Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

There goes Senator Scullion with his proportion of the $70 billion black hole which the opposition has created and which would translate into a stripping of funding for dental health care, health in general, education and a whole range of public interests if the coalition were to assume government in the future. The Greens' position on the mining tax, far from that which has just been traduced by the previous speaker, is consistent with that of the Henry tax review and the Treasury advice over some years—that is, the recommended superprofits tax on mining ought to have been adopted by the government. It should certainly, when the government faltered, have been adopted by the Abbott opposition. But, in the failure of both the old parties to get a reasoned, Treasury backed return on the mineral wealth of this country, which flows so rapidly to overseas pockets, it has been left to the Greens in the form of the member for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, in the House and the nine Greens senators here in this chamber to take up the cause of the public interest.

The notable people for failing to act here are the mining party, the National Party, which tugs its forelock all the time to the mining corporations against the interests of rural and regional Australia and is doing so here again tonight. But let me briefly outline—