AFR: Mining Super-Profits Levy

The University of Western Australia

MEDIA STATEMENT21 APRIL 2021Published in the Australian Financial Review on 22 April 2021“As was the case during the last resources boom, and the one before that, the super-profits earned by a handful of resource majors in this country are a giant rip-off of the Australian people.“Furthermore, the greed of these three is unbelievable: they haven’t even bothered to establish serious, large scale charitable foundations to benefit the Australian people at the scale that other serious global firms do. And in Rio’s case, they dynamite indigenous heritage in the way through.“I fully understand the financial investment needed for long term projects. But nowhere in their long term financial planning did any company forecast prices at this level. That’s why the Australian people, who actually own these resources and merely lease them to these companies, deserve a higher return.“That’s why I believe these three majors should pay a super-profits levy into a national investment fund to underpin the future of Australian higher education and research, because this is the sector that will need to generate the next tranche of national wealth. We need Australian equity in the global technology revolution now underway, where we are in danger of owning none of the intellectual property and assets that will drive future global growth.”Ends