



A tax too lax kills off the Paris option

Disappointing .. the mining tax has not produced the windfall expected.

Disappointing .. the mining tax has not produced the windfall expected. Photo: Glenn Hunt

Like any hard-working Aussie family, at our place we're a bit disappointed with the mining tax. Sadly, it's not all it was cracked up to be.

The sky was the limit when Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan crunched the deal with the big miners in 2010. Billions would roll in, for ever and a day. It was "a breakthrough" that would "underpin major economic reforms", trumpeted the government's official announcement. "All along our objective has been to deliver Australians a better return for the resources they own."

Excited, we began planning how to spend our share of this better return. It would be a fabulous windfall. We settled on a week at the Hotel Le Bristol in Paris, shopping on the Faubourg and dining at Taillevent, followed up by a lazy fortnight in a chateau on the Loire.

You can imagine our dismay when we heard the tax had raised only $126 million in its first six months. There are 23 million Australians. Do the sums: that works out at $5.47 for each man, woman and child, or $21.88 for a (hard-working) family of four.

Bang went the Paris option. We're thinking now of a nice night out at Maccas.

Nothing - absolutely nothing - has gone right for the government from the day the Prime Minister fired the gun for the longest election campaign since Federation.

Labor's disastrous figures in Monday's Fairfax/Nielsen opinion poll had the ratbags of the Tory commentariat chortling with glee all week, gnawing away at leadership speculation yet again.

In this they got immeasurable help from Labor itself. The party leaked like a sieve. Kevin Rudd continued his giddy whirl around the nation's radio and TV studios; surely it cannot be long before he is whipping up a warm duck salad on My Kitchen Rules. A conga line of ministers sashayed into the spotlight, each one solemnly urging everyone else to stop the public navel-gazing and get on with governing. The poll was "a wake-up call", Simon Crean said.

Hello? A bit late for that, Simon. Like it or not, Labor lost control of the political narrative from the moment its most senior ministers, Crean included, rounded on the newly deposed Rudd and accused him of carrying on like the emperor Caligula.

There is allegedly some all-powerful communications and strategy operation in Gillard's office, ruled by one John McTernan, an apparatchik from the British Labour Party, but heaven knows what it actually does. If anything. I emailed McTernan last Christmas suggesting a drink or lunch but he didn't bother to reply.

Anyway, down they go. The farce of the mining tax is but the latest symptom of what appears to be a terminal disease.

Tony Abbott was oddly silent all week. Invisible, even. There was no silly TV stunt at a fish shop or a widget factory, no poncing around in Lycra or hard hat. He kept his head down, allowing his shadow ministers and his obsequious media claque to do the public gloating over the opinion poll.

It was clever politics. Any comment from him would have looked like smart-alec hubris, which is one reason that voters have so disliked him in the past. Abbott still believes he was born to The Lodge and will do anything to get there, but he is learning to disguise this. The election is still his to lose, as his former mate John Hewson managed to do in 1993.

With Labor in turmoil and the smell of blood in the water, the opposition blithely carries on as a policy-free zone and gets away with it. Yet you know exactly what the Coalition will do if it wins government in September. First up there'll be the Gothic horror of a Labor budget "black hole" - even worse than expected, we'll be told. This will be the pretext for a savage round of expenditure "savings" and the sacking of thousands of public servants.

That done, all the same-old, clapped-out Tory machinery will creak into place. Once again there'll be grovelling deference to the Americans in our defence and foreign policies. Billions will be wasted on bright and shiny military hardware, just as the Howard government did by buying 59 useless main battle tanks for the army, the navy's Seasprite helicopters that could fly only in daylight in fine weather, and the eye-watering extravagance of the struggling Joint Strike Fighter project for the air force.

Domestically, Labor's reforms in healthcare and education will be scrapped, with money ripped out of the public sector to be shovelled back into private hospitals and private schools. Climate change will be crap again. WorkChoices will eventually re-emerge with a new name; there will be a swingeing ideological attack on the ABC, enforced by a whopping funding cut; the national broadband network will be gutted; social reforms like same-sex marriage will be further off than ever; and the gap between rich and poor will grow ever wider, as it does in the US.

Been there, done that, deja vu all over again.

Howard Collins, the Englishman newly hired to run Sydney's trains, is not impressed by what he has seen so far. As a former boss of the London Tube - he was in charge there during last year's Olympic Games - he apparently has big plans to fix our network.

''When I travelled it reminded me of the London Underground 25 years ago in terms of the ticketing, the technology, the environment,'' he said this week. "That's what I want to help improve.''

Marvellous, that British gift for understatement. The Sydney system is not 25 years behind; it's about 50. Londoners do enjoy whingeing about their public transport but it is dramatically better than the shambles we endure.

To give just one example: on the Tube they manage disruptions very smoothly. Here, a signal failure at Cronulla can cause chaos from Gosford to Katoomba. London's Oyster card, their smart card ticketing system, works a treat. We're still waiting for the one promised for our Olympics in 2000. And so on and on.

For starters, Collins would like to put Wi-Fi into our trains, as he did in London. A terrific idea, but I expect the state Treasury bureaucrats will find a way of stopping it, as they usually do.

Featured advertisers

Special offers

Credit card, savings and loan rates by Mozo