Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to take part in this debate as a Western Australian senator and I certainly look forward to defeating the bill when it finally comes to a vote. This, I think, is a great example of why you can do opposition by slogan—as the Prime Minister, then the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, was so adept at doing—and what a disaster it is when you try governing by slogan. The whole 'stop the boats, axe the tax' rhetoric that carried the Prime Minister into office now poses a real and present threat to the budget bottom line.

There is a real sense of irony, I suppose, having just heard Senator Helen Polley, my Tasmanian colleague, speak about the evils of the mining industry and how it is so important to stand up to them. If only you had. If only you had not allowed the mining companies to rewrite the mining tax so that it would collect no actual revenue. Having heard the mining tax bills described in recent weeks as among the worst pieces of public policy that we have ever seen, I find it hard to disagree, because effectively the bills were amended to the point where they were unrecognisable from the model that former Treasury secretary Ken Henry put forward.

It leaves us with a shell of a bill that brought the Labor Party all of the pain and none of the gain. They copped a brutal attack—and there are no two ways about it. The $22 million advertising campaign paid for by, among others, the Minerals Council and the determined advocacy of Mitch Hooke and his allies saved the companies—again, by Treasury estimates—roughly $160 billion. After Mr Rudd was deposed, Prime Minister Julia Gillard sat down—under the crafty authorship of who better than Martin Ferguson—with the three big miners, to rewrite their own tax law. I wish I could write my own tax law; I would end up paying a lot less tax, but fortunately the law of the land is not written that way. When Martin Ferguson and the three big mining companies sat down to write tax codes to suit themselves, they realised a return of investment of about 730,000 per cent on their $22 million advertising campaign. I feel a bit sorry for the Labor Party in stepping up to apply a fair tax regime that, when the industry reached a certain threshold of superprofits, would have returned some of those profits to the taxpayer.

As a Western Australian I pay very close attention to that kind of public policy, because our state government—the Barnett government—has managed to blow away a triple-A credit rating in the middle of the greatest commodities boom that our state has ever seen. It cannot afford to put in public transport anymore; it cannot afford affordable housing; it cannot afford to keep schools open. The whole idea of this tax is that it does not kick in until you are doing very well. It would not apply to the small players or those mid-tier explorers or those who are doing it hard, because they would not be affected by the mining superprofits tax; it would only apply to those generating superprofits. For that $22 million advertising campaign, a Prime Minister was rolled out of office and a new one, on coming into office, immediately deputised Martin Ferguson to sit down and rewrite the tax law. Admittedly, the mining tax has very high compliance costs. I am inclined to agree with one element of the industry's reading of this: they are paying huge compliance costs in order to fill out the paperwork for a tax measure that collects almost nothing.

We knew the fix was on at the time that the Labor Party had the tax rewritten. The Greens, with then Senator Bob Brown, did move amendments, but at the time we were in the position where we could either accept a tax was fundamentally broken and would collect very little revenue or vote with the coalition and collect nothing at all. That, I think, is one of the great public policy rip-offs of the Australian public in modern history. The industry wrote a tax that they knew they would never have to pay. That is why the Prime Minister, on his fly-in fly-out visit to Perth last week, said that this would be a referendum on the mining tax. There are no ads on TV; there are no riots in the streets; there are no public demonstrations; there is nothing—because the tax does not work. In fact if the tax had worked we might have been able to afford the light rail project by now. We might have some patients into the Fiona Stanley Hospital; we might not be attacking state school teachers and threatening the education of Western Australian kids. The fact is that the mining industry is 80 per cent foreign owned and senators will no doubt have seen Mr Ross Gittins in the press commenting on the fact that this is effectively a betrayal. This is what he said yesterday morning about the repeal of the minerals resources rent tax:

For the income earned by an industry to generate jobs in Australia, it has to be spent in Australia. And our mining industry is about 80 per cent foreign-owned.

Got the message yet? For our economy and our workers to benefit adequately from the exploitation of our natural endowment by mainly foreign companies, our government has to ensure it gets a fair whack of the economic rents those foreigners generate.

And further:

Long before then, however, Tony Abbott will have rewarded the Liberal Party's foreign donors by abolishing the tax.

This will be an act of major fiscal vandalism, of little or no benefit to the economy and at great cost to job creation.

That is why I am pleased to stand here today and lend my vote in opposition to the Liberal Party's act of major fiscal vandalism.

Those opposite cannot march around the landscape, demanding cuts to health care, cuts to education, cuts to the ABC, cuts to disability support while at the same abolishing tax measures that raise revenue. Senator Fifield and Senator Back—or Senator Cormann when he wants to come out of his office—could have come in here and proposed amendments to this bill, including some of those that the Greens put up when this was last debated. Why don't we raise the rate back to 40 per cent? Why don't we cover commodities like gold? Why don't we cover commodities like uranium? Why don't we actually impose a tax on superprofits, most of which leave the country and the economy, so that we can stand down this aggressive cuts agenda that you have brought to the national debate. But you cannot have it both ways: you cannot be proposing to axe revenue measures, or not improve the revenue measures that are clearly on the table, and at the same time be threatening cuts right across the board—across all portfolios. That is the act of major fiscal vandalism by which you stand condemned today.

I do not think that the by-election in Western Australia is going to be a referendum on the mining tax. I think something very different is going on, which is why we are not seeing the screaming attack ads that so terrified the Labor Party into submission. I think what we have here is Liberal Party advocacy on behalf of politically powerful major donors masquerading as public policy. They got away with it last year—and power to you—but it does not work so well when you are on the treasury bench and need to balance the books. I challenge Liberal senators from Western Australia to a debate on the economy in Western Australia before Western Australians cast their votes on 5 April. Let's have a debate about jobs. Do you really think that as the mining boom tapers off and we move from the construction phase into an operations phase, which is one of the factors behind rising unemployment in Western Australia, that all you need to do is simply repeat mining industry slogans in order to win a by-election? Western Australians are a little more politically astute and sophisticated than that. I challenge Western Australian senators—Senator Back, you are here today. You are not up for re-election but you might have a quiet word to your colleagues. If you are so proud of your economic record of abolishing taxes while proposing cuts, then let us put these views to the people of Western Australia before 5 April, on a level playing field. You choose the time and the place. Let us have a debate on jobs and the economy.

On the weekend the member for Melbourne, Adam Bandt, and I launched the Greens jobs policy for Western Australia. Mining is no doubt going to remain an important part of the Western Australian economy. In fact, as long as you can put up a wind turbine containing 200 or 300 tonnes of steel and other metals, mining will remain an important part of the economy. But the fact is that it is a small section of the Western Australian employment base and we cannot rely on it in the deeply uncertain age which we are moving into, the age of climate change and the age of peak oil. We cannot continue to rely on extractive industries and mining to provide a stable employment base, particularly given the enormous risks that we are exposed to in world commodity markets. We saw last week the iron ore price take a big tumble and that again sent nervous jitters through the Western Australian economy.

So what is your plan? The jobs plan that Mr Bandt and I launched talked about the huge jobs potential in renewable energy—up to 26,000 jobs forecast in the energy 2029 plan to take Western Australia to a mature renewable energy economy. But it is not just clean energy or what you might traditionally consider to be a green jobs, mind you; these are blue-collar jobs. This is kids in Welshpool and Kalgoorlie welding heliostats, it is not anything particularly esoteric. That is 26,000 jobs. What about housing and construction and affordable, innovative, modular prefab housing? We have a housing affordability crisis, a skilled manufacturing crisis, a crisis in south-west timber towns, where native forests are becoming rarer and rarer and we are running out of 400-year-old trees to cut down. We need to put a stable employment base under those towns. What about the affordable housing industry? That is a very jobs-rich agenda. What about agriculture and horticulture? What about telecommunications as you are going about dismantling the end-to-end fibre National Broadband Network? We have launched our jobs plan: let us see yours. We call on coalition senators next time Mr Abbott is in town to maybe do a little bit more than just call a press conference and then put himself back on a plane. Let us see your economic and jobs plan for WA if you have one.

And let us bring this matter, this vote, very swiftly to a conclusion, because this is pantomime. We know why this is happening. If you come in here with amendments to improve the revenue-gathering measures, maybe take us back towards the original Treasury model that would only have kicked in once the industry was generating enormous profits, then let us have a debate, then let us debate amendments. But this at the moment is an attempt to govern by slogan and, like so many other areas of public policy into which you have blundered, it is something of a disaster. I look forward to putting this measure to the vote.