Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Guillotined as well. Maybe we did guillotine it. That is what happens when you have the numbers. Thirty-nine is more than 37. Welcome to the real world. I do not know if it was guillotined. If it wasn't, it should have been. The point was this: we did not have 39 votes in our own right; we wandered down to the end of the chamber. They said, 'Yeah, that's a good package of propositions in there,' about the capital investment, the superannuation improvements, the bringing forward of write-offs for small business for motor vehicle purchases, the improvements in the petroleum rent resource tax and the imposition of the MRRT. They said, 'Gee, we don't like bits and pieces here.' We responded, 'Hey, we also don't like bits and pieces.' As I said at the outset, some of us would have liked to increase superannuation not to 12 per cent over eight or nine years but to 15 per cent over five or six years. But in the negotiation process the eventual outcome was that what was put in this chamber, and the Greens and the government had full knowledge of its content and supported that package.

So it is a bit rich now, barely 12 months after the ink is dry, and after a little bit of adverse evidence from the Secretary of the Treasury a couple of weeks ago in estimates outlining what everyone in the world knew about the design of the MRRT, to use that as an excuse to come back in here and essentially renege on an agreement fully entered into, fully supported, on the basis of—what?—full information. It doesn't get any better than that. The blind, deaf, dumb and ignorant might have a reason to go back on their word. But when you have participated in all the negotiations, sat through all the committees, sat through the debate here, agreed to a particular outcome and voted for the outcome, you do not get to come back 11 months later and say, 'Hey, we don't like that; we want to do something else.'

The inquiry into the bill before the chair, conducted by the Economics Legislation Committee and tabled earlier this month, addresses that point exactly in paragraph 1.12. It says:

Following negotiations with the mining industry and the deliberations of the Policy Transition Group (PTG), which was established to advise on the implementation and technical design elements of the MRRT, the government agreed to the PTG's recommendation 'that there be full crediting of all current and future State and Territory royalties under the MRRT so as to provide certainty about the overall tax impost on the coal and iron ore mining industries.

That statement was released under the authority of Mr Swan and Mr Ferguson on 24 March 2011. Everyone knew what was going on. The government had accepted the recommendations of the Policy Transition Group and had put out a press release in writing to that effect, and everyone in the government and everyone in the Greens knew that.

The time sequence in this discussion is clear, and for the last four years the Greens have been fully aware, fully consulted and, to a very, very significant extent, involved in a lot of discussions. In December 2010 there was the report of the Policy Transition Group. In March 2011 there was government acceptance of that recommendation that I just read out. In March 2012 there was an inquiry into the then MRRT Bill, and on 19 March, barely a fortnight after the recommendations of that bill inquiry came down, the Greens voted for the two measures that were at the heart of the then bill, now act, and are at the heart of the bill they bring before the chair today to renege on. You cannot do business like that.

Turning now to the bill before the chair, chapter 2 of the Senate Economics Committee report is instructive, and it deserves to be put more fully on the public record. It outlines the process of inquiry into this bill. It is only a very brief report. It is only in two chapters, no more than 10 pages. The inquiry was conducted from November 2012 until February 2013: November, December, January, February. It went for almost four months, knocking off a month for January, of course. There was one significant extension of time granted by the committee at the request of the Greens, presumably to get more submissions into the inquiry so we could have a fuller discussion at the appropriate time.

In that four-month period, do you know how many submissions that committee inquiry into the bill before the chair received? It received only six submissions. There were four months of examination and four months of writing to interested parties. The database in the economics committee of interested players in this debate, as you can imagine, goes to hundreds and hundreds of individuals, groups and associations, and only six put in a written comment. Of those six, a full five opposed the passage of the bill before the chair. So after a four-month inquiry, an extension granted at the request of the Greens, six submissions were received. Of those, five opposed the bill, and only one supported the bill before the chair. The committee, in its wisdom—it must be said—decided not to hold a public inquiry on the basis of only six submitters, five of which opposed the bill. We did the report on the papers, and it is before us today.

But what can one conclude from a bill inquiry on a subject which is apparently of great public notoriety when hundreds and hundreds of individuals, groups, associations, companies, governments and the like are invited to put in a submission that essentially goes to a reworking of the MRRT Act? What conclusion can we draw? The conclusion we can draw is that there is just about no interest in this country in revisiting the design features of the MRRT. You would have thought they would have been lined up in their thousands, seeking to come in and say how onerous it is, how heavy it is, how inefficient it is, how bad it is, how whatever it is. You would have thought that the churches would be organised, along with some of the community groups and some of the NGOs. But, no, there was a wailing silence between November and February, because nobody—I beg your pardon, I mislead the chair—rather, one person in Australia took the trouble to write a submission supporting the bill before the chair. Nobody else cared. Nobody else wrote. Talk about Orphan Annie!

I have never been in a bill inquiry, in all the time I have been here—and I have been in inquiries on a whole range of matters—where there were only six submissions, with five opposed to the content of the bill and only one supporting it. Think back over the years. How many contentious pieces of legislation did we handle in opposition and have been part of government policy for the last five years? How many inquiries have people in this chamber participated in, written reports on and given speeches about? I, for the life of me, cannot recall one where there was only one submission in favour of the bill.

Perhaps I have drawn the wrong conclusion on that; perhaps there is a great deal of interest out there in this proposition. We are going to find out because, in addition to all of those matters that I outlined in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013—legislation inquiries, the Policy Transition Group, the pre-existing bill under Mr Rudd, the reform bill under Ms Gillard and the numerous inquiries—less than an hour ago, the Senate Economics References Committee accepted another reference to inquire into the MRRT. It seems to me that the norm is now that you get about 17 bites at the cherry. We dress up the conclusion, in terms of the argument about wanting to have money to spend on Gonski, or disability— (Time expired)