Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President. I appreciate your efforts to maintain order on the other side of the chamber. This is not a broken tax; this is a dog of a tax that should never have been introduced. Unfortunately there is nothing else to do with this tax except, reluctantly, to put it down.

It was interesting listening to the contributions of some of the earlier speakers on this topic. We had Senator Ludwig trying to keep a straight face while he discussed some of the more left-wing aspects that he was forced to talk about whilst looking at this piece of legislation. It was quite amusing. I think you would find that, left to their own devices, there would be a number of people opposite who would agree with us totally on this. The one thing that neither of the more recent speakers from the non-government side has mentioned is that repealing this legislation was an election promise of this government. We were elected on the basis of saying that we would repeal the minerals resource rent tax. That is what we will attempt to do, despite the opposition that we are receiving from Labor and the Greens in this area.

I do not suppose we should be surprised that a dog of a tax was introduced by the Labor government. Their ability to introduce coherent legislation that brought about the effects it was meant to was very, very limited, across the board. Everything you looked at was overlegislated, underlegislated or wrongly legislated. This was partly because of their inability to manage the schedule of legislation that they had and how they could go about it. So there is no surprise that we have here a dog of a tax that needs to go. But, whether it is a bad tax or not, the point is that we promised, and were elected by the Australian people, to get rid of this tax. Last time I noticed, the Greens did not exactly do very well when it came to winning in the last election, and I would hope that they would think about why that might have been the case. Despite the fact that we said very, very broadly that we would repeal the carbon tax and the minerals resource rent tax, we—not the Greens and not their Labor flunkies—were elected to govern Australia for the next three years.

You would get the impression, from listening to some of the nonsense that has been spoken in this chamber, that the mining companies do not pay tax. Surprise, surprise; that was one thing that apparently the Labor government could not break. The mining companies pay company tax in Australia. Certainly they receive tax deductions for development and for exploration, but they pay company tax. They are companies and they pay company tax. So they are not sneaking out from under, although those opposite would have you believe that they are and that somehow mining companies do not behave like companies.

Not only do mining companies pay company tax but they also pay royalties to state governments, because it was recognised long ago—particularly in my home state of Queensland, which I believe was the first state to undertake this—that the mineral resources of Australia belong to the states. Unfortunately, under our Constitution, they do not belong to the Australian people, as Labor and the Greens would have you believe, but rather to the states where those resources lie. That is the way our Federation continues to work. The resources in the ground belong to the states, not to the federal government, despite Labor's best efforts to change that reality. That is how our Federation is constitutionally established and that is how it should remain.

Let us get past some of the nonsense that has been spoken in this place by the opposition in regard to the fact that huge numbers of companies are required to register for this. Over 300 companies have been required to register for the minerals resource rent tax, but, as you would be aware, Mr Acting Deputy President, only 20 companies have so far been obliged to pay it. So there is a significant compliance and administrative burden imposed by legislation that was more complex than it needed to be. Unnecessary as it first was, why would we be surprised by any one of those qualities in legislation put up by the previous Labor government? It was an appalling mess, as usual.

Much has been made of the fact that it was going to raise billions. It will still raise billions one day, according to someone! It will raise billions the day that hell freezes over, because the other aspect of this legislation that has not been appreciated, I do not think, by the other side is that the Minerals Resource Rent Tax Act further damaged international investor confidence in Australia, particularly in the energy and resources sector.

Senator Sterle interjecting—

Senator Sterle has come up with a hollow laugh and joined himself to the many on the opposition benches who appear to believe that everybody who sets up a company in Australia is a cash cow that can be milked indefinitely, forever, and will just stay here no matter what is done, no matter how much is ripped out of them by a Labor government. That, of course, is not the case. We operate in a global market. There are plenty of other places to get your iron ore. South America is certainly becoming extremely competitive in this area, with better shipping than we have and lower costs than we have for our iron ore. Whilst we would certainly want to operate in a very safe and very environmentally controlled environment for our mining industry, we have to believe and we have to accept that we operate in a global market. If we do not act like we have competition in this area—well, gee, guess what? We will not be in the market. It is not the others that will go out of the market.

I must admit that I found Senator Cameron's contribution to this debate—with his crocodile tears about our lack of interest in manufacturing and his views on the car industry—particularly galling. Where do you think a lot of those companies that were downstream of the car manufacturers have gone looking for jobs, looking for work for their companies and looking to keep their well-trained and highly qualified staff in jobs? They have gone and looked at the mining sector. To suggest that there are a few multinational companies that might be gouged for an extra little bit of cash if this tax were to stay in place is a complete and utter nonsense and denies reality. One of the best and largest creators of downstream jobs, of downstream manufacturing, of downstream professional services and of many other services is the mining industry. I think we would all accept—sorry; the majority of us would accept—that, without the mining industry, the Australian economy of the past 15 years at least would have been a much, much sadder sight than it currently is. We need the mining industry, and we cannot pretend that we do not have competition. We have to keep going in that area. We cannot simply try to claim that we can do whatever we like to mining companies and that it will not affect (a) their level of investment in Australia or (b) their level of activity elsewhere in the world. There is a direct relationship, and we need to be very aware of it and to continue to support it.

I was most interested to hear Senator Waters' contribution. I think she used the term 'mules' as a way of talking about people being stubborn. But she also mentioned people behaving like stubborn, rusted window latches. Memo to Senator Waters: if it was a rusty window latch, someone mined some iron ore sometime to create it! So I think you need to think about whether we want to keep those industries in Australia or not. Even if it was an aluminium one, some mining took place. Of course, along with Labor, the Greens would rather not talk about nasty things like mining.

We have got Labor, with the WA election coming up, saying, 'Let's talk about education, let's talk about anything—but let's not talk about mining, because, goodness, we can't get our act together to have a coherent message on the topic of mining.' So desperate are Labor in WA that they are running robo-calling campaigns to talk to every elector—or half the electors, anyway—of WA about health and education because they cannot talk to them about the real issues and the real problems that are going to develop in WA because of their behaviour towards the mining industry and the economy of WA.

Senator Cormann made the point during question time that Labor's minerals resource rent tax deliberately targeted WA and the WA economy. I would suggest that it also targeted my home state of Queensland. But the damage that it has already done in WA is there for everyone to see. The industry is already slowing down because of concerns that the repeal of the carbon tax and the repeal of the minerals resource rent tax will not happen, because the non-government senators in this place cannot bear to pass the legislation because it was moved by the Liberal Party—a move that caused us to be the government. It is the repeal of those two taxes that we proudly stood up for for months and months and months before the election that was instrumental to us being elected, and here is everybody trying to thwart the government's agenda—and not just the government's agenda but that of the people of Australia.

I think it interesting to note that, if you look a little deeper at what is going on, the Labor Party are being played for fools by the Greens, who do not have an agenda for jobs in the mining or manufacturing industry. They do not want manufacturing and they do not want mining in Australia. Labor is going along with all this, without quite realising what is happening to them. The Greens have been saying that Australia's Future Fund should not be investing in coal. Do the Labor senators agree with that view? That is the agenda they are supporting, an anti-mining and anti-coal agenda. As we move to other renewable forms of energy there will continue to be an increased need for coal, with the increasing number of middle-class people in China, India and other developing countries. Even if we use a smaller percentage of coal we will actually use more coal, over the next 50 years or so, than we do now.

A chap called Ben Caldecott, from Oxford University's Stranded Assets Program, has come out here to run a campaign, to encourage superannuation and other companies to divest themselves of investments in the coal industry. They are trying to 'trigger a process of stigmatisation' of fossil fuel businesses. Why would we be surprised that the Greens would try to do this? Ruining the economy of Australia is exactly the sort of thing they would set out to do, because with a ruined economy we would not have too many exhaust emissions, anywhere. We have the anti-coal movement trying to scare investors away from the coal sector. Brendan Pearson of the Minerals Council said:

It is a campaign heavy on hyperbole and emotive rhetoric and light on facts. It is a political campaign dressed up as investment advice.

When did we last hear that from the Greens? Any time they want to, they try it on in any way they can. They even tried it on with chlorine, one of those chemicals it is almost impossible to exist without in the developed and more hygienic world. There are countries in South America that tried to drop chlorine out of their water supplies, and after a couple of plagues and epidemics they put it back again. To suggest that we can stop using chlorine and coal is the sort of thing you would expect from the inexperienced platitudinous people of the Greens party.

What is distressing about this is that they are dragging the Labor Party—which, one would think, had a proud and long tradition of caring about jobs in Australia—along with them. Senator Ludlam is so desperate to have himself noticed in WA that he makes up the most extreme and ridiculous nonsense about this government, in a smug and 'caring' way. He said to the people of Western Australia: 'We want our country back.' As was been pointed out in the Sydney Morning Herald recently, who are 'we'—the Australian people?

The Australian people know who they have given the government of their country to for the next three years and it is not Senator Ludlam and his ilk. It is the Liberal coalition government that is supposed to be in charge of our country for the next three years. But we have to put up with the uneconomic nonsense that comes from the opposition—and the Greens, who are leading Labor around by the nose, yet again, for what they perceive to be some sort of vague political advantage. It is a bit sad. I hope that Labor will come to its senses and behave like a party that cares about jobs and the economy. (Time expired)