Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

It is your policy. You can smile but it is your policy. It has been stated over and over again that the first people who will cop a whack are the 3.6 million lowest paid working Australians in this country. Over two million of those are women. They will be the first to cop the whack—the penalty—and lose at least $500 a year. Five hundred bucks a year may not be a lot of money to a lot of people. I know that it would not give some mining billionaires one second of flight time in their private jets, but to a cleaner $500 a year is a fair bit. It might buy the schoolbooks of one of their children.

On issues like that this government—the Gillard government—understand that cost-of-living pressure are real. We understand that we ought to be doing something about it, and that is what we do. We go out there with the schoolkids bonus, we build better schools, we provide the infrastructure and career development for teachers and we make sure that we are going to be able to compete in the future, and we will not become a nation where a handful of people make the billions while the rest just dig holes or do other things on minimum wage. You get a short boom in the mining industry and people go out and get these fantastic jobs—and they are fantastic—on really high wages. How long do they last? Go and ask people, now, who are trying to get into the mining industry. There are a whole range of associated issues.

The opposition come into this chamber with a matter of public importance trying to say, somehow, that the minerals resource rent tax is a bad thing. They are right on that count, but only in one area: it is bad for just billionaires. That is the only bad thing about this particular tax.

It actually is good for the country. It is good for every single Australian. I am sure six—let's just say there are six—of the great big mining billionaires, the magnates, could do with just a little bit less. Six people versus how many? Twenty three million. What about the other 23 million Australians? I think there is a good case to be made and that case has been made.

We see that the opposition are particularly at war with the facts, they are at war with themselves and they are at war with this struggle to get to an election as quickly as they possibly can. They have been struggling to get to one for almost 2½ years. They are almost foaming at the mouth to get this opportunity. They just want to get there. But, in the run-up to an election, they are not going to get there on the back of good policy or on the back of good, sound economic management principles. They are not going to get there by doing the right thing for the economy going through a GFC or by making sure they actually put in place the tough, hard decisions today so that there is a legacy for the next generation, something left behind, something good. When the globe was facing the problems of the GFC—and they are not over yet—we made the tough decisions in government. We know what the other side would have done because they have already told us. They would have sat on their hands and let the economy just work itself out.

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