Tony Abbott and mining magnate Clive Palmer declared last Wednesday a great day for Australia. I think they both meant to say that it was a great day for Australia’s nine largest mining companies at the expense of the vast majority of Australians.
The powerful mining companies and their lobby group, the Minerals Council of Australia, and the Murdoch press were successful in watering down the original mining tax to one that has hardly raised any revenue at all.
Why is it that we are repeatedly being told we have a ‘budget emergency’ yet at the same time the government is providing a tax cut to companies like BHP, who have recently announced a profit of over $20 billion?
That other ‘big scary’ tax, the carbon tax, which provided a large pool of money for large scale renewable energy projects, and a financial incentive for Australia’s top 100 companies to reduce their carbon emissions has also been scrapped. The promise being that our electricity bills would be reduced by hundreds of dollars.
What we got instead was a 14 per cent increase (IPART approved increase starting 1 July). Nineteenth-century policies that favour polluting industries and big business are bad enough, to win an election based on lies is unforgivable.
Jeff Johnson, Ballina shire councillor