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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (Senator Ludwig) to a question without notice asked by Senator Milne today relating to the Minerals Resource Rent Tax.

What an extraordinary thing it is: it was reported at the time that the three people from the government who negotiated the MRRT were the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the Minister for Resources and Energy. And that is what you would expect might occur, since it was a royalties tax. However, since the debacle of the tax has been revealed to the Australian people through estimates and the like. Martin Parkinson, the Secretary of Treasury, said that he—and I will paraphrase him—could not take responsibility for the flaws in the tax because they had not actually been in the room. He went on to say that they were not aware of some of the detail that had been negotiated because they were not there. Since that time, it has become disastrously obvious, in terms of the amount of money that has been raised, that the decision to rebate the royalties—that the states may increase—has meant that the Australia community has been diddled from the cash we could have had to spend on things we need like implementation of the Gonski review, to get money into schools; to improve Denticare, to roll more money out through that; and to get the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the like.

Whilst the Treasurer, Mr Swan, has been hung out to dry, and the Prime Minister has been expected to answer questions about why the mining deal she negotiated has turned out to be such a dud, no-one has heard anything of the Minister for Resources and Energy. On the website, you find that there is not a single transcript on his website, or the department of the minister, since September last year. How is that possible? Every other minister has transcribed press conferences on their websites, but not Minister Ferguson.

There is quite a famous children's book, that I am sure you are familiar with, Mr Deputy President, called, Where's Wallyyou look around at all the pictures in these books to establish where Wally is in the crowd. That is the question I pose today: 'Where is Minister Ferguson and why is he running a mile from actually being out there defending the tax that he negotiated?' He was in the room with the Prime Minister, and with the Treasurer, negotiating and supposedly getting some sort of deal for the Australian community against the mining industry. What we find is that the big miners have, of course, turned up and were able to run rings around the government.

In fact, we have a situation where the mining industry designed their own tax. The outcome was exactly what they wanted; that is that they agreed to a political cover of a tax, knowing full well they would not have to pay it. At the same time, the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and Minister Ferguson all got a tax where they were able to say that they negotiated an outcome where the former Prime Minister was not able to.

I remind the Senate, that at the time the Greens said to the government, when they introduced the legislation, that this was a major flaw in it. We introduced an amendment at the time, but we were not able to secure the support of the coalition. We sought the support of the coalition—Senator Abetz—to support this amendment which would have plugged the loophole, but the coalition refused.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You voted for it!

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

Do not go on now Senator Abetz! You were not prepared to block the loophole; you were not prepared to raise the cash that we need. Now we have this extraordinary situation where the Minister for Resources and Energy—who basically sat there and allowed the mining companies just to run rings around him, and the Treasury and the Prime Minister—has now disappeared from view. He is the invisible man of the cabinet as the MRRT is shown to be a disaster in terms of raising money.

But the core issue here is: how are we going to improve it? How are we going to fix it so that we do raise the money? The core issue is that we need to raise the money. That is why the coalition's position is so appalling and threadbare on this, because they do not want to charge the big miners anything at all. They want to let them off the hook while refusing to increase Newstart, while agreeing to take money out of the pockets of single parents and while even opposing $4-a-week increase—$4 a week! The coalition were not prepared to see for people on Newstart allowance and youth allowance. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.