Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In her answer, Senator Wong drew attention to gambling and the Spring Carnival—about the only sensible thing she did say—and that reminds me of the famous trifecta of Prime Minister Gillard.

She came to the prime ministership saying that she was going to solve three major problems. The first was asylum seekers. As of the weekend, there were 21,419 of them on 335 boats. This is someone who, when she was shadow minister, used to put out very rare media releases saying 'Another boat, another policy failure'. The second leg of her trifecta was the carbon tax. She went on to say, prior to the last election, 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.' But the best leg of the trifecta, naturally, was when she fronted up with her Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Swan, to try and solve the minerals resource rent tax problem. The best way to summarise that is to say that the two of them were BHP-ed off, they were Rio-ed out and they were Xstratified. Those two thought they were going to be able to deal with the might of those three multinational companies and come out in front, and we have seen the result of that. Needless to say, it has hurt—as we all said it would at the time. In case Senator Marshall is listening, we said it was going to hurt the Australian owned mid-cap and junior miners. The Atlas Iron managing director, Mr Ken Brinsden, said:

We have spent the best part of $2m in compliance to find that we are not paying the tax and that we wouldn't reasonably expect to pay the tax under almost any circumstance you can imagine as we go forward with the iron ore price.

That was echoed by Mr Simon Bennison, the CEO of AMEC, when he said much the same thing, that this was only going to hurt the juniors.

As Senator Brandis said to me a few moments ago, not only did the minerals resource rent tax bring in no revenue; the simple fact is that, because all of these accounting costs and other costs are tax claimable, it is a fair argument to say that, perversely, the jolly thing is actually going to bring in less revenue for the government by way of company taxes.

Mr Rod Henderson, KPMG's national tax leader in energy and natural resources, drew attention to several problems associated with this new tax. First of all, it changes the way the major companies keep records. He said, 'People have to do all this work on a project basis and normally records aren't kept on a project basis.'

So we have example after example of where the failed government failed to listen to Australian companies. They were absolutely done over by the three major multinationals, and the result was that not only did it not bring in any revenue in the first quarter; the government actually pre-spent everything they thought they were going to get—a great tragedy and typical of Labor governments.

Senator Marshall suggested that mining companies do not pay their fair share. In the few minutes remaining to me, I want to put that to rest. The argument that mining pays a low percentage of its income in taxation is not true. The argument that mining pays a low proportion of total corporate tax is not true. They are the second-largest contributor to corporate income tax in this country, after the financial and insurance services sector. The interesting thing about the mining companies is that they paid 28½ per cent tax in 2009; whereas, the financial and insurance services sector paid less. It paid 21.8 per cent tax.

The mining industry in this country is a massive contributor to our economy; 60 per cent of all capex is spent in buildings and structures in the mining sector. It is contributing $140 billion to $150 billion to our economy. It is seven per cent of the Australian economy. We on this side of the Senate have continually said to the government: 'Why would you try and take from the very sector that is creating employment, creating wealth, creating need and creating demand, using up some of those lost 60,000 jobs in manufacturing that we have heard about around Australia?' There is no case for this activity, and the revenue from the minerals resource rent tax is what the government deserved. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.