Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I do not think that was the coup d’etat arrangement. Wasn’t it supposed to be Wentworth and not Curtin? On the condensate arrangement, it was actually instituted back then in order to provide encouragement for the industry to start with. That is the first point. Secondly, that is quite a long time ago, and since that time the industry has not only become profitable and been established; if you look at the return to the industry concerned, its actual profits in recent years have been not just in the hundreds of millions of dollars but in the billions of dollars.

What this seeks to do is to actually close a tax loophole which has existed for a long, long time and, furthermore, to use those taxation measures to underpin the robustness and the financial integrity of this budget, with its $22 billion surplus, which is necessary as an instrument of economic responsibility. What we have witnessed in this chamber just now with this debate and this vote is quite remarkable. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition—

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