John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Straight out of North Korea—exactly! It is a $9 billion tax. Those on the other side should be honest about this and tell the Senate that this is about a $9 billion tax collection to pay the interest on the debt that the Rudd government has accumulated. We are today looking at a $140 billion gross debt. In simple figures, five per cent on $140 billion is $7 billion. But, wait, there’s more: the debt has grown by more than $1 billion a week.

What this is about is tonight’s budget. It is so that the Treasurer can say, ‘We are bringing the deficit down; we are bringing $9 billion extra in every year by strangling the goose that lays the golden egg in Australia.’ That is what this is about. This is the industry about which Mr Rudd, prior to the 2007 election, said: ‘We must change our economy; we cannot be reliant on the mining industry. If it falls over and commodity prices crash, we need to have another source of income.’ What is he depending on? It was the mining industry, but now he is depending on taxing it as much as he can. I find this amazing. This is simply a great big tax to finance the great big debt.

We know where the great big debt came from. We can talk about Building the Education Revolution and the waste of money there. You will hear more about that in the near future, despite the Auditor-General’s report. We can talk about the waste in the pink batts fiasco, where we had a $2.6 billion program which is now costing $1 billion to clean the mess up. That is what this tax on the mining industry is about: collecting money to pay for the huge debt that the Rudd Labour government put our nation into. But that is nothing new: look back at the history of Labor, whether it be at the state level or the federal level, and tell me of one Labor government that, when they were thrown out of government, had reduced debt. Name one occasion.