By Paul Sakkal
Peter Dutton has invoked the Tony Abbott-era campaign against the carbon tax, labelling Labor’s environmental and workplace laws as the biggest assault on mining since Julia Gillard’s contentious emissions policy.
In a fiery speech at a minerals industry event on Wednesday morning, the opposition leader will throw his weight behind BHP and the Minerals Council of Australia, which have launched a campaign against federal moves to give more weight to environmental protection and boost pay for labour-hire workers.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is siding heavily with the fossil fuel sector in a simmering feud with Labor.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“Not since the days of imposing a carbon tax on your sector, or a mining tax on your sector, has a prime minister ... been so out of touch with the need to keep our mining and resource sectors strong,” Dutton will say, according to a copy of his speech.
“But today I give you this commitment: a Dutton Coalition government will be the best friend that the mining and resources sector in Australia will ever have.”
Abbott’s promise to repeal the Rudd-Gillard government’s carbon tax was a key element of his successful 2013 federal election campaign.
Labor ministers have labelled the mining sector’s concerns as “hysterical” in a months-long dispute that threatens to influence voter perceptions of Labor in mining-reliant Western Australia and parts of NSW and Queensland where crucial federal seats are in play ahead of the election.
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s proposed Environment Protection Agency is the second part of her three-stage reform agenda.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Dutton’s remarks build on the Coalition’s attacks on Labor’s handling of the economy, from managing inflation to promoting key industries. This includes farmers, who on Tuesday marched on parliament over the planned phaseout of live sheep exports and yelled at the prime minister during question time.
His fossil fuel-friendly stance could be used by Labor and teal opponents to further their claims that his nuclear energy policy is designed to extend the life of coal and gas plants.
Key to the political fight is a recent decision by Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to block a dam that would help establish a gold mine in NSW based on protecting Indigenous heritage. Plibersek has accused the company behind the project of talking “nonsense”.
Plibersek is also struggling to win support for a new environment protection agency that the Coalition worries would be used to block projects and the Greens fear is too weak, underscoring the difficulty for Labor in balancing economic and environmental costs.
BHP has claimed Labor’s “same job, same pay laws”, which require labour-hire workers to be paid as much as standard employees, would cost the company $1.3 billion a year. BHP reported an underlying profit of $20 billion in the past financial year.
Resources Minister Madeleine King, who is seen inside the government as relatively friendly towards the mining firms, admonished BHP late last month.
“They’ve always railed against Labor policy, whether in opposition or in government, and they’re the first to go to the Murdoch press to do a story around what they don’t like about what a Labor government chooses to do, and it wouldn’t matter what it is,” she said.
Albanese this week told mining executives “the world will go right past us” if co-operation was abandoned in favour of conflict, prompting Minerals Council chief Tania Constable to fire back at Albanese in a speech he attended.
“Under these new workplace laws, conflict has been brought upon us. It is a deliberate design feature of these laws,” Constable said.
Miners other than BHP have also raised the alarm on new industrial relations laws that make it easier for unions to bring firms into negotiations over workplace-wide enterprise agreements, even though most of their workers are not union members.
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