Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Twelve seconds! I found most of Senator Macdonald’s speech incomprehensible and largely forgettable but there are a couple of issues on which we do agree and so I would like to address those first. You quite forcefully raised the issue about how on earth we use a one-off levy to address a rolling series of disasters. I think that is an entirely fair question. Also you raised the issue of compassion. I do not think anybody in here would question the compassion of coalition senators or MPs in the other place. You are from Queensland, Senator Macdonald. I find it difficult to visualise what it must have been like for people who were there or people clearing the mess up afterwards. In Western Australia we have suffered a series of quite horrific rolling disasters as well, not on the scale of what befell Queensland, obviously, but people have been up against it there as well. I do not think anybody here or necessarily even outside this building is questioning your compassion. I think they are questioning your competence to be able, for example, to add up. The $100 million or thereabouts that the government was persuaded by the Australian Greens to return to Solar Flagships amounts, I think, to about 1.7 per cent of the overall package. I will leave it to government senators, if they choose to, to talk about how they made that shortfall up. The $260 million that you rightly pointed out has been returned to the NRAS account, the National Rental Affordability Scheme, is funding deferred, so that actually should not be added to the total of whatever it was you added up because that is funding that will be in the forward estimates post 2014-15 and of course the government then is free to use that money as part of this package for disaster reconstruction. But I would have thought you would be well aware that you should not be adding that $260-odd million to what we took out of the package. That program has been deferred and I think that is a very good thing.

I do not propose to speak at great length on the Income Tax Rates Amendment (Temporary Flood Reconstruction Levy) Bill 2011 or the related bill. I think your reading of it is entirely correct—through you, Mr Acting Deputy President—in that this is not a tax on the mining industry. That was known formerly as the resource super profits tax and now it goes under a different acronym. The government in its negotiations with the big mining companies gave away—I know these are rubbery figures and the secretary of the Treasury pointed that out quite sharply on Thursday—up to $100 billion from the forward estimates, and the opposition wants no tax at all. So being lectured about why we are not taxing the mining industry in a flood levy bill from the side of this chamber that is not interested in chasing any of those profits at all—