Rechtub,
Here's where your analogy breaks down.
If you bought land, you would own the gravel.
But minerals, via the states, are the property of the Australian people.
And I for one do not see why we should let freeloaders like rinehart and palmer, backed by investors in other countries, rip our common wealth from theground, become absurdly rich, all the while crying poor and demanding that the tax payer help them rape us.
And when an attempt is made to tax their SUPER profits, that harridon rinehart is on the back of a truck screaming.
Maybe, we should nationalise all mines in Australia, and have the Australian government pay competent mining managers to run the mines on behalf of all Australians.
Hmm, that's not a bad idea now I come to reflect on it.
Anthony
http://www.observationpoint.com.au

Anthonyve,

You fail to realise that in-situ minerals nave no inherent value; to anyone. The value is only realised when the minerals are extracted, processed and sold.

Good luck with your nationalisation plans. Do you propose that the government buys the assets (not the minerals but the processing plants, infrastructure and equipment) or just simply steals it all? Governments can't seem to find enough money to build roads by themselves so how they could provide the initial and ongoing finance for mining eludes me. Besides, they wouldn’t have anyone left to tax!

In the UK, they nationalised the coal mining industry and formed the National Coal Board. The acronym NCB came to stand for "No Cxxx Bothers" by those who worked there. Sounds like a great model. How did that go for them?

Peter,
First of all, minerals in the ground have value, just as money in a safe has value.
You take it out and you convert it into goods and services.
As for nationalsing, well, yeah, that was tongue in cheek.
But what a threat to use to bring greedy miners to heel
I'm always fascinated by the passion some folk will demonstrate in defending the rights of others to get rich at their expense.
Makes little sense to me.
I save my passion for projects that result in social justice, where all get their, what's the phrase I'm looking for? Oh, right 'fair share'.
And every Australian has a right to a fair share in our mineral wealth.
Including miners, but in their case not obscene wealth.
And they should damned well quit their endless whining and pay fair taxes, just like you and me.
Anthony
http://www.observationpoint.com.au

Anton, minerals may well have value, bu only to the right person.

You can have hundreds of billions worth of Minerals on yourland, however, without the billions of investment dollars, they are worthless, as the cost of mining them is cost prohibitive.

Now had these miners been told that IF they find something we are going to tax you, would they have bothered.

You can't shift the goal posts mid stream.

If you wish to share in the spoils, share in the risks as well. It's called buying shares.

We are being paid for our minerals in royalties, now if this is set wrong, then fix it, but please don't make out that these miners are cheating us of taxes, because they are not.

In fact, they are generating huge taxes, much of which may be placed at risk.

You lot just don't get it.

<< Ludwig please explain why we should reduce our use of oil. >>

Aww Haz do I have to?

It’ll be about the thousandth time I’ve done so on OLO!

Your whole focus is on climate change. Well, as I have implored you to do numerous times and to which you don’t respond; concentrate on peak oil instead. We have to do essentially the same sort of things for that as we do for climate change, and it is in all likelihood a whole lot more urgent.

We’ve got to wean ourselves off of our addiction to oil regardless of whether AGW is real or not.

That doesn’t mean getting off of oil, it means drawing a fair portion of our energy requirements from renewable sources so that it is easier to move much more towards them when the price of oil becomes prohibitive.

<< I really would like you to give me the evidence, as you see it, so I can evaluate it, & what you are saying >>

You refer to evidence for AGW. But as I say, this is really beside the point.

I’m not going to give you any evidence. I’m a climate change sceptic, not a ‘warmist’. But as I keep saying, if we are not sure, we should definitely be erring on the side of caution and planning to reduce greenhouse gas emissions just as strongly as if we were totally sure about it.

Only the complete denialists should be poo-pooing the precautionary principle. But then, no one can be a real denialist because no one can realistically assert that AGW is completely false.

continued

But I digress, because climate change should not be the main concern with the carbon tax.

Our utter addiction to oil, our enormous dependence on it for everything, to the extent that our society would just collapse in a heap if supplies were considerably reduced or prices considerably hiked, the ever-increasing demand for oil and hence increasing consumption rate and the non-increasing supply capability, the progressively higher price of oil, and the prospect of the big powerful nations muscling the supplier nations to give them more oil and thus reduce or cut out supplies to smaller nations like us when it comes to the crunch.

THIS is what it is all about… or should be.

So, I would be in favour of a carbon tax that concentrated on oil to start with and then moved into disincentives for coal and gas at a later stage.