Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy President. There is only one serious embarrassment in here and he has just sat down. I get to the point here. This is a classic case where we have sat here and listened to 40 minutes of ranting on both sides of this chamber and nobody has talked about where the revenue is going to come from to do the things that the Australian community want done, particularly in the lead-up to the election. It is a classic case of a pox on both your houses as far as the community is concerned. That is why I am moving to amend the motion as follows:

Omit all words after "That", substitute "the Senate condemns the Government's failure to put in place a mining tax which raises sufficient revenue from the big miners to fund Australia's long-term needs".

Senator Joyce interjecting—

I understand that Senator Joyce does not want to raise the money to fund the Gonski reforms, for example. He does not want to raise the money to put in place national disability insurance; nor is he prepared to tell people in his electorate in Queensland that he is going to change the tax-free threshold from $18,000 back to $6,000. So let us hear from Senator Joyce, when he speaks a little later, how he is going to do anything other than open his big mouth and make an even bigger fool of himself.

I want to come to the point about revenue raising. There is all this talk about what promises are going to be made or not made in the election campaign. The people want to know where the money is going to come from in order to implement the Gonski review. Let me start with that as an example. We need a new funding model for education in Australia. Where are we going to get that money if we do not raise it from those who have the capacity to pay?

Let me just take BHP Billiton for a moment. BHP Billiton have just made a $9 billion profit, Marius Kloppers has just walked out the door with a $75 million handout, yet BHP can only spend $77 million on the mining tax. It is time that we actually raised the money so that we can put it into Australian schools. We still do not have in this House a piece of legislation for a funding model to pass between now and the election, and we need it, but we also need to know how to fund it.

I happen to agree that it is very clear that the mining industry ran rings around the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and Minister Ferguson. They did—it is now quite clear that that happened. But I want to come to this idea that the Greens should have known that somehow and I want to go through the dates to explain this. It was on 2 July 2010 that the Prime Minister and Treasurer Swan announced to the Australian people they had reached a deal with the big miners. The federal election was called on 17 July for a 21 August election. No further information was made available in the public arena in relation to the exact details of that tax, nor were they revealed throughout. Indeed, the details were not revealed until a long time afterwards, after the agreement that the Greens reached with the government.

So let us get back to the facts of the matter. Between 2 July and the time the election was called, no details were in the public arena. And, for example, it did not come out in the public arena until Senate estimates the other night that Treasury officials were not even in the room. You do have to ask yourself: what were the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and Minister Ferguson doing? In fact, where was Minister Ferguson? He seems to have slipped out the side door and managed to avoid the criticism that he ought rightly to have been there. Of course, he would be the best friend of Senator Macdonald—they are both on the same side on many issues. When we get to the point here, the fact of the matter is nobody knew and we have only just discovered from Treasury that Treasury were not in the room to negotiate this outcome.

The other reason we need to fix this mining tax is one where we get total hypocrisy from Senator Abetz and the coalition. They do not want to raise a cent. In fact, they want to let Gina Rinehart, Twiggy Forrest, Clive Palmer et al off paying any tax—any at all. Not once has Senator Abetz or anyone on that side been able to say where they are going to get the money from to be able to do what they say they are going to do. If you say you are going to get rid of the mining tax, if you say you are going to get rid of the carbon price, how are you going to fund the change to the tax-free threshold and the compensation payments more generally? How are you going to fund the superannuation contributions? How are you going to fund any of those things? You have not presented a single idea about where the money is going to come from except that, as you have already said, you do not support giving even a $4 a week increase to people who are on the lowest level of support in Australia. What a disgusting exhibition of meanness and of increasing the gap between the rich and the poor in Australia. You do not want the miners to pay anything, but you are not even prepared to give people on Newstart or youth allowance $4 a week.

As far as the government is concerned, you do not want to give them more than $4 a week; in fact, you have taken away the support for single parents and you are not prepared to see people on Newstart get $50 a week more, even though all the community NGOs who are supporting people in the community are saying it is essential and so too are the churches and the business groups. Everybody recognises that people are living below the poverty line and we have to do something about it.

How fair is it, when people are living below the poverty line, that we have a coalition saying it is fine for BHP to make their $9 billion and for Marius Kloppers to walk away with $75 million in his pocket? It is fine as far as the government is concerned not to fix the mining tax but, instead, to leave the Gonski report not fully implemented until 2019. That is on the never-never. That will never happen. That is the fact of the matter: unless you bring these things forward and fund them, they are not going to happen. It is the same with the promises about national disability. How are we going to get this actually implemented? To make them at-risk propositions, to go out there and say, 'Unless you vote for us you are not going to get these things,' is to condemn another generation of schoolkids around Australia to a completely unfair, unjust funding model.

We cannot afford to have these things made at-risk propositions. I will never facilitate the coalition determining that you will not get a fairer school funding model. The minister has said that the funding model is coming. Well, let us see it in here. The opposition spokesperson, Christopher Pyne, has said he wants to delay it for another two years. Let us go back. In 2007, when the Labor Party came to power, Prime Minister Gillard was the minister for education and she deferred that funding model for two years. It has been deferred and deferred and deferred until the last gasp of this government. Now it is right up against the election and we have a coalition saying they want to maintain disadvantage in schools around Australia. They want to maintain the poorest and most disadvantaged schools being disadvantaged and to maintain that unfair, unjust funding model. I am not going to facilitate that because I want to see this money raised.

I am not going to facilitate a coalition which wants no mining tax and is hypocritically standing up here criticising the mining tax. If you want to actually see justice in Australia—which you talk about—do something about it and let's raise the money. If you are not prepared to raise it from the miners, tell me where you are going to raise it and identify the people around Australia whose pockets you are going to rob. Which people are you going to take money from? That is the obligation of the coalition. You cannot just come in here and get stuck in about a mining tax which I agree has been poorly designed and which needs to be fixed. We need the money. I am just tired of a debate where everybody says what they will spend the money on and nobody says how they are going to raise it.

The Greens are prepared to fix this. We have said that, if you lift the rate to 40 per cent, if you block the state royalty loopholes and if you deal with the accelerated depreciation, you could get $26 billion over the forward estimates. How is the coalition going to pay, how is Labor going to meet the Gonski implementation and when are we going to see that funding model? When are we going to see some fairness and justice for people who are on Newstart, for people who are on youth allowance and for single parents? When are we going to see those sorts of things, because, as we speak, there are children in Australia who go to school hungry and are at school hungry today? The coalition would rather have the mining industry pay no taxes, the Labor Party is not prepared to fix the holes in it, and neither side is prepared to say where the money is coming from. Until we get an idea of where the money is coming from, everything that the coalition are saying about this is simply hot air because we do not have any notion from them about who is going to pay for this direct action. Where is all this money coming from? It is simply not there as far as the coalition are concerned.

Worse than that, we have even had the coalition trying to get people to breach their statutory obligations and break the law. We have had Andrew Robb—