Get ready for a media barrage against renewable energy in Australia
When asked about the $2 billion ‘fuel tax credit scheme’, for which miners are allowed to claim fuel costs as a tax write-off, 91 per cent thought it money that would be better spent on health and education. Nearly eight in 10 respondents wanted the handout scrapped entirely.
No doubt, we will hear further claims about the extraordinary wealth the mining boom is conferring onto Australian working families, and how taxpayer-funded support for investment in clean energy will cruel our economy for decades to come. Far better our tax dollars keep flowing back to the miners.
When that invariably happens we need to remember we’ve heard it all before. We’ll hear it all again. And after the dust settles, they’ll be here until there’s nothing left to dig up and sell.
You’re just jealous: mining and the politics of envy The Drum, Denise Boyd, 1 May 12“.……what is this sovereign risk our big miners are worrying themselves sick over? Basically, it’s another furphy. Our miners aren’t going anywhere. Only a month ago Australia was proclaimed by a 101-year-old mining consultancy to be the best place in the world to be a miner.
The thing is, the vast majority of Australians are not seeing ‘the benefits of the boom’. What they are seeing is an industry with a vested interest in blocking, delaying and holding up efforts to improve our environment, using ever more spurious arguments as to why it deserves special treatment.
In the Drum only recently, Peter Lewis and Jackie Woods described Australians’ growing dissatisfaction with miners’ complaints of mistreatment. Two out of three Australians felt they had not benefitted at all from the mining boom, while 37 per cent believed the industry did not pay enough tax.
The Australian Conservation Foundation has conducted polling that delivered similar findings. When asked about the $2 billion ‘fuel tax credit scheme’, for which miners are allowed to claim fuel costs as a tax write-off, 91 per cent thought it money that would be better spent on health and education. Nearly eight in 10 respondents wanted the handout scrapped entirely.
On Friday, the Productivity Commission called for the removal of ‘perverse incentives’ that prevent businesses and individuals from responding to the threat of climate change. There can be few incentives more perverse than offering the mining sector a $2 billion handout annually to offset their fuel costs.
This is an industry, bear in mind, that turned a $51 billion operating profit in 2009-10……
This industry that is more than willing to accept such extraordinary displays of government largesse is equally eager to aggressively pursue the prevention or repeal of any and all moves towards making Australia a clean energy economy.
Any attempt to point this out is, of course, ‘the politics of envy’.
Over the next few months, a national clean energy fund designed to turbocharge renewable energy investment in Australia will come before Parliament. Suggestions as to its operations have come from no less an authority as a board member of the RBA, all of which have been accepted by the Government.
No doubt, we will hear further claims about the extraordinary wealth the mining boom is conferring onto Australian working families, and how taxpayer-funded support for investment in clean energy will cruel our economy for decades to come. Far better our tax dollars keep flowing back to the miners.
When that invariably happens we need to remember we’ve heard it all before. We’ll hear it all again. And after the dust settles, they’ll be here until there’s nothing left to dig up and sell.
But if you’re upset, you’re really just jealous. http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3980232.html
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