Hung parliament should be miners’ worst nightmare

Teal MPs Kylea Tink, left, Sophie Scamps, Allegra Spender and Kate Cheney. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

The big end of town is finding out what its like to have few friends in Canberra.

And it shouldn’t be surprising.

The opening two days of minerals week on the hill has already proven this point.

But it is now caught between competing populist movements.

Peter Dutton can also see political advantage in beating up on corporate Australia, egged on by the Nationals, but for completely different reasons.

Some might say business leaders deserve what they have got, having displayed their political naivety.

But if the miners, bankers and industrialists think it’s bad now, wait until they get their first taste of a hung parliament, if that’s what the next election throws up.

Whether it is the teals or Greens holding up the numbers for a Labor minority government, there will be a palpable anti-business posture.

Labor has been very clear that a resurrection of the Swan/Gillard mining tax is not on the table. Jim Chalmers has been on the front foot trying to calm the nerves of executives on this point.

But there is a growing sense of anxiety, as witnessed by the miners this week, about where its all heading. BHP president Geraldine Slattery’s rare intervention into the political quagmire was revealing.

A minority government will clean the slate for a chaotic playing field with both the Greens and teal blocs advocating for super-profits tax, not to mention the Greens’ demands for an end to coal and gas.

You can bet a mining tax will be quickly back on the table – Greens leader Adam Bandt hinted as much in his recent speech to the National Press Club.

These ideas will be ventilated in any deals that either the teals or Greens seek to extract to support a minority Labor government.

Fuel tax credits, which the Greens wrongly claim are fossil fuel subsidies, are another.

Of course, there may not be a hung parliament but this is now firming as the likely scenario.

And industry will cop it.

Illustrating that at least she gets what’s going on, Minerals Council boss Tania Constable spent the first day giving Anthony Albanese a serve over industrial relations and the second day issuing a rally cry to mining executives to knock down the doors of Coalition MPs over their opposition to the government’s Nature Positive bill.

The watered-down version of the bill as about as close to Coalition policy as Labor could possibly get. There is no reason not to support it other than if business is lobbying for it, that’s reason enough for the Coalition to be sceptical. And the Nationals won’t support any bill that has Plibersek’s signature on it.

Its weird politics when Dutton knows as well as anyone what it is at stake. If the bill is pushed into the next term, a climate trigger will doubtless be injected into the bill by left-wing crossbenchers.

But that will be a trifling issue compared to the tax hunt the crossbenchers will be on.

Constable’s point is that while business may have few friends in Canberra at the moment, they will have far fewer in a hung parliament.