Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. The spins and turns from this government are quite exceptional. You can imagine the conversation in the Treasurer’s office earlier in the week when they said: ‘We need some quick justification for the new tax. Quick, go to Google.’ And in Google they found an obscure academic working paper out of North America. ‘That’ll do,’ says Wayne, ‘That’ll do the job.’ But then we find out when we dig a little deeper that it is based on a survey of four people, and even the authors of that working paper say, ‘Please do not overstate this for a particular industry in Australia.’ So they go into panic mode: ‘Quick, Google. Find us some more justification for the tax.’ Lo and behold, there is an academic paper from three junior officials in Treasury—not even Treasury says that it is a ‘Treasury paper’. And when we dug a little bit deeper on that paper we discovered that if you applied the same rationale to the electricity industry and the gas industry and the water industry, they deserve a super profits tax. Of course, the Prime Minister runs away from that.

At the end of all that, where are we left? We are left with a government that is seeking to use whatever it can to justify its $9 billion a year tax. What we do is start to go behind the numbers of the Treasurer’s own paper, the one that Rory Robertson used as a justification for the great big new tax. The Treasurer’s paper from 9 May says that in 2008-09 royalties, resources taxes and company tax amounted to 27 per cent, and profits, 73 per cent. The only conceivable way they could get those numbers is to redefine ‘profit’, to call it something other than what it truly is. But I will tell you what matters. What matters is when you go to the tax office website and you have a look at the numbers in the bank. The numbers in the bank do not lie. Table 8 says quite clearly that in 2007-08 the total net tax of the mining industry was $8 billion on $29 billion—around 27 per cent. In addition there was nearly $4 billion on royalty expenses, which takes it to around 41 per cent. So this Treasurer is asking us to believe his spin rather than the money that has been received by the Australian Taxation Office from the mining sector.

The government is trying to obscure the debate with any clutchable number and any clutchable paper as a justification for a $9 billion a year new tax. The government has a problem: not only is it banking the $9 billion a year, it is spending the $9 billion a year. So we will know exactly to the dollar how big the backflip is going to be—and we know there is going to be a backflip. We know the backflip is going to be this big—maybe even bigger. We heard it today. The Prime Minister, with absolute conviction, said, ‘We’re engaging in consultation on the North West Shelf.’ And the Prime Minister said, with absolute conviction, ‘We’re engaging in consultation with small miners.’ The Prime Minister has said over the last few weeks, with absolute conviction, ‘We are engaging in consultation with the industry.’ But you know what absolute conviction is? The budget numbers: $9 billion a year in, $9 billion a year out.

We asked the Treasurer, the master of the numbers: ‘Exactly how much, Treasurer, is the gross amount of money you are going to collect from this tax?’ He said, ‘Well, it’s all there in the budget papers.’ All there in the budget papers? That remains a mystery, because on 4 May the Treasurer said, ‘We’ll be writing out a cheque of at least $8 billion a year to the miners.’ Add that together with the $9 billion he is banking net from the resources tax, and that tax looks like a hell of a tax, even bigger than the ETS. It is a huge amount of money. And you know what? The bottom line is: this mob cannot be trusted. They have not thought through the implications of their tax. They have not thought through the implications for Australians. It is pretty simple: if you are collecting $9 billion more from the Australian people, either someone is going to have smaller returns from their shares or someone is going to pay a higher price. It is simple: you take $9 billion out and every Australian is going to pay, because this government just do not know what they are doing.

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