Miner player reveals truth in spades

MINING billionaire Andrew "Twiggy" Forrest is the accidental politician.

Blitzing the nation, fighting the Rudd-Gillard Government's new mining tax, the Minerals Resource Rent Tax, he is attempting the impossible - trying to present himself as apolitical. On a flying trip to marginal seats in mining areas around regional Australia - Devonport on Wednesday, Mackay and Adelaide yesterday - he is campaigning for better economic management. But it is Labor's economic mismanagement that is in his sights. He is not advocating a vote for either of the major parties - just pointing out the damage former prime minister Kevin Rudd's misguided Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT) did to the nation when it was dropped like a blast from the heavens on May 2, before Rudd and his tax were axed and replaced with Julia Gillard and her equally disastrous Mineral Resources Rent Tax (MRRT). If the advertising bankrolled by big unions like the powerful CFMEU is to be believed, Forrest, 48, with holdings worth up to $4 billion (depending on the stock market) should be lying back aboard a luxury yacht, smoking a Havana and sipping champagne. Instead, he's pacing before audiences made up of small business people, contractors and tradesmen, with much the same gutsy determination and drive that drove his pioneering ancestors to open up huge tracts of grazing land in West Australia nearly 150 years ago. In some sections of the media he has been portrayed as a mate of the former prime minister's, a notion he is happy to kill. Though he worked with Rudd to make the Federal Government a partner with business and the indigenous leadership in the GenerationOne project Forrest started, they are not close. If they were ever going to be mates, the big new tax on mining, the only recommendation of Treasury secretary Ken Henry's exhaustive tax review to be acted upon, aborted any prospect of that. As he tells his audiences, the Labor Government's wasteful spending had left it with a giant deficit that needed plugging. Their plan called for the miners to effectively hand over 40 per cent of their projects to the Government. Forrest says it's "the stuff you would have expected from South American dictators or tinpot African nations, not Australia". "It was expropriation, defined as the compulsory seizure or surrender of private property for the state's purposes, with little or no compensation to the property's owner," he tells the packed meetings. Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan conspired with the unions to milk the mining industry. They worked to have political advertisements prepared in breach of the Government's own advertising guidelines, breaking the protocol by declaring the ads legal using untested emergency powers. Rudd, and his ministers including Swan, demonised the miners, calling them foreigners, liars and tax cheats and through their taxpayer-funded advertising campaign attempted to divide the nation by playing on the old class-war politics of envy. They failed. As the public rallied around the miners, Rudd called Forrest to the Lodge to find a way out of the morass created by Labor's grab for cash but Rudd was so unsuccessful that the faceless men running the Labor Party ousted him in favour of Gillard on June 24, a day before he was to present Forrest with a draft of the new tax arrangement. In her first press conference, Gillard declared she would tackle three issues: the mining tax, climate change and the surge in illegal boat arrivals. After holding secret meetings with the big three miners, BHP-Billiton, Rio and Xstrata, Gillard declared that a new agreement had been reached - the Minerals Resource Rent Tax - but the confidential agreement has not been shown to the rest of the nation's miners and Forrest and the medium and smaller companies are angry. "It was a short-term political solution that has done nothing for the economic security of Australia," he says. "The Big Three have been given a 20-year tax holiday and the rest of us have been given a $10 billion bill to pay so the Government can present a balanced Budget when it goes to the next election." Cassandra Dickerson, a Mackay real estate agent who moved to the city two years ago, applauds Forrest's message. "I see the effects of the mining tax every day," she says. "All Australians should understand that mining is important to the whole country, not just to the people who live in mining areas." Mike McGrath, a sales manager for a crane manufacturer supplying industry up and down the Queensland coast and inland as far as Mount Isa, agrees. Mining carried on through the fiscal crisis, he says. It kept the nation ticking over but the mining tax has slowed projects and created uncertainty. Forrest has called Gillard but she hasn't returned his calls and the Government says it will not release details of its secret agreement with the three big miners until after the election. He remembers Rudd's half-joking threat made to the mining industry at the Press Gallery's Mid-Winter Ball that he had "a long memory". That's why he is trying to present himself as apolitical and continuing his work with the GenerationOne project. Gillard avoided meeting him on Wednesday when he attended a GenerationOne launch in Sydney's Redfern. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott made time to attend the event before travelling to Rooty Hill RSL for The Daily Telegraph's highly successful public meeting. Gillard could not find her way to Redfern and sent Housing Minister and Sydney MP Tanya Plibersek. Forrest, Abbott and Plibersek spoke before Forrest dashed to the airport and on to Brisbane. Another flight, another audience. The same message. It's not about politics, it's about economic management of the nation, and in this election that's about as political as anyone could get. Piers Akerman flew to Queensland and South Australia courtesy of Fortescue Mining