Mark Furner (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I oppose the Minerals Resource Rent Tax Repeal and Other Measures Bill 2013. The Australian Labor Party believes in a fair go, equality and opportunity. We believe that the profits of our country's resources, which can only be dug up once, should be shared amongst all Australians, not just enjoyed by a handful of mining magnates. That is why we in government introduced the minerals resource rent tax—to share the wealth and spread the benefits of Australia's mining boom by providing tax breaks for small businesses through the instant asset write-off and the tax loss carry-back, by helping young families through the schoolkids bonus and by assisting low-income earners through the low-income superannuation contribution.

But this government is deadset keen on making cuts. As my colleague Senator Bilyk mentioned the other day in this debate, the coalition campaigned on cutting the mining tax and the carbon tax, but they did not tell the electorate where these cuts would come from. They did not tell the Australian people that they would lose out on assistance that so many of them rely upon. Why are we on this side not surprised? This government has done nothing but cut, cut, cut since it came into office. It reneged on grants by the Regional Development Australia Fund which had not yet reached the stage of contracts being signed. The Australian government cancelled the round 2 grants of the Tourism Industry Regional Development Fund. This program offered matched dollar-for-dollar funding of between $50,000 and $250,000 to assist tourism operators. TIRF grants offered unique opportunities for regional and rural tourism operators to improve the quality of their tourism products and increase the numbers of visitors to their regions. North Queensland, where I have recently travelled, is an area where we particularly need to make sure tourism is supported—not put into mothballs.

Last year the Labor government announced $40 million for the National Crime Prevention Fund to help address gang violence and street crime. This initiative was fully funded in last year's budget. A number of community organisations in areas with high crime rates across Australia received funding based on the quality of their submissions. There have also been cuts to pay increases for the childcare and aged-care sectors. The NBN website was removed. The list goes on. There were cuts to the Building Multicultural Communities Program. Some organisations who had been told they had been successful received letters notifying them that the federal government was withdrawing its funding. In another low blow by Mr Abbott, payments were cut to the children of veterans who had been killed or injured. It only cost the government $250,000 a year to provide assistance to 1,200 children under the Veterans' Children Education Scheme and the Military Rehabilitation and Compensation Act 2004 Education and Training Scheme, yet Mr Abbott still has his mind set on introducing a paid parental leave package to benefit the wealthy.

It is a sad day to be in this place with the government wanting to repeal all these Labor government initiatives so that they can keep their big business and mining friends content—friends like Gina Rinehart, who thinks Australians get paid too much and should 'spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising and more time working'. Ms Rinehart also supports reducing the minimum wage. She told the Sydney Mining Club:

The evidence is inarguable that Australia is becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export-oriented business.

Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day. Such statistics make me worry for this country's future.

Surely we cannot afford to have situations where we have migrants coming to this country willing to work for below the minimum wage and at $2 an hour. That type of mindset is from way back in ancient times.

These comments by someone who inherited her wealth and is worth an estimated $19.89 billion put a knife through the hearts of our working families—families who are struggling with cost-of-living pressures and who were receiving assistance from a Labor government. I am a former union official. Ensuring that workers have a safe work environment, fair pay and overtime conditions and access to leave entitlements is the principle of my working life. Those workers that I represented relied on every dollar they earned to keep food on the table for their families, to pay their bills and to send their children to school, and yet we have people who have no financial woes saying that these workers deserve a pay cut. It is a bit rich.

Ms Rinehart also had no second thoughts on looking down on those who need help most and blaming welfare recipients for receiving government funding, yet she sees no problem in big business and corporations receiving tax cuts or financial assistance. An article called 'Gina Rinehart hits out at welfare recipients and the Left for dragging Australia into debt', on The Daily Telegraph website, indicated that Ms Rinehart had double standards when it came to her views on welfare. It said:

She wants to be a bigger welfare recipient herself … She's against social welfare but she's very much in favour of business welfare for herself … I think that's an appalling double standard, there is no bottomless pit of money and that should apply to Gina as much as the people she's bagging today.

It is important that support is reciprocal, not just directed one way in supporting mining magnates like Gina Rinehart or others. It should be generated through our society to make sure that it gives a fair and equitable system. That was the message and the ideology behind our taxation: to make sure it was spread across our communities.

Now I will have a look at the schoolkids bonus. The Labor Party has always believed in investing in education. With a good education, no matter their background, young Australians can strive to achieve whatever they set their hearts and minds to. In 2009, we invested heavily—$16 billion—in the Building the Education Revolution program to upgrade facilities in our schools and allow schools to build much-needed new infrastructure, including sites—