minister said, refusing to rule it out after a follow-up question.

“We’ve had a lot of success by engaging with the Senate respectfully and constructively – as you saw last week with the biggest reform of personal income tax in a generation.”

The Coalition has gone on the attack after the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, unexpectedly confirmed on Tuesday that Labor would raise $20bn by repealing the corporate tax cut for companies earning more than $10m and was considering whether to roll it back for those earning between $2m and $10m.

On Wednesday the treasurer Scott Morrison called on Labor to “end the mystery” about whether it would increase taxes for those businesses.

Turnbull accused Labor of “an assault on jobs, an assault on enterprise, [and] an assault on innovation and small and medium family businesses”.

The workplace relations and small business minister, Craig Laundy, told Radio National Labor had “nailed its colours to the mast” and “demonstrated the ignorance and the respect they have for small business operators”.

“The more money you leave in business operators’ pockets – irrespective of their size – the more they will reinvest in themselves, grow and employ more people,” he said.

Laundy said the Labor rollback plan was not a saving but amounted to taking a “sledgehammer to the economy” with a $20bn tax increase. He said wage earners’ and business operators’ profits were theirs “not the government’s”.

“We will be back to surplus in 2019-20, a year ahead of expectation, with reductions in tax ... that’s the responsible thing to do,” he said.