We should never forget the image of Treasurer Joe Hockey and finance minister Mathias Cormann smirking as they announced the end of the mining tax introduced by the former Labor government.
Along with that other image of them enjoying their post-budget cigars, they should be preserved as evidence for the day when the exploiters and oppressors face justice.
A deal had been done with mining billionaire and politician Clive Palmer to abolish the mining tax. He is a mining billionaire after all 鈥 and the abolition of the mining tax was in the platform of the cashed-up Palmer United Party in last year's federal election.
Because of the previous opposition that the PUP senators had held to other federal government budget measures, some people may have begun to place their hopes in the PUP. But this dirty deal is a reminder about the real interests that Palmer and his party stand for: a mining billionaire's greed.
For a decade, the mining billionaires have scooped up almost all the benefits of an unprecedented mining boom. Profits soared while the proportion of these the mining companies paid in tax and royalties plummeted. But when the former PM Kevin Rudd government tried to impose a 40% tax on their super-profits, the miners hit back with a multimillion-dollar campaign that cost Rudd his position as prime minister and resulted in an even weaker mining tax negotiated with the biggest mining companies.
This weakened mining tax raised just $200 million in its first year and a miserable $170 million in its second. At the same time, the mining companies enjoyed an estimated $4.5 billion a year in federal government subsidies.
But the mining billionaires do not want to pay an extra cent and with the help of the Coalition government, they are having their way.
Even before the clinking of champagne glasses at the big end of town had died down, Abbott was off to India to sign a deal to sell uranium to the nuclear-armed state, which is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is also a country where people are already dying and being deformed as a result of a poorly regulated nuclear power industry.
If 鈥 or when 鈥 India has its Fukushima, Australian uranium exporters could be directly culpable.
Just before the mining tax was repealed, the go-ahead was given for a huge new coalmining development in Queensland that will wreck the world heritage Great Barrier Reef marine park as well as worsen the climate change crisis.
Coal is a bigger killer than asbestos. Apart from its culpability in climate change, air pollution from coal combustion is accountable for more than 200,000 deaths a year worldwide according to a recent article in The Age by Tim Flannery and Fiona Stanley.
鈥淚n Australia, the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering estimated that the ill-effects of coal costs the country $2.6 billion annually. In Europe, the health cost of air pollution from coal-fired power stations is 鈧42.8 billion [A$60 billion] a year, and more than 4 million lost working days each year, due mainly to respiratory and cardiac disease. US economists have estimated the health impacts of coal-fired power stations in the US to be between one and six times its value added.鈥
The mining billionaires are getting away with mass murder.
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