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

Never! This is what they are about: building debt and throwing money around willy-nilly. Then all of a sudden they say: ‘Well, now we have a problem. We have a $7 billion, $8 billion or $9 billion interest bill. How are we going to fund it? Oh, we will go up to the big end of town.’

Who owns those industries? Who owns Rio Tinto? Who owns BHP? The workers of Australia, those with superannuation, own them. What we are doing is strangling the future, the retirement fund for the working families, the working Australians that the people on the other side of the parliament are supposed to represent. You are strangling their retirement, because they are the people who own those industries. One accountant has given me figures today saying that 10 to 20 per cent of investment portfolios are directly in mining shares—for example, BHP and Rio Tinto. So you are strangling the workers’ retirement funds. You have already seen the damage that you have done to the stock market because of the announcement of this huge tax on that industry.

There is one thing that is interesting: when this tax is brought in and implemented by the Rudd government, Australia will pay about twice the tax of the mining industries in Canada, Brazil and China, yet we are expected to compete. What we are going to see—and we have already seen it—is the pulling out of investment and of exploration. Companies will tend towards South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil—you name it—anywhere where there are fewer costs so they can get the same product and make more profit. That is how free enterprise is. What this government is doing is simply scaring business out of our nation.

The one concern I really have is the fertiliser industry. Incitec Pivot have told the Stock Exchange that they will stop drilling for phosphate as a result of Labor’s new mining supertax. We have been importing our fertiliser onto our farms for years and here is an opportunity to have our own fertiliser in Australia and get a distinct benefit for our nation, but our Incitec people have said, ‘What’s the point of going ahead; we’ve been taxed out of existence.’ That is what this tax is going to do, and that is why we on this side of the parliament will oppose it from the very beginning until Mr Rudd does another backflip and does away with it.