Super profits tax is up against brazen propaganda

 

May 29, 2010   (By Ian Verrender of SMH)  (Emphasis added)

 

Tony Abbott is hard at it right now. So is the mining lobby. After labelling the emissions trading scheme as a GBNTOE, the opposition and the miners are busy lobbing grenades all over the place with a new scare campaign that is devastatingly efficient.

 Then add in the fact that our mining bosses, particularly Tom Albanese at Rio Tinto and Andrew Forrest at Fortescue Metals, are actively talking down their prospects as part of the campaign to kill the new tax before it gets off the ground. According to Albanese, Australia is his numero uno sovereign risk problem, outstripping Mongolia, Guinea and Madagascar, where Rio Tinto has major projects.

 But it is a very serious accusation. Generally it is defined as the risk that a government will default on its debt; the sort of situation we are seeing in Europe, and particularly Greece, right now. It can also relate to new regulations imposed by a government that will restrict the ability of a company to meet its financing obligations.

 There is no way an extra tax on hugely profitable ventures will result in either of the above. The accusation, coming as it does from a man who engineered a plan to deliver control of Rio Tinto and its Australian resource projects to the Chinese government, is a piece of propaganda so brazen it boggles the mind.The debate, or lack of it, has been clouded by the confusing and conflicting array of statistics thrown up by industry lobbyists, the government, the opposition, and other business leaders variously opposing or in favour of the new tax.

 Instead, here are a few numbers that tell the real story of our resources boom.In 2002, with the boom in its infancy, BHP sold minerals and energy to the value of $US13.51 billion. By 2008 that had leapt to $US59.47 billion. Earnings per share jumped from 26c to $US2.75.  Make no mistake, BHP is a well-run company with excellent management, a model for how to conduct an age-old extraction business in a modern world. But it was riding a massive boom in commodity prices, based in large part on resources it was leasing from the Australian population.

 Rio Tinto's numbers are just as dramatic: revenue soared from $US8.46 billion in 2002 to $US54.26 billion in 2008. The real story is that our big miners are worried that if they don't kill this here and now, other countries will leap in to impose similar tax regimes.

 The fact is, these non-renewable resources are owned by all of us, and if we are going to exploit them, we have a responsibility to maximise the return, not just for ourselves, but for our children and for generations to come.  Norway came to this conclusion years ago. It has a resources rent tax of 50 per cent, with company tax paid on the top of that. But the world's major oil companies are still drilling in Norwegian waters. Why? Because it is profitable.

The more important debate should be what we do with the proceeds of such a tax. Norway has invested the proceeds in offshore assets to provide the country with an income once the oil runs out and the petroleum companies pack up and move.

 COMMENT:  The above are only excerpts considered by me as relevant to the War declared against the Australian government and our people by the Coalition of foreign Miners and their Liberal Party colleagues in Parliament.

 God Bless Australia and may the Rudd government prevail against the foreigners.  NE OUBLIE.

 

 

One of the most mistaken ideas to take hold in politics in recent weeks is that Kevin Rudd has somehow been shocked that the big miners are reacting ferociously to his proposed new mining tax.To believe this, you'd have to think Rudd some sort of moron. He certainly did not decide to spring a big new tax on the richest companies in the country, just before an election, in the expectation that they would calmly invite him to tea to negotiate.

Luckily for Rudd, the big miners were too dumb. He got his fight. The large mining firms - Big Dirt, as distinct from Big Oil - have responded with angry public bluster, threats and exaggeration.  Raging against a plan which they claim would have them paying the highest taxes in the world, they neglect to mention that they currently pay a lower rate of effective tax in Australia than in comparable countries.

PricewaterhouseCoopers' annual study of the taxes paid by the world's 57 leading mining firms, Effective Rate Comparison of the Global Mining Industry, calculates the effective tax rate on miners for six countries.

The industry pays 29 per cent tax in Britain, 22 per cent in the US, 21 per cent in China, 20.4 per cent in South Africa, 17.9 per cent in Canada and 16.4 per cent in Australia. Worldwide, the average effective rate of tax across the mining industry is 23 per cent. So much for being overtaxed.

But the standout mining blowhard of the week was the chief executive of Rio Tinto, Tom Albanese, an American, saying that "from my own perspective, this is my number one sovereign risk issue on a global basis".

This from a company digging holes in 30 countries including Madagascar, where militias have been conducting running gun battles in the capital city, and Mongolia, where the government has been lining up standby emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund just to make sure it stays solvent.

Even Albanese's native US has greater sovereign risk than Australia by some measures. Australia's federal deficit for the year ahead is projected to be 3 per cent of gross domestic product, while the US equivalent is a whopping 11 per cent and the worst since World War II. And Tom, just in case you missed it, no major banks failed here.

Here's how the US Moody's credit rating agency described Australia's sovereign risk in March as it confirmed its Aaa credit rating, the highest possible: "Australia's Aaa ratings are based on the country's very high economic resiliency, very high government financial strength, and very low susceptibility to event risk."

And after seeing the announcement of Rudd's mining tax and after the publication of the budget, Moody's issued a note reaffirming the Aaa rating and strongly endorsing the budget.  And then you'd also have to agree that it was the mining tax that pushed the Australian dollar up again dramatically by some 2¢ in the past two days.

As a bonus for an Australian government pursuing multinationals for a "fair share" in tax, Rio's bombast is delivered in an American accent and BHP's comes in a South African strain courtesy of its chief, Marius Kloppers. These companies are playing exactly to type. They show a well-honed lack of self-awareness. An industry veteran remarked this week that they are behaving as if they were dealing with the government of the Ivory Coast.

So when the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, counters with very aggressive and inflammatory rhetoric, accusing the miners of being "ignorant or liars," he can get away with it.  Some of the big miners, among others, were smugly satisfied when the scheme [the ETS?]was dropped. But they can now see that they sowed the wind and are about to reap the whirlwind.

Accused of weakness, Rudd feels the need to demonstrate strength. That is exactly what he is doing. But what does he hope to achieve by fighting a huge and well-funded lobby?  First, it is designed to make him look strong. Second, it is set up to position him as the champion of the values of Australian fairness against the miners' self-interest. Third, it makes Rudd a fighter on behalf of "working families".

Remember that the government rhetorically links the revenue raised by this tax to the planned spending on superannuation concessions, small business deductions and new investment in hospitals and infrastructure "for the future".

Is Rudd winning the fight? The opinion polls so far show the public is divided pretty much down the middle on the tax. Rudd and Co are not skilled salespeople. As the independent senator Nick Xenophon put it this week, "this government couldn't sell heaters to Eskimos".  It wasn't the popularity of the cause that mattered. It was the fight.  That's what Rudd wants.

And that's why all the speculation this week of an imminent Rudd U-turn is misguided. The government will ultimately offer the miners a deal on the parts of the tax that it always said were negotiable. But it does not intend to make a U-turn and it does not want to bring the argument to an early close. This will run for weeks.

Rudd wanted a fight and expected a fight.

That is why, as the government revealed yesterday, it tucked $38 million into the budget for a taxpayer-funded ad campaign to argue its case. Invoking a campaign of "misinformation" over the tax, the government will now start the ad propaganda rolling.

Peter Hartcher is the political editor.

COMMENT:  Have the journo's from the Fairfax Media been given more latitude in their opinions?  I hope so but, we all know that the "Murdochracy" still wants to change the US and Australian current governments to those who he can control, like Howard and his "New Order" were for eleven plus years.  Struth.

God Bless Australia and if the foreign mining parasites want to leave, I will be there to wave them off - and check our silverware. NE OUBLIE.

 

 

 

World terror has been euphemistally called - "sources of information" - since the emergence of an educated world and has been the major "modern" basis upon which wars are caused - excused - provoked - and their crimes justified.  IMHO, all are entrenched in what is also comfortably called, "The Free Western World".  Fair dinkum.

Currently, we in Australia are confronted with the spectre created by the Coalition of foreign Corporations in Industry and Media who are determined, along with their Coalition Parliamentarians that miners didn't even need to vote for, to remove our people's government for one controlled by them.

This sort of thing, which is slowly but surely destroying the so-called "Freedom loving" Americans and the flag to which they pay so much homage.

A certain class of Americans has taken control of the finances of that nation and while that group have profited by "wars of choice" the American people have paid an enormous price for believing in the propaganda of those who say "show our flag and die - we are right behind you".  In short, the proposers of the foreign war doctrine are becoming extremely rich while the American people are facing enormous financial hardship, debt and the loss of credibility.

I submit a part of an article from Countercurrents recently....

John Pilger (outstanding expatriate Australian UK writer and journalist) reviewing “The First Casualty” by Phillip Knightley (Evatt Foundation, 13 March 2003. “The people don't know and can't know”: http://evatt.labor.net.au/news/201.html ):  “When I read the first edition of this remarkable book twenty-five years ago, I was struck by the following quotations. During the First World War, Prime Minister David Lloyd George told C P Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If the people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know." The truth was reported, insisted The Times correspondent, Sir Phillip Gibbs (knighted for his services), "apart from the naked realism of horrors and losses, and criticism of the facts…Like [William Howard] Russell's, the best journalism is the first draft of history: for that we are indebted to Phillip Knightley, whose clear-sighted and principled book throws down a challenge to journalists to examine their role in the promotion of the war, in propaganda and its myths, and the subliminal pressures applied by organisations like the BBC, whose news is often selected on the basis of a spurious establishment "credibility". The following pages ought to be read by every young reporter and by those who retain pride in our craft of truth-telling, no matter how unpopular and unpalatable the truth. The rest is not journalism.”

Of course any worthwhile correction of this financially based power will take time, probably not in my lifetime but, at least let's hope that our single passport Australian people, still staggering from the media blitz against our elected Government by a traitorous rabble of WW II style "Quislings" and their masters - can think, reason and fairly judge the justified rebuttals of those who we have elected to protect us from just such an insidious objective.  Did we have that right? Because Rudd is us.

I say again - it is a truism, which we must learn to understand - the propaganda media is a profit organizion and when they attack the government of a country, that government is certainly not on the MSM payroll.  At least that is an advantage that I don't believe the Americans have.

And as an intended example of foreign control, the life of Kerry Packer, taught by his infamous Father of 1975, was the biggest tax avoider in his imperial period of power.  His government led by John Howard gave him a tax funded state funeral.  What does that tell you?

And the multi-passport system recently exposed by the Jewish Mossad with dual or copied passports, could not have succeeded if there was no such thing an multi-loyalty and allegience?

God Bless Australia and our prized single passported citizens. NE OUBLIE.

 

 

When was the last time that foreign vested interests (the sale of public assets) have openly declared a class War on our country's tax by investing $100 million in false and blackmailing ads? Threats and Cry Wolf hysteria?

And these in the propaganda media of their corporate friends as profit? Should they pay tax?

And, where is any real argument sufficient to convince the Australian people that their government should back off from defending a justifiable fair tax which is intended to benefit the very same Australian people?  Cut our own throats?

The only media personality that I can so far commend for her understanding of this situation of class war and panic, is Michelle Grattan.

The facts are NOT that the foreign Mining giants don’t want to pay a tax, which is in reality, just a different and better method for them and us - but because the Corporations along with Abbott and his corrupt policies want to remove our government as they did egregiously in 1975.  So, the deception is not really their opposition to a tax on their "small change", but in their political intentions. One of which is the possibility that the fairness of this tax may flow to other nations being ripped off.

Think reason and be logical.  The foreigners are crying Wolf yet again.

IF our government backs down on this it would tend to confirm the power of the foreign interests and to portray the Rudd government as “cowardly” – and after the concerted attacks on Rudd’s abilities by the Murdochracy, it could possibly follow with a change in our voting intentions to benefit a bunch of radicals already controlled by those very same foreign interests. 

And thereby lays the real conspiracy of the two Coalitions - this is all about the election and who the foreigners want in power to maintain their elite advantages.

IMHO, our Rudd/Gillard/Swan and Tanner government will stick to its principles of government for all Australians, and therefore their obligation (i.e. ours) to the non-voters from foreign countries, is a big fat Abbott I.Q. of zero.

Some day the media in Australia will be brought to justice and their beat-up unsubstantiated and divisive misinformation (like the Murdochracy) will be obliged to have an explanation for the bias in all articles other than their protected Editorials.

God Bless Australia and may we stand by our independence. NE OUBLIE.