George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I am sorry, Ms Julia Gillard, the Prime Minister—Ms Julia Gillard, the Prime Minister, said 'the test of a government's capacity to manage the budget is the test of its competence'. And Mr Wayne Swan, who sits at the heart of the government's economics brains trust and whom I have known since we were university students in the 1970s—he had no brains then and his intellect has not grown in the years since—said: 'Come hell or high water, we will be returning to surplus.' These are the fiscal geniuses who went naked to negotiate the mining tax that produced no revenue. It produced many other things by the way, Mr Deputy President. It produced a prime ministerial scalp, because you will recall that it was on the basis of the mining tax that Ms Julia Gillard—in conspiracy with Mr Wayne Swan and in violation of her repeated and solemn and emphatic assurances of support and loyalty to Mr Kevin Rudd—tapped him on the shoulder in the dead of night on 23 June 2010, a day of infamy in Australian politics, and removed the elected, sitting prime minister. The mining tax did produce that historic result, but revenue, it produced nary a dollar.

After resisting for weeks any attempt at accountability to parliament for the revenue collected by the mining tax, eventually the Treasurer relented, and the pathetic, limpid figure of $126 million turned out to be the entirety of the revenue collected by this mining tax in this financial year. Just think about it, Mr Deputy President, originally the budget projection for the revenue from the mining tax was $3.7 billion. The revenue projection was revised downward by almost half so that it became a revenue projection of $2 billion—from $3.7 billion to $2 billion to $126 million. And Senator Conroy says, 'Well, the iron ore price has been very volatile. It's gone up and down.' Yes, it has, Senator Conroy. It has gone up. The price of iron ore has gone up by $30 a tonne. The Secretary of Treasury, Dr Martin Parkinson, himself admitted to Senate estimates under questioning from Senator Sinodinos that the fault was not in the international price of minerals; the fault was a design flaw in the heart of the tax.

Let me say that again, because we heard no answer from Senator Wong put up because Senator Conroy could no longer cope. Senator Conroy, in his answer to Senator Sinodinos's question today, said, 'Well, the reason the mining tax has collected a negligible amount of revenue is because of the volatility of international mineral prices.' But Dr Martin Parkinson, the head of Treasury, told Senator Sinodinos in estimates that that was not the reason. Dr Martin Parkinson said the mining tax did not collect the projected revenue because of design flaws in the tax.

That brings us to the obvious question: who designed the tax? Who were the fiscal geniuses who were responsible for designing this tax, the fiscal architects of this tax that was such a terrific tax that it provided a political excuse to assassinate an elected Prime Minister but barely collected a dollar for consolidated revenue? We know who they were: Ms Julia Gillard and Mr Wayne Swan. They went to the negotiating table with Mr Marius Kloppers, Mr Tom Albanese from Rio Tinto and the CEO of Xstrata, and between the five of them they designed a tax.

Mr Deputy President, who do you think were the smartest people in the room that day when it came to designing the mining tax? Do you think that perhaps Mr Marius Kloppers, who until recently ran the biggest mining company in the world, was the smartest person in the room? Do you think that Mr Tom Albanese, who until recently ran Rio Tinto—Australia’s biggest single taxpayer, by the way—was the dummy in the room?