Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business, Deregulation, Competition Policy and Sustainable Cities) Share this | Hansard source

What else could be happening here? There is one other possibility that Hansard would probably capture not quite as well as the sound of a phone that no-one is answering! There is one other possibility, and that is that the government has already decided to take those resource categories out: to say, ‘Look at us; we’ve consulted.’ That is the other possibility: that they have already made this decision. The mining industry and those at the bigger end of town have learnt that the government is completely uninterested in consultation and will not even discuss the fundamental issues about this tax and its impact on their businesses, on the jobs of thousands and thousands of people, on everyone’s superannuation, and on the costs of resources that are used in production in Australia. All those people get ignored. They will not even talk to them about that, but I bet you that in about a week—that would be my tip—Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, just before he goes on an overseas trip, will say: ‘I’ve consulted. I’ve talked and I’ve listened. And do you know what we’re going to do because we’re so consultative and so interested? We’re going to take out these resources, because that’s just the kind of guys that we are.’ That will be what Labor says: ‘Haven’t we consulted well?’ They will not say that that was what Henry recommended all along. If they had thought this through they would have done that to start with.

They will say that it will not have any impact on the budget because there been this problem that if you keep the tax you damage the economy but if you change the tax you ruin their dodgy budget numbers. They will somehow find some new way of saying, ‘Well, it’s not going to cost anything because some of these businesses were doing it tough; maybe they weren’t going to add that much anyway.’ But we know that that is a concern. Small business operators are fearful and quite fatalistic. They are fatalistic because they know the government is not interested. Their circumstances will be used as some kind of political prop—some kind of spin—when what the government should be doing right now is strengthening confidence in those businesses that will be damaged by the tax. The government will use that announcement in the hope that somehow it will strengthen Australians’ confidence in the Prime Minister. That is what the government members will do. The Prime Minister will get out there and say, ‘See, I am listening. It is not that I’m difficult to work with and that if you’re not in the gang of four no-one is listening.’ That is exactly what they will do.

That is always what this has been about. This tax has always been about exploration—not exploration of resources but exploration by Labor for a spine for the Prime Minister. They are trying to find him one. They are trying to find him a spine so he will take on a fight with those miners. You have seen the class warfare and the nonsense that has been trundled out here by the Labor Party in backing up what is essentially a tax grab—it is a fight they were looking for—to try and prop up a dodgy set of budget numbers and to make the Prime Minister look as if he believes in something. That is what this is about.

Do you think they have thought this through? I think not. I think of Midland Brick in Western Australia. Midland Brick challenged this government—the Customs people on behalf of the Commonwealth—about diesel fuel rebates. They said, ‘We reckon we’re involved in mining. Therefore our clay extraction operations in Western Australia should be able to qualify for the diesel fuel rebate.’ Do you know what the government said? They said, ‘No, mate. You’re not in mining.’ And they declined access to the diesel fuel rebate because that clay extraction activity that Midland Brick is involved in, according to the law, is not mining. But do you think this government could be consistent? Do you think they could be honourable in their application of these technical descriptions? Do you think they would think through and see whether they were being consistent? Of course not. So, in one decision they said, ‘No, in terms of you gaining a benefit from government policy, you guys taking clay out to make bricks is not mining; it is something else. Uh-uh; you miss out. No money.’ But when it comes to copying this government’s mining supertax: ‘We know we said you weren’t in mining when there were some benefits available but, by golly, you’re in mining now. You are a miner now, because we will catch you in that net and we will insist that you are subject to that tax.’ So there is the inconsistency, the duplicity and the desperation by this Labor government. I think the Australian public is learning more and more about that.

But it gets worse. On the Minister for Finance’s rather interesting performance on Meet the Press on 30 May he was quite dismissive—almost arrogantly dismissive—about concerns about the extreme complexity that this tax will have on businesses left to work with it. He said that concerns about the extreme complexity of the government’s mining tax are ‘fallacious’. He went on to say that the impact will be simply ‘dealt with by large companies with sophisticated accounting and computer systems’. Does the finance minister not know that this tax is going to land on small and family businesses operating local gravel, sand and fertilizer operations? Is he ignorant of the Henry recommendations to exclude those resources, or does he just not care? He is supposed to be one of the gang of four; he is supposed to be part of where all these big decisions are made. That is where the locus of knowledge now sits. But when it comes to the implications on small and medium enterprises he is completely indifferent.

This is yet another example—and we saw it with the great big ETS tax—of everyone getting compensation except small businesses. We have seen it in relation to paid parental leave: ‘We don’t even worry about the administrative burden we’re going to fit you up with. We’ll ignore that for small business.’ This great big mining tax is supposed to land only on big companies that have shareholders in pinstriped suits on the other side of the world. That is completely wrong to start with. They have a complete blind spot because this lands on family-operated and local small businesses that are a part of their community right across Australia from Warwick in Queensland, where they are deeply concerned, down to Dunkley in southern Victoria, where the local sandpits in some cases dip into their profits to provide charitable contributions. They are going to be done over by this, and this government does not care. (Time expired)

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