The Greens have released a report which has found 83 per cent of Australia’s mining industry is foreign-owned.
The party paid a private consultant to undertake the research, which Greens Leader Bob Brown will present in an address to the National Press Club today.
The report also says that in the next five years $50 billion in earnings derived from Australian mining investments will go offshore.
Senator Brown wants the Resource Super Profits Tax rather than the new mining tax to be rolled out, and believes Australians would have been more supportive of the idea the first time around if they had seen the figures.
“I think Australians simply have been left in the dark about the rapid takeover of ownership offshore of Australia’s minerals,” he said.
“I don’t think Australians have any idea that Australia’s mining industry is 83 per cent foreign owned.”
Senator Brown says images of Australian miners campaigning against the Government’s mining taxes give a false impression of the level of local ownership of the industry.
“A few local billionaires who’ve made a motza out of mining are covering up for the much greater profits than even they have yielded flowing overseas into the pockets of similar millionaires scattered around the world,” he said.
Senator Brown wants the new mining tax to apply to gold and uranium.
But Ben Mitchell from the Minerals Council of Australia believes there are holes in the Greens’ research.
REad the full ABC Online story HERE
Elsewhere …
What about Bob?
John Birmingham, brisbanetimes
(A note to readers. This is an essay I wrote earlier this year for The Monthly. But it wasn’t really what they wanted. I’ve been saving it up ever since. Apologies for the length. I’ll write something short and stupid on Thursday). – JB
Of all his many excellent adventures, it was tweaking the nose of the tyrant Bush for which he was most loved. He had saved many forests from the woodsman’s axe. Fought great battles against the owners of satanic mills spewing poisons into the water, and befouling the air with the fumes from their furnaces. He had liberated the oppressed, the gay ones from Tasmania anyway, and snatched the weapons from the hands of the angry gun nut tribe. But it was for standing up to Bush the Younger in the parliament of the land that Senator Robert Brown, the elder of Greens, was most fondly remembered, by his followers and by those who would become his followers.
So little sleep they had the night before the American potentate was to speak to all the members and the senators, that many of their eyes were pouchy and bloodshot. Helicopters thudding and roaring through the night robbed many of their rest, although anxious excitement meant some would never have slept anyway.
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For Senator Brown however, there was little to be excited about by the visit of junior Bush, or of the Chinese overlord Hu Jintao that week, unless it was the rare opportunity to confront both men with their many crimes. While other, harder heads, were positively giddy with the prospect of being feted by these two, Bob Brown and his accomplice, Ms Kerry Nettle, would not be sitting quietly, waiting for a kind word from the warmonger and the despot. They would be giving both men a jolly good talking to.
In the end, sadly, only Bush received his dressing down, with Brown interrupting him as he enthused in his wide Texas drawl about toppling Saddam Hussein, about the asses whupped, the dissidents saved, the secret weapons discovered and the crimes against humanity punished. The President even cited atrocities such as the poison gas attacks on innocent families – attacks made possible by American military aid – although he didn’t mention that last bit. Perhaps he would have, but Senator Brown was suddenly talking over him, telling him to respect international law if he wanted respect himself, and to “release the two Australians you’re holding prisoner in Guantánamo Bay,” to send them for a fair trial in the US if they had any case to answer.
A few weeks earlier, in Bangkok, John Howard had warned the President to expect something like this, and Bush appeared to receive the verbal assault with much greater ease than many of the politicians around Bob Brown. He smiled and replied with a pre-chewed homily about how much he loved free speech. Although he didn’t love it enough to expose himself to the threat of it in the Canadian or British Parliaments when they later invited him to speak at joint sittings. He down turned both requests. Apparently the good Senator Brown had put him right off his discourse. Brown and Nettle, in the meantime, were kicked out of Parliament for twenty-four hours, effectively barring them from giving the Chinese premier a touch up of his own.
Read more: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/opinion/blogs/blunt-instrument/what-about-bob-20110627-1gnq3.html#ixzz1QbvbxKJq
