Letter to the Editor – AFR
25/05/2010
Bryan Kavanagh, Glen Waverley
Ross Garnaut and Ken Henry are undoubtedly correct about the benefits of the so-called super-profits ‘tax’ on miners. It’s actually a resource rent and acts vastly differently from a tax.
Where taxes notoriously fine and destroy industry and production, natural resource rents cannot.
Garnaut quotes E Cary Brown on the need for the public to capture natural resource rents, but he might also have quoted Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Henry George and a number of others. Clive Palmer and Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest ought to pay their rent.
