Dickie dear, I find it rather amusing that you find Norwegians
such good managers, given that they make their "filthy lucre"
from mining the ocean, and killing whales and other sea life.

Sadly some of that "filthy lucre" was lost, when their Govt
invested parts of it with Lehman Bros and similar!

Indeed Peter Costello established a future fund, to invest for
the future. But Kevie and Co decided that "cash splashes" and
similar jokes were more important. As Kerry Packer pointed out,
Govts don't tend to spend it so wisely, that we should give them
any extra. Waste is the name of the game in Canberra.

But comparing Australia to Norway is like comparing apples and
oranges for many reasons. For a start, climate. You'll find
that people in northern countries work a bit more then in the
south. For the weather in Norway is not really idea for surfing
in Byron Bay, lazing at the beach in general or holding a
corroboree. So people are indoors more and when they are,
then tend to become more industrious. The net result is less
leeches on the tax take.

Next mining. Oil mining and on land rock mining are quite
different. It takes more then to stick a straw in the North
sea to extra megadollars, with hard rock mining,as you would
know. So it takes more investment and risk, financed by
private enterprise, unlike North Sea oil.

I partly agree but am concerned the tax is going too far. Rudd has performed very poorly in introducing this tax by making it a war against the miner and also a war against foreign investors. makes Australia look poor for investors.

I am in Far North Queensland and the economy is bad. Rudd is trying to get people to see there are two speed economies. One speed is Cairns which is woeful. The Australian dollar is far too high he says so tourism suffers as a result so places like Cairns are going under. If he trashes the value of the Australian dollar all the tourists are supposed to start coming. ha ha.

So he runs the risk of increassing the interest rates because higher risks associated with investing here and we end up the same as last century. Maybe not as high but same problem. Sometimes trying to fixing problems government create them.

The bottom line though is the government getting all this extra money does not mean Australians will get to share it. I find that hard to believe lol. Just transfering the money from states to Canberra really. How scary.

I am curious as to how the Treasury boffins came up with the idea that a mere 6 per cent return on investment represents a "Super profit", given that my understanding is that a nominal 10% ROI is not an unreasonable low-end-of-the-spectrum return on a speculative or a moderate risk-bearing investment. Certainly there is a case for an increased royalty type payment in exchange for the resources but the very low base proposed for this so-called 'super profit' tax is flawed and not unexpected from the Labor side of politics.

Can the red/green/getup/labour cheer squad "please explain" to me why they are not going for an "across the board" increase in personal income tax rates for all high income earners, CEOs, regardless of which industry they earned their "excess profits" in? Or a wealth tax, etc?

Oh yeah, the PM, cabinet, etc, might have to pay more & we can't have that. Plus they needed cash fast to cover their "spend like a drunken sailor" habit, so lets go after an allegedly, politically easy target.

That & its an opportunity to play wedge politics plus lots of dog whistling.

Let's put aside the personal attacks made against the character of some of the critics of the new tax. Instead, let's look at the claim that the resources industry isn't paying its own way. The authors state that the industry paid just 7% of its $100 billion income as tax in 2006-2007. But they also state that corporate profits in 2005 amounted to 27% of income. In other words, 73% of corporate income was paid out as wages and to suppliers and service providers. Where would Australia be today without that re-investment of commodity sales income having been invested back into the national economy?
Analysing the numbers a little more also shows that the $7 billion paid as tax was in fact paid out of the industry's $27 billion profit, a tax rate of 26%, not 7% as the authors want you to believe.
All up, this is a very shallow analysis of the new tax and the criticisms levelled against it.

Today in WA, I read a letter to the editor of a regional paper where the author claims that over the last five years, $225 billion has been repatriated to foreign investors in the mining industry in WA.

Assuming some accuracy to the claim, one could imagine with that sort of money, we could have the best health care in the world. With Australia’s increasing GHG emissions, comes the ambient and tropospheric discharge of non-GHG hazardous emissions as well, coupled with an escalating morbidity incidence among the Australian population.

Several Australian studies on the impacts of NO2, Particulate Matter and SO2 have shown strong and consistent associations between children's hospital admissions and industrial air pollutants in Australia but there remains a paucity of research on the other couple of hundred noxious chemicals discharged from the mining industry.

The mutagenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are the products of the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and have been detected on suspended particulate matter (PM), an inconvenient truth for a mining industry which is self-regulated and self-reporting:

1. A single mining operation at Boddington WA discharges 6.2 million kgs of Particulate Matter to the environment every year

2. At Cadia Valley in Orange, one operation emits 8.2 million kgs of PM

3. The Century Mine Burketown, 9.7 million kgs of PM

4. One operation at Telfer in WA, 10 million kgs of PM

5. One bauxite operation at Weipa, 8.8 million kgs PM

Alcoa’s Smelter at Pt Henry emits 16 million kgs of CO annually

Alcoa’s operation at Anglesea Victoria emits 33 million kgs of SO2 annually.

And we must take them at their word, however, the mining industry is not obliged to pay for the environmental carnage they cause or the escalating health costs of industrial pollution.