Ross Gittins says – How mining companies campaigned for a ‘government’s defeat’ and brought down a Prime Minister

Tax reforms lost in saga of expediency, is a piece in Fairfax, by economics editor Ross Gittins, that talks puts the Rudd-coup in economic terms, in order words, how the big miners brought down a Prime Minister. And if they could do it once, they’re probably planning to do it again.

Here is an extract from that piece:
hopefully not more than 10% for copyright reasons

one of the first of Rudd’s silly ideas, the Twenty-20 summit. Bring a bunch of bright people together with a pile of butcher’s paper and who knows what good ideas they could come up with?

The business people attending came up with the world’s most predictable idea: what this country needs is more tax reform. What they really meant was that taxes should be changed so they paid less. When it comes to contributing to the public debate, our business people are nothing if not chancers.

… someone had a bright idea. Among Henry’s hundred-plus proposals was one for some new-fangled tax on the miners’ economic rents.

But caught off guard by a new tax no one understood (and which would raise twice as much as the government imagined), the miners – led by BHP Billiton’s Marius Kloppers – opted to campaign for the government’s defeat. They ran TV ads assuring the mug punters the mining tax would cost ’em their jobs.

Rudd’s losing fight with the miners …cost him his job. Gillard decided to buy off the big three miners – BHP, Rio and Xstrata – at any price… The deal she did replaced an incomprehensible mining tax with a dog’s breakfast designed on the run by the big miners. It came at the expense of their pipsqueak contemporaries – including T. Forrest, G. Rinehart and C. Palmer – and big business generally, which had its cut in the company tax rate halved.

To read the full article, click Tax reforms lost in saga of expediency

Ross Gittins says – What Jesus said about capitalism

In a piece, to coincide with the religious festival, is this piece by Ross Gittins, The Sydney Morning Herald’s Economics Editor What Jesus Said About Capitalism.

Gittins is giving his review of a book, The Biblical Vision of Sabbath Economics, by the Californian theologian and teacher Ched Myers.

This is a short extract from that article, but the whole piece is worth considering reading

…a much-quoted saying from which today’s prosperous Christians derive comfort: Jesus’s observation that the poor will always be with you.

This doesn’t mean Christ accepted poverty as an inevitable characteristic of the economy, or part of the divine plan. Rather, he says, the divine vision is that poverty be abolished, but as long as it persists, God and God’s people must always take the side of the poor – and be among them.

Privately controlled wealth is the backbone of capitalism, Myers says, and it is predicated upon the exploitation of natural resources and human labour. Profit maximisation renders socio-economic stratification, objectification and alienation inevitable.

According to the gospel, however, those who are privileged within this system cannot enter the kingdom. This is not good news for first-world Christians – because we are the ‘inheritors’ of the rich man’s legacy.

So the unequivocal gospel invitation to repentance is addressed to us. To deconstruct our ‘inheritance’ and redistribute the wealth as preparation to the poor – that is what it means for us to follow Jesus.

Read more…What Jesus said about capitalism (April 9, 2012)

 

text by @redglitterx
image of Jesus-Che in no way connected to Ross Gittins
additional text by Ross Gittins, and, is in no way intended to imply that Gittins would in anyway endorse the contents of this blog