No One Noticed, But The Senate Voted To Keep The Mining Tax On Friday

We were all a little busy last week, what with Russian-backed separatists shooting down a civilian airliner, Israel invading the Gaza Strip and the government launching us boldly into the future by repealing the carbon tax.

In the midst of all this warmth and wonder it kind of slipped everyone’s radar that the government’s other keystone “policy”, scrapping the mining tax, is currently dead in the water — Labor, Greens and Palmer United Party Senators voted to send the mining tax repeal bill back to the House of Reps on Friday, and there doesn’t seem to be a way for the government to get what it wants without either breaking a few more promises or kissing some serious minor-party arse. If it doesn’t resolve the problem soon, the entire budget could be in jeopardy.

The crux of the disagreement involves $9.6 billion in payments to families that the mining tax funds — things like the School Kids Bonus and the low income super contribution. If the mining tax gets repealed the way the government wants, those payments go too.

Being founded and led by a mining billionaire, the Palmer United Party is happy to get rid of the tax in principle, but not if it means that ten billion dollars in funding gets thrown out as well — which is why they supported Greens and Labor amendments to the mining tax bill that would keep that money flowing. The amended bill passed in the Senate before being sent back to the House of Reps and promptly getting voted down by the government, who insists the funding has to stop along with the tax to keep the budget in line.

To make it worse for the government, Parliament’s on holiday and isn’t sitting again until late August, meaning that the mining tax and all the income it sends to dirty, dirty poor people is going to keep on flowing for at least another six weeks. The government even tried to force the Senate to sit until the tax was repealed, which is definitely how you persuade people to do what you want. That, or through seduction.

 

So will the government get its mining tax repeal, and the budget it wants? It all comes down, again, to Clive Palmer, and if there’s one thing Clerv likes more than money and dinosaurs, it’s fuckin’ with government policy for the joy of the YOLO. He voted against the carbon tax repeal one week, voted for it the next, and somehow managed to rope Al Gore into the whole thing somewhere along the line. There’s a pretty decent chance he’ll vote to repeal the mining tax eventually too, but not if the government doesn’t budge on getting rid of that ten billion dollars worth of funding — which it says it can’t.

If the stalemate continues, the budget goes south by ten billion dollars, and things get interesting. This isn’t the only budget measure the government’s having trouble getting passed — around $300 billion worth of savings over ten years is currently stalled, including cuts to health and education and the $7 GP tax. In response, Joe Hockey is threatening to bypass Parliament entirely and force the budget through on his own — it’s doubtful whether that’s even possible, but threatening to cut the Senate out from passing laws isn’t a great way to get their support for anything, let alone a budget they’re not too keen on in the first place.

In Palmer’s words, the government will either have to pass a “mini-budget” or call a double dissolution election if it hopes to get everything it wants. If neither of those options rub them the right way — and they shouldn’t, given the government’s about as popular as the Ebola virus at the moment — it’ll have to dump some of the budget’s most controversial measures, which could involve building a new budget from the ground up. Unless Clive or someone else unexpectedly rolls over, old mate Tone and his government could be in seriously deep shit.

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Feature image via The Australian.