The mining tax brawl is there to be won
Sunday Agenda
PM’s message not getting through by ROSS NEILSON
The mining tax brawl is there to be won.
If you haven’t noticed, there’s an almighty blue going on over the Rudd Government’s move to cut the rest of us in on the minerals bonanza by whacking mining companies with a tax on some profits.
In recent weeks, I’ve been reminded of that classic Sean Connery line from the The Untouchables.
Playing a hard Chicago cop, Connery responds to a gangster brandishing a large, lethal knife with a dead cool remark about idiots bringing knives to a gunfight — before blowing the hapless baddie away.
It has seemed as though the Government, having announced its plan to tax some of the most mindbogglingly wealthy, tax-averse and hardball-playing corporations in Australia, had to sustain a dozen gunshot wounds before it understood that this wasn’t a fight that the Marquis of Queensberry would have approved.
Auspoll surveyed 1500 people nationwide last week as both sides blazed away in cashed-up advertising blitzes. While the Government’s opponents have criticised its use of publicly-funded advertising, you could argue that it was in a gunfight without ammo before returning fire. And Australians love a fair fight.
What we found was instructive. Almost a third of people (31 per cent) neither support nor oppose the tax, or don’t know. No-one has convinced them, either way. While the debate has been super-heated, neither side has yet persuaded a big proportion of voters that it’s a game-breaker. How much effect is either side having with these ads? It’s hard to know for sure, but we do know that the proportion of people neither supporting nor opposing hasn’t budged a centimetre in a fortnight. Since he no longer has his Great Big New CPRS Tax to play with, Tony Abbott has seized on the RSPT with renewed gusto and declared this one is now the fatal blow that will bring our economy down around our ears.
Having become so enamoured with the phrase, it’s nice that he still has something great, which is also big and new, to kick around. But it’s a big call to base your whole campaign around it, however attractive the prospective
financial support for that campaign. Abbott has placed the RSPT squarely at the centre of his election strategy, saying it’s the main issue he will fight on. Our figures suggest that strategy is questionable. With a third undecided on it, almost half (47 per cent) say it will make no difference to their vote. More oppose the tax (36 per cent) than support it (33 per cent), but does that amount to the centrepiece of a campaign to sweep a government from office after one term? The Government’s sales pitch is that it will use the money to cut other business taxes and improve superannuation. Staggeringly, when we asked people what they thought it would be used for, 6 per cent mentioned super and only 4 per cent business taxes! This compares to 20 per cent who said health and 17 per cent who said ‘‘waste it or spend it on themselves’’.
If you want to see the real meaning of these figures, go no further than the TV commercials that the mining companies paid for (then, amusingly, cried foul when the Government also discarded its pen knife and unholstered the Glock semi-automatic).
The ads are very good. They try hard to make voters in marginal suburban seats in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane fear that they are directly threatened by this tax, even though they and their jobs have nothing to do with gigantic iron ore pits in north Western Australia.
That’s because huge numbers of them don’t see the connection — and won’t change their votes on it. And, if no-one persuades them to, the miners lose. But there’s a massive job for the Government here, too. If it is to hold its ground and win, it better convince those people that the RSPT will do something real and fair and beneficial for them. Because so far, they haven’t heard the message.
■ Ross Neilson is chief executive officer of Auspoll
www.sundaytelegraph.com.au THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH June 6, 2010 107
supposed
to happen
ROSS
NEILSON
Well, what a
campaign that
was. Almost
nothing that was supposed
to happen seems to have
happened. And a whole lot of
weirdness that isn’t supposed
to happen surely did.
Tony Abbott was never
supposed to be Liberal leader.
And he was never supposed
to be within cooee of
winning government.
Having seized his party’s
leadership by one vote, in a
desperate rearguard action to
stop a done deal with Labor
for a popular (and arguably
mandated) carbon-emissions
scheme, it was inconceivable
he could be a viable contender
in less than a year.
Abbott is known as The
Mad Monk, a moniker he
can’t enjoy. Implicit in it
is that he’s supposed to be
unpredictable, loose-lipped,
gaff-prone and a little scary.
What we got instead was
iron discipline, absolute
clarity around three or four
highly defined campaign
themes and a five-week
clanger-free zone.
This reflects his campaign
experience as the favourite
apprentice of John Winston
Howard and that of the
campaign team around
him (unsurprisingly, most
of JWH’s senior crew).
Labor, by contrast, hardly
took a trick. There aren’t
supposed to be Cabinet leaks
composed and timed to cause
maximum damage, exploding
under a leader almost from
the outset. We’ll never know
where they came from, but we
know it was someone privy to
Cabinet discussions.
Your most popularly
reviled and comprehensively
rejected former leader is not
supposed to rise from the
grave and lurch zombie-like
around the country, dogging
your campaign, brandishing a
Channel 9 mic like a light
sabre and a licence to kill.
Labor’s campaign bounced
from one oxygen-sucking
distraction to the next—a
pinball with everyone’s hands
on the flickers but their own.
A mixture of self-inflicted,
allowed-to-be inflicted by the
Libs, like a week-long debate
about a debate and wounds
that seemed inflicted by acts
of perverse and angry gods.
Despite this, Gillard has
persevered with extraordinary
strength of purpose to pull the
campaign back to equilibrium
in the past fortnight.
At the time of writing, we
don’t know who won the
election, but we do know
Tony Abbott’s Coalition
was never supposed to be
a snowflake’s chance at a
Darwin Christmas dinner.
Not tonight, and not when
the gun fired five weeks ago.
So, whoever is PM this
morning, we know who
won the campaign.
■ Ross Neilson is
the CEO of Auspoll
Miners should pay a mining tax because they are taking products out of OUR soil and making money from it and the only income we get from this is the tax they pay on their declared income.
Alan Wells
June 4, 2011 at 11:44 am
Totally agree mate
At last someone else who thinks different from the stats quo
The mining boom is benefiting a small minority at the expense of manufacturing which we need to support now for our future
If we dont tax those that can pay – who is going to pay for the infrastructure to set up new industries – once China stops buying our Gas and Iron
Its not going to last forever
Harry
August 23, 2011 at 3:06 am