Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Every time you think they are out of the house they are back in it again—'It's great; we've just been voted back into the house.' We go through this complete and utter anarchy which is this tax. Initially they had the RSPT, Kevin Rudd's mining tax, and they thought that that tax was so good and such a ripper that it was actually going to earn more than Mr Rudd's tax in the first year. Probably one of the things they said in that meeting with Mr Paul Howes—the person who is the unelected Prime Minister of Australia—when they were trying to work out why they should remove Mr Rudd was that they had come up with a better tax that was going to earn more money. The problem is that it did not—thus we are here today.

When we go through this economic work of art which is the minerals resource rent tax we see they had their base value back on 1 May 2010, if my memory serves me correctly, and then we had the market value and they would depreciate the asset from that point in time. But, pray tell, wasn't that at the end of the so-called global financial crisis that they tell us about all the time? Could it be that this asset at the end of the global financial crisis was valued so high that the depreciation of it has meant they have never earned any money from the tax? What happened to that global financial crisis? Where did it go? So quickly did it disappear. But they had as their base value the value at the end of the crisis that they kept on telling us about. Because the crisis never existed, the market value was so high that, on the depreciation of this market base value, they have never actually really been paid any money.

So all this confusion goes on. But now we have the crux of it. In this boiling cauldron of confusion, we now have the person who was deposed because of the mining tax, Mr Kevin Rudd, the member for Griffith, out there as 'Pop-Up Kevin' and every time something is on up pops the member for Griffith. I think the reason he is popping up everywhere is that he wants his job back.

Opposition senators: No!

I think he wants his job back. I do. I was even more confirmed as to that idea today when I saw a brilliant interview by a senator from New South Wales.