Fortunately the Coalition have said that they will scrap this tax as well as the carbon tax when they get into government... thank God for that!
I doubt the Coalition will be our saviour. It's much harder to pass a tax through to legislation than it is to repeal one. Why would they undo someone else's hard work unless it gained a lot of votes? I suspect the Coalition wouldn't repeal the mining tax or the carbon tax and instead we'll hear about those horrible refugee boat people arriving in droves and taking over our country. Those boat people are our number one national issue after all! Forget deficits, monumental private debt or incompetent Governments! A few thousand refugees arriving by boat, constituting less than 10% of all annual immigration and adding less than 0.1% to our population are our real problem :/ One day we might have the guts to frame our own political agendas. Wouldn't that be nice
You guys are probable going to have a laugh after my previous post on the subject but I agree with Bob Dogmatrix on it being so far down the real issue list that it should not be shaping the political life in Australia. I however do disagree with him on the carbon/mining tax issue though. These are the two issues that have seen an incumbent Labor govt poll record low numbers in history. If Abbott says he will scrap them when he gets in and fails to do so he will be lynched.
BigAD - i think dccpa was simply trying to illustrate the ridiculousness of your statement that the resources belong to everybody by comparing it with housing which everybody accepts as being "their own" - yet it isn't because government lays claim to it via taxation... same as with the resources. The simple truth is that property rights are a joke here and elsewhere in the west. you pay through your arse for property - including a massive windfall/profit for government when initially developing the property, yet government still milks that property - WHICH THEY SHOULD HAVE NO CLAIM ON WHATSOVER - forever and ever after...
you dont need to be born here for that privilege or even earn your way in - you can simply arrive here by boat now and you're immediately 'privileged'...
This looks like one of those threads that gets closed down! Anyway, once the gold and coal are gone then so are the mining companies, all the jobs will go too, you will be left with horse racing and tourism to pay for all the road maintenance and a whole load of unemployed people who are too tall to be jockeys. It will be too late then to ask the mining companies to help support the country that made them rich. The thing is every company that can is shifting business abroad, they are not interested in giving jobs to Australians, that is not what they are there for, if they could shift the mining abroad they would, if they could bring in cheap labour from abroad and pay them third world labour prices they would. The argument that the big mining companies would just love to create jobs for Australians but can't because they have to pay more tax instead is rubbish. Anyway, I am not a big fan of paying taxes myself but that is because I am selfish, so I can understand why the big mining corporations are not keen to pay it either. But I take my hat off to them for managing to get the potential benificiaries of such a tax to be so vehemently opposing it.
mate - if you and your ilk had to run the country for any length of time we'd all be screwed quicker then you can say HUGO CHAVEZ!
there are other countries in the world without natural resources and they participate nicely in the global environment. There enough iron or in the pilbara to last a 1000 years, so I wouldnt get to sookie about it all
That's really funny BigAD! In case you didn't know, there really isn't much difference here cos taxes are extracted through coercion! If the company refuses to pay, then jackbooted government goons will knock down the doors and arrest any and all "members" attached to management it deems appropriate, and any resistance to such arrest can result in such members being shot. So really - there isn't too much difference mate
+1 What is the deal with socialists wanting Govt control of industries? It's never worked! It's like they're runnin around screaming "look, this square wheel will benefit everyone" It hasn't before, yet they are so insistent it will this time SMH.
It is true that our mining companies are being taken over or at least the projects they start, due to lack of available funding, are being mostly funded by offshore interests. If I was in their shoes, I would do the same thing. as resource demand rises so does the price. They are simply hedging themselves so that when they pay the higher price, they are getting a kick back on the profit. It's quite sad. This is also a result of the Howard and Rudd/Gillard government policies. There's something like 1.3trillion in super sitting on the sidelines and a lot in private wealth that has been drawn into an unsustainable housing bubble. If we want our companies to stay Australian owned it isn't that hard. There are plenty of ways the govt could make it viable for more of our own wealth to go towards funding these projects through tax incentives just the same way they manipulated the housing market. The same goes for Australian farm land. Once that is sold to China we will never get that food security back. Australian farmland should be off limits to foreign ownership - period. But I have to take exception to your comment about The way you put it, it is like you are trying to assert that we are not receiving anything from the profits. That is very misleading, when it is those profits alone that have kept our head above water since 2007. We receive billions of it every year.
That's pretty easy to answer... the difference is when government "asks for an increase" - you have no choice as they literally hold a gun to your head! in a free market, workers are free to ask for an increase and business owners are free to accept or deny such increase... savvvie??!! :lol:
Well Tony Abbott has vowed to repeal BOTH these new insidious taxes and i've gotta tell ya - i trust him a hellova lot more than i do Juliar...
the west (including/especially Australia) will have to learn some hard MF facts ... 1. get rid of big government - that way there is more money to go around for everybody whose willing to get off their arses 2. with big government out of the way, people will again discover what it means to actually make/create things... as opposed to selling houses to each other at ever increasing inflated prices and expecting handouts stolen from others. The zombies wont give up without a fight i'm sure, but that still wont change the eventual outcome
