Rudd raiding our super to pay bills

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan have seriously miscalculated the level of support they can count upon for their new attempt to seize a massive chunk of mining industry profits.

In an era when most Australians hope to receive some form of superannuation from funds that have invested considerable amounts in blue chip mining shares, the Labor Government's call to wreak class warfare no longer has the resonance it had in the Menzies era. The ALP and its attack dogs, like Australian Workers Union boss Paul Howes, may rail against billionaires in the mining industry and undermine their own arguments about the need to participate in the global marketplace, but mums and dads watching the diminishing returns on their superannuation, in which they have invested hard-earned dollars, are unlikely to be convinced that the Rudd Government is acting in their best interests. The Eureka flag, which elements of the Left (and extreme Right) have co-opted over the years, actually flew over the miners' camp at Ballarat in 1854, not the government barracks. It was raised in protest at petty government fees, not in support of the colonial bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is even more on the nose today when uber pencil-pusher Kevin Rudd is calling the shots from Canberra and, significantly, there are growing signs within federal Labor that MPs are just as unhappy at the unintended consequences of Rudd's delusional flights of policy - from Fuelwatch and GroceryWatch to the lethal pink batts insulation program and the rorted education building scheme - as they watch Labor's popularity dwindle. In Western Australia, the atmosphere is toxic. The mining tax is seen as direct attack on the State for its prescient Premier's refusal to kowtow to Rudd and his phony health reform. The State has been receiving less than its fair share of GST revenue and now there is fury at the stance taken by Labor MPs and candidates. Mining is at the core of the WA economy. Every sector of the State is affected by the industry, not just the tens of thousands directly employed moving minerals. In every industry, there are now new apprentices hoping to gain employment in the service industries, created to meet the demands of the businesses that are expanding because of the mineral wealth. The new tax hits at not only those with super funds, but also the very working families that Rudd claims to represent. The WA Liberal Party's state council, with delegates from mining areas like Kalgoorlie, the Pilbara and the Kimberley, has called on State Labor to stand up to Kevin Rudd. Working families have been able to join the dots and make the connection between the projected revenues from this insane new tax and the huge interest bill on Rudd's borrowings. They do not want the mining sector - and their sons and daughters - to pay for Rudd's reckless spending. They are not buying his argument that this tax grab is necessary to pay for their superannuation, as they are well aware that their super contributions come from their employers - not from the federal Government. Western Australians have a deep suspicion of Canberra: indeed, of all that comes from what they call the Eastern States. The Liberals hold 11 of the 15 federal seats in WA. They believe they now have a better than even chance of picking up a few more. At the top of their list is Hasluck, held by Labor's Sharryn Jackson, who won it in 2002, lost it in 2004, and regained it in 2007. The seat, which Labor holds by a 1 per cent margin, has 6000 to 7000 Aboriginal voters and the Liberal candidate is Ken Wyatt, the impressive head of WA's Office of Aboriginal Health, who stands to become the first indigenous member of the House of Representatives. It is not lost upon those voters that the mining sector is by far the nation's biggest employer of indigenous Australians. Even former Labor Party national secretary Gary Gray, who also worked for mining giant Woodside, may not be safe in Brand, which he won with a 5 per cent majority. In Queensland, the seats could really fall, with Herbert and Dickson under 1 per cent and Longman, Flynn and Dawson under 3 per cent. The mining companies sense that the state of the global economy works in their favour. Rudd's claim to have protected Australia from the great fiscal stuff-up rings hollow. The figures demonstrate that his stimulus spending was not the saviour of the Australian economy he has claimed; that, if anything, it just blew out the Howard Government's surplus and plunged the nation into unprecedented levels of debt. Tuesday's Budget will confirm this, no matter how much spin Swan applies. The so-called super profits tax has not been well thought through, in line with all of the Rudd Government's initiatives. Not all mining operations are the same, no matter what the Treasury boffins would like to believe when they run their modelling. Their financial structures vary wildly. Some of the majors, to cite just one example, claim their railway operations as part of their structure, while others use independent freighting companies. Applying a blanket tax to both is clearly unjust. Some concessions will have to be made by the Federal Government in coming weeks, particularly as the governments in both WA and Queensland intend squeezing more in royalties from the miners in their states. Apart from Howes and former Labor apparatchiks Bernie Fraser and David Buckingham, the government has been unable to roll out supporters of its tax grab and its arguments have been threadbare. As armies of political consultants moved in to stem the damage from this rash decision, one new joke surfaced. It was based on Rudd's end-of-week announcement that he was committed to serving a full second term, should his government be re-elected at the next poll. The good news was that, so far, he hasn't kept his word on anything.