Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Australia is indeed fortunate. We live in resource mining boom times, driven particularly by the fundamental change in the world economy driven by the growth from Asia, from countries such as China and India. That is why the government has acted to ensure that the nation as a whole will receive a proper return during this cycle by proposing a resource super profits tax. The reform of taxing profits rather than production is projected to increase investment in the mining industry by between 4.5 and five per cent. There has been a great deal of misinformation and claims, often spurious and inaccurate, made about investment not going ahead. But yesterday we had in Australia none other than the Vice President of the People’s Republic of China. He was here to sign agreements with Australia’s government as well as with a number of individual mining operations. We saw yesterday the announcement of 10 projects, seven of which were in the mining and energy sector. This is real proof that investments will flow and will continue to flow. We saw a new deal by Mr Palmer. Mr Palmer is a very frantic critic of the resource super profits tax. His own company Resourcehouse Limited signed a major cooperation agreement with several Chinese companies to establish a $10 billion China First coal project involving the construction of a mine, a 476 kilometre railway to the Port of Abbot Point near Bowen. There has been another critic, Mr Forrest— (Time expired)