Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Furthermore, the report says that, in Chile, mining companies will likely reject the tax increase. This debate is universal. Mining companies around the world do not want to pay more tax. In this country we believe that mining companies should pay more tax when prices are high for a resource owned by the Australian people. We believe the Australian people deserve a fairer share. We believe they deserve a fairer share for better super for working families, a fairer share for small businesses and their tax concerns and a fairer share for the regions that need infrastructure invested in them. This is a debate between those who support the reform and those who oppose the reform. Those who support the reform believe a profits based regime for the future is the right way to go.

The Leader of the Opposition stands with his new best friend, the pin-up boy of the Liberal-National Party, Clive Palmer, as the two voices out there opposed to any profits based reform in the mining industry. There will be a range of claims and counterclaims. You will have people right across the industry commenting on it. You will have people like Roger Corbett who came out quite rightly and said as a director of Fairfax Media and Wal-Mart—and he is also on the Reserve Bank—that these are resources owned by Australians and that Australians should extract from those resources the best possible advantage that they can. In principle, he supports a resources tax.

Therefore, those opposite will simply take a position in this debate which is subservient to the likes of Clive Palmer in pursuit of a sectional interest and in pursuit of an individual who bankrolls the Liberal-National Party in Queensland to the tune of nearly $1 million. They do not stand for the national interest; they stand for a partial interest; they stand for an individual corporate interest. We are about the business of tax reform for the nation. We stand on one side of the debate prosecuting a hard debate on tax reform. Those opposite have evidenced no spine for tax reform whatsoever.

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