The Budget sell is proceeding today with three ministers on the hustings. From Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane to mining:
“The reality is in the last six years this industry has not been given any credit for what it has done and has been treated like an ATM, that the government kept going back to get more money. That is in sharp contrast to where the government is today…abolishing the mining tax and carbon tax, the associated compliance costs will also go”.
This echoes Gina Rinehart’s comments from last year:
“Mining and other resource industries aren’t just ATMs for people to draw from without that money first having to be earned and before that, giant investments made.”
Abolishing the carbon and mining taxes will make zero difference to mining investment given the super cycle is winding down. I’m still wondering if the PM actually knows this. When PM Abbott announced the car industry closure and the SA premier asked what his state was going to do for jobs, PM Abbott answered that Olympic Dam would go ahead after the taxes were cut, only to have BHP deny it. Seems his faith is strong.
But, cutting the two taxes will rip a huge hole in the Budget, some $6 billion next year and much more in out years, not to mention ensuring that we under-achieve on climate mitigation.
As such, the Education Minister is considering collecting HECS from the dead:
In an interview with The Australian Financial Review Mr Pyne said he had no “ideological opposition” to collecting debts from the estates of former students who died still owing money to the government’s income contingent student loan scheme, which is commonly known as HECS.
Mr Pyne pointed out that “if an elderly person passes away with a HECS debt, they wouldn’t be able to say to the bank, we’re not paying back our mortgage, yet they are at the moment entitled to not pay back their HECS debt”.
I have no real issue with that. It’s the unemployed living and doctor-visiting poor that I’m worried about. They are both going to fund keeping the near dead on life support, which brings us to the Minister for Health Peter Dutton:
“My view is very strongly that given by 2050 in our country there will be thousands of Australians each week diagnosed with diseases of the brain, it’s incumbent upon us to enhance the medical research investment that we make now. I make no apology for that whatsoever.”
So, in today’s Budget sell, the Government’s managed to empathise with grossly under-taxed miners to the nation’s detriment, underline a huge and bizarrely vague picking of winners in contradiction with its own principles, as well as ensure the young, vulnerable and already dead pay for it all.
This is one hell of a Budget sell!
