The government might have hoped to spend the first week of the parliamentary year concentrating on linking Labor to the CFMEU and claims of union corruption. Instead, growing backbench disenchantment with a GST rise and a leak of cabinet documents has again focused attention on two of the government’s most significant problems: its fixation on GST changes at the expense of genuine economic reform, and the disunity that bubbles constantly beneath the surface of the Turnbull government.

While disunity will be a cross Turnbull has to bear at least until he can win an election in his own right, on tax his problems are of his own making. While the Prime Minister is now backing away from a mooted rise in the GST — a pea-and-thimble trick with minimal benefits for the wider economy — the government remains in a difficult position. The entire rationale for Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership is, ostensibly, that he is better able to achieve economic reform than the disastrous Tony Abbott. But the government has yet to even explain exactly what economic problems it believes need addressing, let alone connect those to policy solutions.

Instead, it has wasted months chasing its tail on a GST change that now looks likely never to see the light of day. Malcolm Turnbull is burning his political capital going around in circles rather than strategically deploying it to achieve the kind of reform that he promised would be at the core of a “thoroughly Liberal government”.

If Turnbull dismisses a GST rise as not sufficiently economically beneficial to be worth the cost, that will free his government up to pursue more substantial reforms that will deliver over the long term to Australians. Even within the tax area, there are many of those — negative gearing, land tax, superannuation tax concessions and infrastructure pricing. But after a false start, the government now has less time, fewer options and less electoral goodwill to exploit in the prosecution of a reform agenda.