Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

Fundamental injustice day. Then along came the current Prime Minister, delivered by the factional bosses. In the middle of an absolute row with the mining industry, where she asked the mining industry to stop their ads, to pull their ads and to sit down and negotiate, what did she do? She negotiated with the three major miners: BHP, Xstrata and Rio. She did a secret deal with these three majors on what they were going to pay. Canada was actually licking its lips at that stage. It thought: 'Isn't this fantastic? Australia, one of the pre-eminent resource areas of the world in terms of its mining industry, is now going to make itself uncompetitive.' Canada would be so much more competitive.

I will put this in context. I was speaking to the mine manager of potentially the largest goldmine in Australia, the Boddington goldmine in my electorate. He has just returned from South America and he confirmed what I have said. In Chile, the government tax, which is not set but negotiable, is 26 per cent. If we were to end up with a tax of 56 or 58 per cent, as proposed by the then Rudd government, where do you think they would take their money? As this person said to me: 'We would be taking it off to South America, we would be taking it off to Africa and we would be taking it off to Mongolia, where there are no impositions on us getting ahead and mining.' Money is fluid in this business. Those strange people out there who think that Australia is the only place that these large companies want to invest in should just think about BHP. The largest copper mine in the world is Escondida, in Chile, which they are going to expand. We have huge copper resources in Australia. Sandfire Resources outside Meekatharra is going to be a massive copper mine. But what is going to be put in its way? These sorts of impositions—not only a mining tax but a carbon tax.

The previous Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, went to the 2007 election promising $100 million for WA in infrastructure. The only thing that happened was that he said:

… in the West, so much money is generated for the public revenue in Canberra out of these great resource projects. But you know something? Not enough of that money is given back.

This government has not delivered one cent. None of that $100 million has materialised. The reincarnated tax, the minerals resource rent tax, of the Gillard government—done secretly with the large miners, leaving out the midcaps and juniors—will have a debilitating effect on the mining industry across Australia. Western Australia, where I come from, is not the only place where mining occurs. You only have to look at the massive resources of Olympic Dam in South Australia; at coal resources in New South Wales; right across the board—zinc, copper, gold, obviously massive amounts of coal—in Queensland; and uranium in the Northern Territory. I suspect no-one has mentioned uranium in the debate since Japan. There are all these potential opportunities. Western Australia is described by Colin Barnett as potentially the richest mining province in the world.

We are told that the resource rent tax will deliver $2 billion back to Western Australia over 10 years if it goes ahead. It has to get through this place yet, even though it was announced in the budget. During the election campaign my opponent wanted to tell us it would happen over four years. He argued that on radio. I want to confirm again that it is over 10 years. It is $200 million a year. It is not much when you think of the billions of dollars that will come out of Western Australia. In fact, between 2012 and 2014, WA will generate $7 billion for this tax if it goes ahead and will only receive $400 million in those two years. In other words, for every dollar WA gives to the federal government it receives less than 6c in return. The member for Capricornia talked about this tax grab on mining. You cannot get a bigger tax grab on mining than the minerals resource rent tax.

I want to make this point very clear before we move to the end of this debate. The Minister for Resources and Energy came in here and said how sneaky it was that Western Australia they did not tell them about this. We now know, through questions at question time and since through the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, the member for Curtin, that this government certainly did know and they knew well in advance. They knew that this would be added to the iron ore fines and it would not increase the overall royalty on iron ore. Obviously this government does not understand fines.

Let me put this into context. As a thief in the night, a couple of budgets ago, the Rudd government put a $2 billion tax on condensate in the gas industry. There was no prior knowledge and no prior warning. It was a by-product—a bit like the fines—that had not had any tax previously imposed on it, again to help the industry get on its feet. The gas companies did not know about it, they were not warned about it and they did not factor it in. Along came the government, tearing $2 billion a year out of that industry. The government complains about no knowledge, no prior warning, no consultation on this effort—which we now know from Western Australia is not true. What is true is this government put a tax on condensate, on a burgeoning resources industry which is going to supply clean energy to this country and to the rest of the world. They slapped a massive $2 billion tax on it without any warning. So much for this government saying that this is unjustified, terrible and something they would never do—they did. These threats that have been made by this government to Western Australia are just unparalleled. The Prime Minister and the Treasurer of this country are out there threatening Western Australia about its allocation of GST—and we know that we are only getting 63c in the dollar compared to Queensland's 91c, and I will not even mention Tasmania. But the fact is that this income will flow to Western Australia, because we are entitled to it. I had people stop me over the weekend and say to me, 'I thought the resources minister, Martin Ferguson, was a good bloke until I heard him coming out with these unbelievable threats.' If you are going to be a minister, you cannot carry on like a trade union thug, threaten sovereign states in this country and accuse them of doing a whole lot of things, as has been done over this last while. This is a bad tax. It is bad for Australia, it sends a very bad signal about the sovereign risk of this country and, at the end of the day, moneys will flow to areas where they do not have the same impositions.

MagNet, a group of magnetite companies, came to see us the last time we were in parliament here and outlined the massive projects they are building in this country, particularly in the north-west—CITIC Pacific, for example, has a project with a mine life of 25 years which will put $125 million in royalties per annum into this country. They are very concerned about the direction of this government in terms of both its mining tax and its carbon tax. The lobbyist for this company, dare I say, is the former state member for Kalgoorlie Megan Anwyl, who is out there saying, 'This is terrible for mining, this is terrible for our magnetite industry and we should stop it.' (Time expired)

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