Tag Archives: gina rinehart

Barnaby To Fight Miners

11 Sep

From the Australian:

Billionaire Gina Rinehart turned up at Barnaby Joyce's post-election party in Tamworth. Picture: Peter Lorimer Source: The Australian

Billionaire Gina Rinehart turned up at Barnaby Joyce’s post-election party in Tamworth. Picture: Peter Lorimer Source: The Australian

OUTSPOKEN Nationals frontbencher Barnaby Joyce has vowed to protect prime farm land from mining and coal-seam gas, and ensure that an inland railway line connecting Brisbane and Melbourne is built by 2026.

…

Mr Joyce said he would maintain his steadfast support for protecting prime farmland from mining and CSG, despite having a close friendship with influential mining magnates. Billionaire Gina Rinehart attended Mr Joyce’s election night party. He said prime farmland and aquifers should be “off limits” to mining and CSG, while “people’s quiet enjoyment of houses should be protected”.

In the battle between good agricultural land and mining, farmland should “win every time”. He said he had been “more vociferous than others” in parliament about these issues, and he pledged to remain so in government.

Mr Joyce supported the need for effective and transparent regulation and monitoring of the resources sector.

In regard to CSG production, he said farmers should earn a percentage of the value of production of gas on their land.

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The Greens Totalitarian Instinct Writ Large

16 Mar

From ecological paranoid obsession, to misuse and abuse of “science”, to advocacy of eugenics, to silencing of dissent, the parallels between modern Australia under Green-Labor and the actions of the Third Reich continue to ring out as loudly as a tolling bell.

Senator Joyce writes for the Canberra Times (my emphasis added):

Alliance blocks your right to know

It has been a very interesting week. I did have a genuine desire to try and offer what I thought was good advice as to how disputes in families are rarely improved by public discussion on the front pages of national newspapers.

I think my initial views have proved overwhelmingly correct but as expected in the rough and tumble of this place, I burnt political capital giving that view. I tell you what I do find annoying, though, is where it is thought that because you get along with someone then you take your riding instructions from them; you don’t.

In politics you meet all sorts of people from all sorts of sectors and they all have their issues; it is quite obviously a part of your job. I have met priests and I have met prostitutes and I have no intention of becoming either but they have a right to be heard. I have met drug addicts and I have met farmers, I have met billionaires and I have met branch members. The one thing I have found is that underneath it all you would be surprised how every group has their strengths and their frailties, including me.

Now back to Parliament. I have just come from the chamber, where the Greens and Labor have voted to guillotine, that is, shut down debate on 16 pieces of legislation. This is bizarre. It is the start of the sitting year, you do not start guillotining things when you have the whole of the year to properly debate them.

There are very important pieces of legislation within this guillotine. One is the Mining Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) which, if they display the same management skill for this as they have shown for the carbon tax and the NBN, we will have a serious problem. As absurd as it sounds, this tax actually costs us money. They have given away more than they expect to collect.

[see GilSwan Conned – Mining Tax The Greens’ Pit Of Despair]

It genuinely is something that you should know as much about as possible before, as your elected representatives, we vote on it on your behalf. Remember, you have drawn your account to $232 billion, but you only have a $250 billion limit and you’ve borrowed $10 billion in the past four weeks. Things for you are not looking too rosy and I believe that the more attention that we give to your affairs the better it is for you.

Then there is the so-called small business tax deduction. It is not a small business tax deduction, it is a company tax deduction, which big companies do not get. The vast majority of small businesses, however, are unincorporated entities, like partnerships and sole traders. They do not get any MRRT tax-inspired tax deduction.

The next issue that grates is a statement that the government is going to finance the superannuation increase from 9 per cent to 12 per cent through the MRRT. No they are not, the employer is going to pay for that superannuation increase. It is so frustrating when you have a right to know about all this but you have that right taken away from you because the Green-Labor-independent alliance has control of both houses in Parliament.

Here is another example of how your rights have been compromised; debate on the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Powers and Offences Bill 2012) will start at 10pm on the March 20 and finish at 10.30pm. This bill, among other things, will govern the collection of DNA material and the parole conditions for federal offenders. I can’t work out why the Greens would be party to a decision to shut down a debate on a decision that involves the rights and liberties of the individual and the capacity that the government has to encroach on them.

Senator Bob Brown used to believe that the guillotine was counterintuitive to an open and transparent legislative system. Today he and his party voted for the guillotine not just on one piece of legislation but on 16. I wonder if he sticks that in his little green triangles at the next street march. Anyway, what will be will be, until the time comes to change the political mix at the next election.

Senator Bob Carr has also arrived this week. I thought he was going to bring some stability and sanity to the chaos of the Labor Party but after the hypnosis lecture he gave Australia at the Senate doors, I think I have been sadly misled.

Barnaby is right.

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Better Late Than Never: Hartcher’s Conscience Jarred

11 Mar

At last, a journalist from the lamestream media spots the galactic hypocrisy in Wayne Swan’s rants against 3 local miners.

Without actually calling it that, of course (emphasis added):

Swan’s pronouncements strike a jarring note, for three reasons. First, the contemporary playbook for “vested interest” campaigning was written not by the miners but by the unions.

It was the ACTU’s campaign against Howard’s Work Choices that established the power of an aggressive third-party thrust into politics. The union movement’s $30 million Your Rights at Work campaign discredited Work Choices, forced the Howard government into retreat and, finally, helped destroy the Coalition government. In the final humiliation, it even contributed to Howard’s loss of his seat of Bennelong. Swan was a beneficiary of this campaign.

Second, the miners that Swan demonised are not the miners that successfully emasculated his original mining tax. It was BHP Billiton, Rio and Xstrata that aggressively campaigned against the tax and funded its $22 million worth of lobbying and advertising, and it was Twiggy Forrest who went into private negotiations with Kevin Rudd to try to reach a compromise on the tax.

It was the three multinationals that helped discredit the Rudd government, accelerated Rudd’s downfall and forced the Gillard government to come to terms. Yet Swan does not mention these three multinationals in his critique of vested interests. Swan does not criticise the “vested interests” to whom he capitulated but the ones who were shut out of the negotiations. He is, in effect, punishing them for continuing to complain about a special deal to which he would not admit them.

The rest of Fairfax political editor Peter Hartcher’s article is well worth reading too. Even if it does continue to refrain from calling a spade a spade.

A little tip, Peter. That “jarring note” you feel, is called your Conscience.

The polar opposition between Wayne’s words, and his actions, pricks the inner sense of right and wrong once known as “morality” that we all possess, but few (especially politicians, and journalists) ever seem to recognise. Much less heed. And even less … act upon.

For the full story on Wayne Swan’s hypocrisy … and treason … not just on the mining tax, but on the carbon dioxide derivatives scam too, see this blog’s writeup of almost a week earlier – The Galactic Hypocrisy Of Wayne Swan.

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The Galactic Hypocrisy Of Wayne Swan

6 Mar

The red mist has descended.

Your humble blogger is angry.

Very angry.

Wayne Swan has publicly attacked three local, homegrown Aussie miners.

Ms Gina Rinehart. Mr Clive Palmer. And Mr Andrew Forrest.

Wayne claims that he is fighting for a “fair go”, for “equality”, against “rich” “vested interests” that are “threatening our democracy”.

Oh really?

Wayne Swan did a secret, exclusive deal on the design of the mining tax with the Big Three foreign-owned multinational mining companies, BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, and Xstrata, just before the 2010 election.

Wayne’s secret deal is widely claimed to favour the Big Three foreigners, at the expense of the much smaller local Aussie mining companies.

Wayne’s secret deal is alleged to have come about after the Big Three foreign-owned mining companies “gave the nod” for Julia Gillard to knife democratically-elected PM Kevin Rudd, and promised to pull their anti-mining tax ad campaign.

Tell us again, who is a “threat to democracy”?

Wayne Swan accuses three local Aussie miners – two of whom are self-made, from humble beginnings – of being “champions of privilege”.

Oh really?

Wayne is a career political hack, with an Arts degree, and zero business experience.

Wayne receives $346,000 per annum, $6,653 per week, paid for by the taxpayer.

Wayne voted himself an $84,000 pay rise late last year.

Wayne blew $75,440 of taxpayers’ money on empty RAAF VIP “ghost flights” to collect and ferry him around, in just 6 months last year.

Tell us again, who is a “champion of privilege”?

Wayne Swan is a vile, disgusting, public trough-swilling, grossly overpaid, thoroughly under qualified, pathologically dishonest, monumentally repugnant, morally destitute, vomitous, self-serving, bottom-dwelling, anti-Australian, treasonous, galactic hypocrite.

* I have chosen to keep this piece focussed on Swan and his attack on locals in the mining industry. I could write an entire new piece on other “vested interests” that Wayne oh so conveniently neglects to mention, much less publicly attack. For example, the unions who finance (and rule) the ALP, and the clubs industry whose “power” and political activism prompted the Labor government to brazenly renege on a written contract with Andrew Wilkie for poker machine reform. And that’s just for starters.

** The media in this country are deserving of very similar epithets to those attributed to Wayne Swan above. I am not aware that a single journalist has challenged Wayne Swan on any of the above facts.

*** Note well: this blogger is no fawning acolyte of miners, big business, or “free markets”. On the contrary, if it were within my power I would nationalise all mineral, petroleum, and natural gas resources – see “Why I Hang Farther To The Left Than Bob Brown”.

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Swan’s Anti-Australian Rant A Smokescreen For Treason

2 Mar

Treasurer Wayne Swan has written an essay in The Monthly. Doubtless you will hear about it elsewhere.

What you are highly unlikely to hear, is Wayne’s essay being called out for what it really is.

An anti-Australian rant. And a smokescreen for treason.

How so?

Consider Wayne’s definitive paragraph:

But Australia’s fair go is today under threat from a new source. To be blunt, the rising power of vested interests is undermining our equality and threatening our democracy. We see this most obviously in the ferocious and highly misleading campaigns waged in recent years against resource taxation reforms and the pricing of carbon pollution. The infamous billionaires’ protest against the mining tax would have been laughed out of town in the Australia I grew up in, and yet it received a wide and favourable reception two years ago. A handful of vested interests that have pocketed a disproportionate share of the nation’s economic success now feel they have a right to shape Australia’s future to satisfy their own self-interest.

Note well.

Wayne uses his essay to single out and publicly attack three (3) Australian citizens.

All wealthy miners.

All … how shall I put this delicately … of ordinary physical appearance.

Or less delicately … fat and ugly.

Here is the photo used for the piece:

Billionaire activists: Clive Palmer, Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart. © Philip Norrish/Newspix; Greg Wood/AAP; Tony McDonough/AAP

Wayne has singled out this Terrible Three as somehow exemplifying the dangers of “vested interests”, a threat to “democracy” and “equality”.

Conveniently, Wayne neglects to mention a few relevant facts.

A lot of relevant facts, actually.

He neglects to mention that he and Gillard locked these 3 Aussies-made-good out of the behind-closed-doors negotiation of his “mining tax”, and that instead, he negotiated the design of the MRRT exclusively and confidentially with BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, and Xstrata – the Big Three multinational mining companies.

He neglects to mention that the final design of the MRRT favours the foreign-owned multinationals – quelle surprise! – and that it will in reality act as a tax minimisation mechanism that will not “spread the wealth of the mining boom”, but will instead help the multinationals to increase their oligopoly, at the expense of much smaller Aussie locals like Palmer, Forrest, and Rinehart.

(Do you think that just might have something to do with their choosing to become “activists” against this government’s policy agenda?)

And the carbon tax “vested interests”?

Again, Wayne very conveniently neglects to mention a few highly relevant facts.

He neglects to mention that the Green-Labor government’s anointed chief “designer” of the Clean Energy Future legislation, Ross Garnaut, is a career Big Banker and a member of the Trilateral Commission.

He neglects to mention that the choirmaster for the “eminent economists” who publicly sang in favour of the legislation, Saul Eslake, was at the time the director of the BHP Billiton-founded and funded Grattan Institute; the former chief economist for ANZ Bank; and is now employed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch – a major player in the international CO2 derivatives trade.

He neglects to mention that Mr Eslake conceded (right here on this blog) that 7 of the 13 “eminent economists” who co-signed the Open Letter in support of the government’s plan to “price carbon” were current employees of banks; that 3 more were former employees of banks; and that only 3 of the 13 had no past or present associations with banks “as far as I know”.

He neglects to mention that Mr Eslake conceded (right here on this blog) that “..it is true that banks might make money from an emissions trading scheme..”.

He neglects to mention that just 3 days after the announcement of the draft legislation, leading banks were already announcing plans to cash in via a new carbon derivatives market, one specifically allowed by two tiny clauses buried in the 1,000 pages of legislation; a new market whose value (to banks) would, in their words, “dwarf” the value of the underlying market for basic carbon permits.

He neglects to mention other “vested interests” in our society too – like the unions who finance and rule his own party, and the banks who our major political parties rely on for loans to finance their election campaigns. Conflict-of-(vested)-interest, much?

Wayne has cynically picked out three easy targets to attack, in his class warfare-inciting rant.

Three fat, unattractive, wealthy, Australian Tall Poppies*.

Wayne has conveniently neglected to mention his own appalling hypocrisy.

And his treason.

Because when it comes to Green-Labor’s two big “economic reforms”, loudly touted as being in the “interests of all Australians”, the truth is that Wayne is personally culpable for selling out the financial best interests of the Australian people to multinational miners, and Big Finance.

Foreign-owned “vested interests”, whose wealth and power make our homegrown Ms Rinehart, Mr Palmer, and Mr Forrest appear mere paupers by comparison.

Treasurer Wayne Swan is a cynical, dishonest, anti-Australian, treasonous hypocrite of the lowest order. A disgrace to morally sentient beings.

He revolts me.

UPDATE:

It is alleged that the Big Three multinationals approved the plot to remove elected PM Kevin Rudd (and with him, the original RSPT):

JULIA Gillard was “given the nod” by the big three mining companies — Xstrata, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton—to challenge Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership, knowing the advertising campaign against the mining tax “would be pulled”.

… The revelations come from an article written by Mr Rudd’s friend and actor Rhys Muldoon, published in the latest issue of The Monthly magazine.

Immediately after the coup, Wayne and new PM Julia went behind closed doors with the Big 3 – and only the Big 3 – and quickly locked in a new deal before the election. One that the Big 3 foreigners are “happy with”.

And yet, Wayne Swan has the unmitigated gall to author a rant singling out and publicly vilifying 3 of our homegrown Aussie miners as the “dangerous” “vested interests” threatening our democracy?!

To paraphrase Thomas Beckett:

Will no one rid me of this turdulent Treasurer?

* My sincere apologies for the use of wholly unfair and brutal artistic licence to Ms Rinehart, Mr Palmer, and Mr Forrest, whom I’ve never met and have no reason to doubt are hard working, decent Australians.

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