Prof. Ross Garnaut gave the Hamer Oration at Melbourne University on Thursday. He pointed out that Australia has not experienced a recession for 17 years, a record for The Lucky Country. Such a period of unbroken growth is not just an Australian record, it is a world record. But one-way tickets have built-in risks for [...]
photo credit: Grégory Tonon This week’s backdown by the federal labor government on the Mineral Resource Rent Tax will cost Australian taxpayers $35 billion over the next ten years. The shortfall in government revenues will be made up from taxes on work and taxes on business. That means it is coming out of your [...]
photo credit: Urban~Spaceman Miners finally agree to tax reform. What are the changes? The attempt to harness economic rents for the public good has been renamed from the Resource Super Profits tax to the Mineral Resource Rent Tax. The MRRT kicks in at the corporate bond rate plus 7%. That is 12%, rather than the [...]
“Gillard must come out strongly and call the lobbyists for who they are. She must assert control over the RSPT rather than negotiate with each and every individual company.
photo credit: Gary Denness Harold Mitchell, advertising supremo, summed up the mood that led to Kevin Rudd’s downfall, as quoted in the AFR, 23 June: It is an ‘amazing fact’ that ‘ordinary people on the street are barracking for five people…who have got so much money they don’t know what to do with it’. The [...]
photo credit: Schaffner Sometimes the ignorance of experts makes my blood boil. Why can’t they do the arithmetic, the sums plainly before them? The Victorian Transport Plan will cost $38 billion and produce benefits of $180 billion, according to a state-commissioned report by Ernst and Young. If these numbers are right, the Plan [...]
photo credit: loungerie The Henry Tax Review recommended a resource rent tax to the Australian government, carefully designed to maintain incentives and reward risk. The miners responded with apoplexy and a campaign of deliberate misinformation that has left the economically literate gobsmacked. Let’s get a few things straight. Searching for ore-bodies is not done by [...]
photo credit: Yuga. The government must focus on the rate of return between those who benefit from economic rents and those that are entrepreneurial. The Age reports today: …a Senate estimates committee was told the average profit in mining was 37.1 per cent, compared with 11.4 for the overall economy. Some projects had ”extraordinarily high [...]
photo credit: funadium Yesterday’s ABS release of a 14.8% fall in seasonally adjusted building approvals shows that property insiders understand that a crash is coming. If not them, then the banks curtailing credit for housing is another signal that housing is over-priced and well overdue for a major correction. Last weekend’s housing auction figures showed [...]
photo credit: jcarter The Commonwealth of Australia was built on the sound principle natural resources are part of every Australian’s endowment. The Henry Tax Review recommended and the Rudd government has accepted a new tax system for mining that builds on this idea. The Super Profits Resource Tax (SPRT) provides the community a share [...]