PRIME Minister Tony Abbott called it correctly.
“The mining tax,” he said yesterday, “was possibly the most stupid tax ever devised.” Indeed it was.
The now-repealed tax was ridiculously cumbersome and damaging to industry, while at the same time bringing in insufficient revenue to cover the various bonuses promised by the previous Labor government. It didn’t win at any level.
The repeal represents a significant victory for the Prime Minister, who yesterday reviewed the nearly-one-year-old government during a party room meeting.
“The boats have all but stopped, the carbon tax has been repealed, the roads and infrastructure expenditure is being rolled out and the budget is coming back under control,” Abbott said.
On that last point, one potentially contentious element of the mining tax’s repeal is the associated delay in superannuation increases. Currently set at 9.5 per cent of employee wages, government contributions were scheduled to reach 12 per cent by July 2019. That has now been pushed back to mid-2025.
While retirees will definitely lose some anticipated gains, the overall benefit of repealing the mining tax should easily offset this. Nor should Labor get away with blaming the new super schedule on the current government.
Treasurer Joe Hockey yesterday reminded parliament that if Labor had agreed to the repeal, the super delay would not have been required. “If people think this is going to have a long-term impact on their superannuation, blame Labor,” Hockey said. “This is entirely their fault.”Labor had a chance to be constructive during the repeal process and blew it, just as Labor blew its chance to be more useful during the repeal of the carbon tax.
And then there are
the Greens, who are left fuming over their new and utter irrelevance.“Within one hour they want to come in here, circulate amendments, just bang them on the desk and say it doesn’t matter what you think about it, we’ve done the deal, we’ve got the numbers, we can ram it through,” Greens leader Christine Milne said yesterday.
We hate to break it to the Senator, but that’s how things work in parliament. Legislation goes with the numbers. To paraphrase the Prime Minister,
the Greens might possibly be the most stupid political party ever devised.http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/the-numbers-add-up-the-mining-tax-...