Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Again, Mr Acting Deputy President, it shows the lengths the Greens political party will go to to try and stop people making a point. Why? Because they know that everything I am saying is the absolute truth, and there is one thing the Greens political party cannot handle, and that is the truth.

We have been told that the mining companies pay no tax. Indeed, the truth is very different. Mining has paid $117 billion in company tax and royalties since 2006-07, and it has paid some $21 billion in 2011-12 alone—that is double the payment it made several years previously. Australian Taxation Office statistics show that mining's effective tax rate was 28 per cent in 2010-11, but, if you include the royalties that are paid to state governments, the effective rate of tax was 40 per cent. So Senator Cameron, Senator Milne and Senator Lines would have you believe that the mining companies pay no tax, but there it is: the ATO's statistics say some 40 per cent effective tax is paid by mining companies.

Mining companies do make profits and they do send them overseas—which makes me wonder why the Greens did not support my call for a debt levy on them. But the Greens can answer to that.

Mining companies do pay a considerable amount of tax through mining tax and royalties. They are a major contributor to the Australian economy directly, accounting for eight per cent of GDP, and directly employing some 250,000 of my fellow Australians. That is why I proudly stand in solidarity with all of those people who work in the mining industry that the Labor Party and the Greens would throw onto the scrap heap. I know that, since the mining tax has come in, there has been a pause, a concern, a hesitation in investing in Australia—due to sovereign risk as well as the mining tax and the carbon tax. As a result of that pause in investment, a lot of jobs have been lost in the Bowen Basin area in my home state.

Australian mining spends more than $4 billion each and every year on research and development, which is about 22 per cent of the total business expenditure on research and development in Australia. Mining has spawned an Australian mining equipment technology and services sector worth around $90 billion, and it exports some $15 billion worth of goods and services.

We have been asked to be brief. There are a lot of other facts and figures I would like to submit—and perhaps that will be something for the future. But, before I leave the debate, I just want to contribute by referring to some of the things that others said in this debate. We heard Senator Lines refer to the 'big end of town' and 'big mining mates', carrying on the terminology of Senator Cameron, and I pointed out: who are the mates of the big mining companies? The Labor Party that got into bed with the three biggest of them, and then had the hide to come in here and accuse everyone else. And don't let the Greens fool you. They were in it up to their necks with the Labor government. They worked and worked with the mining companies to bring in a tax which affected many mining companies but not the big ones.

I would refer you to a publication of the Association of Mining and Exploration Companies, who clearly said that the legislation was an:

… ill conceived, anti competitive, complex, distortionary … and … irrefutable bad tax.

They say a lot more things about it, but time does not allow me.

We heard Senator Cameron railing against the three big companies that his government got into bed with and did the deal with, and using all of the old-fashioned class warfare arguments. I want to say something to Senator Cameron—and I hope he is listening. In this chamber we should be debating the issues, playing the ball and not the man. Senator Cameron—and I do not know if he has got something against women—cannot let a day go past without attacking personally and viciously—