Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party, Leader of The Nationals in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

The mining tax is a classic example to all Australians of how the Labor Party, if left to its own devices in a situation where it has to devise a tax in opposition to the best interests of others, stuff it up. Mr Swan and Ms Gillard went into a room with Xstrata, BHP and Rio Tinto and, obviously, Xstrata BHP and Rio Tinto absolutely did them like a dinner. These organisations said, 'What we'll do is write our assets off at market value over 25 years,' and any person who was even slightly competent would have replied, 'Hang on; that means we're never going to get anything—we're never going to raise any money from this tax.'

We argued against the mining tax because we understand the sensitivities in the mining industry, which are there because there are alternate venues to which the miners can go: Indonesia, South America and Africa. But the government said that it would go with the minerals resource rent tax anyway, and it then allocated the funds from the tax to various measures. The only problem is that the tax has not raised any money. With the super guarantee, the government was going to help small business, apparently by jacking up small business's superannuation liability. So they jacked up the superannuation liability of small business while saying that small businesses would have greater expenses because they would be paying more money out of their own pockets for superannuation and that Treasury would suffer a loss of revenue. Then the government said that it would cover the loss to Treasury by the minerals resource rent tax. The trouble is that the minerals resource rent tax didn't bring in any money. Then there was the $1.2 billion a year for the schoolkids bonus. Every time you hear the word 'bonus' you know that you have a problem. The $1.2 billion a year that was going to be spent on the schoolkids bonus was also going to be provided by the minerals resource rent tax; the trouble is that the minerals resource rent tax didn't bring in any money. The big one for regional people in my state is the $6 billion for the Regional Development Australia Fund. At the moment $573 million is hypothecated to go towards the fund. The problem is that the government is not getting any money from the minerals resource rent tax.

So where will the money for all these measures come from? The government is not making any money from the minerals resource rent tax. The government had about $1.4 billion in one fund, $350 million was spent after the floods and about $50 million went into the Rob Oakeshott Christmas club. That left the government with about $1 billion. Then there was about $200 million in RDA funding so far and $200 million for other projects which have been on the books. After all this, the government was left with about $600 million. About $574 million was hypothecated on the mining tax, and the mining tax is not raising any money, so we are left with $26 million—and that is hardly an amount to take to an election. The question that the Independents should be asking is: where is our money going to come from? It could come from the debt. Our debt is currently at $255 billion gross. The government repaid about $3 billion this week, but in the previous fortnight they borrowed another $8.1 billion.

All of this goes to show that the chaos of this government continues day after day. The Labor Party and the Greens might get some solace out of the polls today, but there is no solace when you look at the books, because there are massive debts and now our revenue stream is drying up. How are we going to run the show? The Financial Review reported a black hole of $120 billion out to 2020—and that was before the fiasco of the failure of the mining tax to raise any money. Originally, the long-term projection for the minerals resource rent tax was that it was going to bring in about $60 billion. But we found out that it was really going to bring in $40 billion, so there was a $20 billion black hole in the minerals resource rental tax even before this latest fiasco. What we are suffering now it has happened as a result of the sins of Ms Gillard, who said when she got rid of Kevin Rudd that she would fix the mining tax, fix the boat people issue and cool the planet.

I do not know how the cool-the-planet thing is going. It has been a bit cool lately, so maybe that one is working; I do not know. We certainly know that people are poorer. We certainly know that the tax is there, but the temperature of the globe seems to be carrying on as it was. We note that the boats are still turning up. And the mining tax is starting to turn into one of the greatest examples, par excellence, of a government that just has not a financial clue.

Maybe the current Minister for Finance and Deregulation of this nation, Penny Wong, used this as a recommendation in her Senate speech. Maybe this is the reason she ended up as No. 2. Surely there must have been some person somewhere in the Labor Party who realised at the inception of this tax that, because they had granted the mining companies the capacity to write off their assets at market value over 25 years, there was not a hope of gaining any money from this. That being the case, why on earth did you spend the money? Why on earth did you allocate the money—money that you were never going to have? Because you have allocated the funds that the minerals resource rent tax was supposed to get—as crazy as it was, and we should not have had it—we have to get it back from somebody else. Where are we going to get it? Where is that money going to come from?

The Australian people have to pay for it. They have to pay for it now. They have to pay for the outcome of one of the most tawdry and pathetic forms of financial accounting that this nation has ever seen. What you see now is that this allocation of basically $60 billion over 10 years has to be picked up by other people—$60 billion has to be picked up by the 22½ million people who live in this nation. If they do not pick it up, we are going to have to borrow it. If we do not borrow it, we have to cut the funding to it. It just goes on and on and on.

Everything you see in the government is a sign of them just going out the back door. I will bet you London to a brick that before the next six to 12 months are out, if this crowd is still around, they will be running back wanting another extension on the credit card, another extension on the credit limit.