Julie Bishop <This economic thinking runs counter to everything that made Australia rich over the last three decades, namely the embrace of competition and capitalism which rewards high risk with high returns>

Uncontrolled Capitalism also sent the banks broke recently, As for competition, I don’t think Woolworths and Coles have very much competition that’s why groceries never stop going higher in price.

Don’t get me wrong I believe in private enterprise and Capitalism as long as there is an authority that can step in and reign in some of the excesses of Capitalism when it is in the interests of Demos. Demos as in Democratic, meaning for the people. That is all the people not just the Jetset millionaires like the mining magnates

The call to "add value" to the resources is economically naive. Most of these industries have closed down as China and India can do it for a fraction of the cost. The only way to make this viable is to pay the employees a fraction of what they earn now. As there very little unemployment, I don't see many of our youth gravitating towards sweat shops.

The miners are not afraid that other countries will follow suit, in fact Canada is now offering sweeteners to Rio and BHP, and as they are international companies they can switch focus overnight. The same goes for South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, etc.

Having the highest tax rate on mining in the world should ring alarm bells in anyone with an IQ greater than a squirrel, but Rudd thinks its is about right?

Rudd should have hit the fossil fuel miners specifically with a carbon tax at the minehead. But a carbon tax should be part of a package that both makes fossil fuels increasingly prohibitively expensive in order to reduce their extraction whilst encouraging investment in low emissions energy technologies. This Resource Rent Tax isn't aimed at causing any reductions in anything, just to maximise the return to the owners of these mineral resources; it will just add to the dependence on their revenues and our gov'ts desire to increase extraction rates.
Julie, I can't imagine you could come up with any policy that actually results in reduced fossil fuel extraction (and reduced global emissions) and you belong to a party that's made it clear it wants to make the great challenge of climate change go away by the power of disbelief. Your party's undying support for the big vested interests who refuse to acknowledge the costs and consequences of failing to deal with GHG emissions is why you are dinosaurs, headed for the vilified villains section of future history. Any party that dismisses and ignores the best scientific advice at it's disposal and prefers to take their 'science' from the losers and liars of climate science reveals itself unfit to govern. Until your lot can turn away from your delusion of disbelief and put Australia's and the world's future ahead of the wealth of your wealthy mates you shouldn't be in parliament even as opposition members. Don't take it too personally; apart from the rhetoric I don't see Labor is any better - with no more intention than LibNats to plan for the future essential shutdown of the fossil fuel industry.

"Adding value" locally to unprocessed raw materials is a good idea but not always permitted by powerful stakeholders.

The final nail in Whitlam's political coffin was when he proposed to process uranium yellowcake on-shore and got USA interests offside.

Even BHP decided that local steelmaking was something that was no longer profitable enough and had no hesitation in acting in its own interests.

Shadow Minister: << The call to "add value" to the resources is economically naive. >>

I'm no economist, but I'd like to know what the apologists for the rampant mining industry propose as the basis for Australia's economy once we've sold off all of our mineral resources to the lowest bidders. It seems to me that our economy is very similar in this respect to places like Nauru, which enjoyed a brief period of wealth but is struggling to support its population now that all the superphosphate has been mined.

Currently we have coal mining companies destroying prime agricultural land in places like the Liverpool Plains and Darling Downs. Maybe if a resource rent tax slows them down a bit, that will ultimately prove to be a good thing, IMHO.

To all here who applauded the "redistribution of wealth" driven by the mining sector.
Where was this legislation two weeks ago, one month ago, two years ago...absolutely nowhere, not in sight or on the horizon? Where will the revenue go? It will pay the interest on the tens of billions borrowed and wasted by Labor. Why did Labor not bring in the mining tax to exclusively pay for the national health scheme, another failure I may add? The answer is that paying back the debt and covering their ass is more important than the people’s hospital and health care system, and that goes for both sides of politics.

Those here who embrace it as being our right because the resource is ours by birth or citizenship need a reality check. When you are born the government does not give you land and a house, at that point you own nothing except yourself. Everything that comes after your birth is purchased in some way or another including the dirt below our feet.

What we own collectively as a nation in pragmatic terms is not the soil, but the right to legislate guidelines as to how business is to be conducted on that soil.

I am not against a review of tax versus net profits in the exhaustible natural resources segment, but unlike Labor I considered it for many years. The mining sector sustained us during the global downturn. I experienced Europe and the States in 2009, and if their fiscal pain rated ten ours rated two, and it was not because of anything we made, but what we dug up. We are not out of the fire yet and hammering the resource segment right now is simply not common sense governance.