Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am grateful for the opportunity to make a statement on the matter of public importance today on mining. I do so on behalf of my constituents in Hotham, on behalf of the nine million Australian workers who will lose superannuation under decisions made by this government, on behalf of 1.3 million families who will now go without the Schoolkids Bonus and on behalf of 3.2 million small businesses who will suffer from the decisions made yesterday just so that the biggest mining companies in Australia can make an extra few million dollars a year in profits.

I do not remember ever seeing such a flagrant display of a government supporting the powerful and the wealthy at the expense of ordinary Australians. Never has a clearer articulation of priorities been made than through the dirty backroom deals that those opposite promised they would never make.

Let us go through the decision that was made. This is a tax break for the wealthiest mining companies in Australia coming at the expense of a Schoolkids Bonus that more than a thousand families in my electorate relied on to do things like buy school shoes for their children, starting the new year of school, and to buy school books and laptops. These are things that people in my electorate cannot afford to do without that bonus. It comes at the expense of retirement incomes of ordinary Australians that have been reduced by billions—$128 billion less in national savings due to this decision yesterday. It comes at the expense of support for small business—more than $5 billion in tax breaks have been removed. The income support bonus is gone—that was a bonus of just $215 a year that went to some of the lowest-income people in the whole of Australia. All these are gone for the benefit of nine mining companies.

I have worked for some of these companies. In general, they are run by good people who are trying to do the right thing. But let us be clear: the resources that they are mining, processing and exporting belong to the people in my electorate, they belong to me and they belong to those on the other side of the chamber. But instead of keeping a profit based policy in place, which would make sure that the people who own these resources are the people to whom benefits flow, those profits will go back to mining companies. We know that those increased profits—

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