Ian Macfarlane (Groom, Liberal Party, Minister for Industry and Science) Share this | Hansard source

I shall not bother responding to the previous speaker. There was so much misinformation in that speech that would take all of the 15 minutes allocated, and I have something far more positive to talk about. But I will just say that that diatribe lacked one thing. I am sure the member for Oxley is an extraordinarily generous person and when people ask him for things he gives them to them without even a second thought. That has been the problem with the Labor Party: every good idea got given a prize. Every bad idea got given a prize. In fact, every idea got given a prize, and that is why this country is staring at a debt of $667 billion. Not once in that previous speech did we hear the member for Oxley actually say how he was going to fund any of those programs. He has no money. He has no plan. And he is just throwing money at a problem, with some faint hope that the next generation will be able to pay it back. So I did sit there with a wry smile on my face. It is little wonder that every time the coalition comes to government we inherit a massive debt from the previous government, and of course this time around is no exception.

I come here today to speak of something far more positive and something really important to your home state, Deputy Speaker Goodenough, and to the home state of other members in this chamber. We are as a government addressing an issue, which again was promised but never delivered by the Labor Party—that is, an exploration and development incentive which will incentivise small exploration companies to go out and discover new deposits of minerals and the like. It will provide the opportunity for those to be developed. It will create jobs for Australians and will continue to reinforce the opportunities for the resource industry which we acknowledge are under pressure—and we do not try and blame the previous government for that; we got rid of some of the things they did, like the mining tax. But the general situation within the resource sector is largely because of a fall in commodity prices.

I come here today to speak to the debate on the second reading of the Tax and Superannuation Laws Amendment (2014 Measures No. 7) Bill 2014, the exploration development incentive. This bill amends the income tax law to implement a scheme to stimulate greenfields minerals exploration in Australia. This is done by allowing Australian resident shareholders in exploration companies to deduct the expense of eligible mining exploration activity against their own taxable income.

In simple English, that means that if you, the individual Australian, invest in a company that is conducting exploration, then you will get a flow-through benefit in terms of your taxable income; you are able to take some of the tax benefit that the company has and flow it back into your personal income tax situation.

The measure is badly needed to secure continued growth in the minerals industry in Australia and, as I said, it is long awaited. I confess that I had a few failures—not many—last time I was the minister for resources. This was one of them. I was unable to convince the Treasury at the time that this scheme was needed, but give me a second chance and I will not miss it. We have taken up this opportunity. It was a shame for the resources sector that, in the six years that intervened in my ministry, the Labor Party promised that they would introduce this measure but they never did. Instead they introduced a tax. And why are we not surprised by that? This was a new tax: 'Hello, here we come. A tax on the mining industry, a tax that deters investment, a tax that had a number of machinations—'

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