Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw that. Perhaps I can use the term 'untruthful dealings' with the Australian people before the last election, when she said there would be no carbon tax under the government she led and then, just six months after the election, set about introducing that same carbon tax. That consensus that was the carbon tax—that rolled-gold dud that has increased the cost of living for Australian families—has done nothing for the environment. I do not know if that is the community consensus the Prime Minister had in mind, but it is certainly the one she has achieved and certainly the one that has been levelled against Australian families across our country.

On the mining tax, which is a critical and crucial element of one of the bills we are considering here this evening, the coalition is seeking to exercise some amendments. What we do know about the minerals resource rent tax—the solution, if we could charitably call it that, to the superprofits tax problem that the former Prime Minister, the member for Griffith, had created in his dying weeks in office—is that, having dispensed with the services of the member for Griffith as Prime Minister, the new Prime Minister and her faithful sidekick, the Treasurer, sat down with Australia's three biggest mining companies to fix the problem. And fix it they did; they fixed it in a real good old way. This shows what happens when you have a poor, rushed, secretive process, and that is how we can best describe the development of the minerals resource rent tax. You would have thought that the MRRT, the mining tax, would have provided Labor with a cautionary tale. Yet apparently this government has learned nothing, as here we are with yet another rushed legislative process. The guillotine will fall on this bill very shortly in the same manner as it has fallen on many others in this place. Indeed, 54 other bills will face the guillotine in this Senate in this week alone.

So what has happened? The government had secret meetings with managing directors of Australia's three biggest mining companies. Those discussions deliberately excluded other mining companies. They deliberately excluded state governments with a very, very strong interest in resource development. Even more extraordinarily, they excluded other Commonwealth officials from those discussions. That is to say, they cut out of the process Treasury experts who might have been able to say to them: 'Wrong way—go back. You have made a wrong and foolish decision.' I am sure there were any number of people who, had they been asked for their considered, professional opinion, would have been able to tell this government that it was setting itself up for a fiscal disaster.

But, as we have seen from this government time and time again, it is not interested in hearing the views of others. It detests having to deal with anyone who holds a different view from its own. We saw this most evidently in Senator Conroy's ham-fisted attempts earlier to regulate our newspapers. We know now, very well, that this government will go to exceptional lengths to silence voices that disagree with it. So it was with the mining tax as it has been with so many other initiatives. It was designed in secret, with the government talking only to three mining companies who told the government just what it wanted to hear—and in the process cut themselves a pretty decent deal.

What was the final outcome? Has the MRRT achieved what the government said it would? Of course, it has not, because, once again, poor process led to a poor outcome for this government, for this budget and for the Australian economy. It is now apparent to even the most casual observer that Treasurer Swan and the Prime Minister got their calculations horribly, disastrously wrong. The MRRT has raised just $310 million in gross terms, with no further payments expected in this financial year. That is 10 times less than the net estimate in the 2012-13 budget. The Treasurer and the Prime Minister grossly overestimated the revenue their MRRT would generate, and they vastly underestimated the cost of the concessions they made to the three big mining companies in order to prove that they had solved the problem of Kevin Rudd's mining tax.