Today’s Essential Research poll illustrates just how badly the Rudd government bungled its case for the Resource Super Profits Tax, and how timid Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan have been on the issue ever since.
Essential found that only 11% of voters thought that “all Australians” were benefiting a lot from the resources boom, and only 29% thought they were getting “some benefit”. In contrast, 68% thought mining company executives were benefiting a lot, and 42% thought the same of foreign companies.
This is not how voters would prefer the benefits of the boom to be distributed. Fifty seven per cent want mining executives to benefit less from the boom, and 56% want foreign companies to benefit less from the boom. Who should benefit more? Sixty eight per cent want all Australians to benefit more, and only 15% think the balance is currently right. They also want regional communities to benefit more. There’s even support for state government, in particular, to benefit more.
We’ve come quite some distance since May 2010. But the electorate has persistently indicated it supports making the mining industry contribute more of the windfall gains it is enjoying from the resources boom back to the rest of us. The government’s MRRT makes a poor show of doing that.
If only Rudd and Swan hadn’t bungled the RSPT in early 2010.
It should have been a cinch to sell to the public- First Dog on the Moon executed a masterful cartoon explaining it graphically and in plain English. All Rudd needed was a simple line stating that, a decade ago, the miners were paying royalties of one in 3 dollars, by 2010 it was only one in 7. A cinch to sell…one would think.
Since Rudd was forced out by a media campaign against fair taxation of mining profits, why wouldn’t the Government be walking on eggshells ever since?
“the electorate has persistently indicated it supports plain packaging, carbon tax, mining tax, pokies reform and yet two lots of pusillanimous, political poltroons (scuz triple tautology) have pissed away the huge mandate in deference to what, the chance to grovel for the crumbs from the Masters’ tables, as if they’d ever get any more.
The important question is, how many of those majorities (57%, 56%, 68% etc) live in marginal electorates?