George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The rabbit is another one. The development of the Holden Sunbird—I mean, no-one would want to be caught dead being in a photo with that one! In more recent times we have had the iSnack 2.0. I think that lasted four days on the shelves. Click Frenzy, which happened last year, probably did not even last four minutes before the internet system went down and nobody could buy anything. And even Slim Dusty, that great Australian songwriter, put a song together about a failure: the Pub With no Beer, he called it.

But I have to tell you that there is nothing so lonesome, morbid or funny than to gamble your surplus on a tax with no money.

The reality is that we have got another failure here in front of us with this mining tax and it is a failure of epic proportions. The thing about failures is that most people actually learn from them, do something about them and move on. But the government will not even acknowledge its failure on the mining tax front. The Treasurer was dragged, kicking and screaming, to announce to the public that this tax had raised only $126 million in half of a year of its operation—a quarter of what it was predicted to raise. He talks about the need for this tax to spread the wealth and spread the benefits around to everyone. As the member for Casey pointed out the other day, it is spreading $5.50 to every Australia—fantastic! It is not even enough to buy a McDonald's meal.

We have heard the Treasurer and the Prime Minister blame all sorts of different things for the reason this tax has fallen short. We have heard the blame falling on commodity prices. The Treasurer has certainly said that no commodity analysts or economists had forecast the tumble that took place in iron ore prices last year, but the fact is that iron ore prices have actually risen—so that is not a real excuse. But he did say that the resources rent taxes, by their nature, are difficult to forecast and that jumps and falls in the revenue relative to the estimates is to be expected. He is trying to blame it on international pressures on the mining industry or the resource industry and what that does with prices.

But then we have another excuse, and that is that it is the states' fault. This seems to be the Prime Minister's approach, that it is all those terrible state governments—even the Labor state governments—that are doing the wrong thing by having royalties. Royalties are something that state governments have always had and that were in existence for the life of the Howard government, when we did not have great deficits and debt. This is something that has been around for a long time, yet somehow it is the states' problem. Then we had the member Lyne coming in, as part of that menagerie that makes up the government, saying that it is these loopholes that are the flaw in the system and saying that these loopholes allow Rio and BHP to have $1.7 billion credits to buffer themselves from paying the tax—as TheAge put in its newspaper today.

But the thing is that these are not flaws; it was a tax that was actually designed that way. The tax was actually designed to allow the big miners to have $1.7 billion in credits to buffer themselves from paying. It was a deliberate design that was done in the deal that the Prime Minister made with the big three miners after she knifed the member for Griffith and took over his job.

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