[Graeme]

Australia: Tax billionaire companies to fund rapid transition to renewable energy

Even as the Australian federal Labor government sticks its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme [carbon trading scheme] into the freezer the climate change crisis intensifies, demanding a response adequate to its enormity. The goal dictated by climate science is annual emissions reductions of 5% from now to 2020 -- the critical "transition decade".

Policies such as a carbon tax and feed-in tariffs have a role to play in reaching that target, but there is no way it will be remotely achieved without a vast increase in public investment in programs that strip back carbon emissions in the key problem sectors -- energy generation, transport, land use, buildings and carbon-intensive industry.

Public investment, planning and oversight is the irreplaceable centrepiece of adequate climate action.

Detailed plans for the transition in all these sectors in Australia do not yet exist, but the Zero Carbon Australia project (ZCA) is working at them, and has already produced a detailed proposal for the most carbon-polluting -- stationery energy. It is costed at A$367 billion, or $36.7 billion annually to 2020, around 3% of Australia's present gross domestic product, or 10.3% of federal budget outlays.


When it comes to saving our planet, those who can most afford to pay -- the billionaires, especially those whose obscene wealth derives from polluting industries, must pay the bill.

link

[americandream]

So naive. Any company worth it's salt will have tax advisers who will find gaping holes in the legislation. Statutory interpretation renders most legislative provisions impotent in the hands of a good tax lawyer. And the cream of the tax legal profession tend to be in the private sector, not revenue authorities.

[timmac]

But I thought you would have been in Socialist Heaven there Americandream when reading this story..

Tax the rich give it to the poor and those that refuse to work and the government employees, cronies, thugs, but not let those Capitalist rich keep it...

[Graeme]

AD, That's a fair comment but if read the entire article, you'll see that this tax issue is a political hot potato. One would like to think that common sense will prevail once it's pointed out what the consequences will be if the big corporates don't help. They could benefit financially if they shifted investment into renewable energy.

Where would the money to fund the shift to renewable energy come from? The present tiff between the federal Labor government and the mining industry over the proposed Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT, see article below) provides the clue. In 2006-07 (the last year for which full statistics are available) pre-tax resource industry profits stood at $41 billion and the industry profit margin (pre-tax profits as a proportion of total income) at 35%.

If mining super-profits in that year had been creamed off to bring the mining industry profit margin to the average, (economy-wide) rate of 12.8%, the public purse would have benefited to the tune of $26 billion. That's 70% of the annual funding needed for energy sustainability. (We should also add in the $2 billion a year that the industry receives in fuel and energy tax exemptions.)

Despite the orchestrated squealing of the billionaire mining oligarchs the federal Labor government's RSPT won't be reducing mining industry profitability anything like that much. When the RSPT is in full operation it is predicted to trim only $9 billion a year off the industry's profits, between 10% and 15% of the likely total.

[americandream]

You need to sit at a tax planning conference. These people and their bonuses are dependant on the next dividend declaration and that's all that concerns them. I'm not anti-capitalism out of any airy fairy "let's all be nice" notion. I've worked with these pople and know for a fact that they are only answerable to the bottom line despite what they say. Remove the profit motive and you remove the incentive to work the safety systems we have to setup as large organised societies.

[americandream]

I find it remarkable that you persist in defining socialism as these pathetic Keynesian liars. Socialism woud see you and me and everyone else in worldwide collectives, no private ownership of anything and our modernity applied to improve us as a species in more ways that your feeble mind is capable of contemplating (OTHER than endlessly shopping and wasting valuable resources).

The arts, sport, music ( and I mean of the sort that uplifts us and does not reduce us to a primeval state of blubbering neo-barbarism) and community in which our lives are real instead of the anaemic virtual variants that abound.

The freedom to be a fully functioning specimen in other words rather than the brute (and I would do the animal kingdom a disservice to compares these creatures to our forest, ocean and bush dwelling fellow earthly dwellers) idiocy that so characterises the modern moron.

But I thought you would have been in Socialist Heaven there Americandream when reading this story..

Tax the rich give it to the poor and those that refuse to work and the government employees, cronies, thugs, but not let those Capitalist rich keep it...

[Graeme]

That's why we have governments - to moderate extreme, right-wing capitalism. It's a constant battle. Would you like to get involved in politics? At this point, I won't but their role now is critical.

[americandream]

There's nothing extreme about the tendencies the profit motive gives rise to. The desire to capitalise on one advantages is entirely natural in a system which elevates wealth and privilege to a godlike state of being.

The fact that such behaviour also generates all the issues we find ourselves surrounded with is an incident of that behaviour, a dangerous outcome at that, but entirely to be expected in the circumstances.

[Graeme]

Swan opens door to resources super-profits tax threshold change

WAYNE Swan has refused to rule out changing the 6 per cent threshold at which the government’s proposed resources super-profits tax would kick in.

At a media conference this morning, the only element of Labor's contentious mining tax package the Treasurer would guarantee as non-negotiable was the 40 per cent tax rate.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh and others have argued that the 6 per cent threshold is too low, pointing towards the 11 per cent return allowed under the petroleum resource rent tax.

When pressed on whether the threshold was a “non-negotiable” Mr Swan said: “I can tell you this. The government is absolutely committed to putting in place a resource super-profits tax of 40 per cent which delivers fair value to all Australians for the resources that they own 100 per cent, which will deliver vital tax cuts for corporate Australia, for small business; investments in superannuation and infrastructure.”

Mr Swan used the media conference to point to an open letter from 20 leading economists and academics that backed the government's mining tax.

He said the group saw “very clearly that replacing a royalty regime with a profits-based tax is squarely in the national interest”.

theaustralian