Australian billionaires take to the streets for tax protest

By Kathy Marks / Independent


It was, by any measure, a most unusual rally. Many of the placard-waving protesters gathered in a Perth park wore suits and ties, and impassioned speeches were delivered from the back of a flat-bed truck by two billionaires, including Australia's richest woman.

Gina Rinehart's pearls glistened in the sunlight as she bellowed through a megaphone: "Axe the tax!" Ms Rinehart has a personal fortune of $4.8bn (£2.7bn). Andrew Forrest, in monogrammed worker's overalls, told the well-mannered crowd that

Australia was "turning Communist". Mr Forrest is the country's fourth richest person, worth an estimated $4.2bn.
Both Mr Forrest and Ms Rinehart have amassed their wealth from digging up iron ore in the remote Pilbara region. Like other mining magnates, they have grown fabulously rich during a resources boom based largely on China's insatiable demand for the coal, iron, nickel and other minerals that lie in abundance beneath Australia's rust-red soil.

Now Kevin Rudd's Labour government is planning to levy an extra tax on the mining industry, and the industry is furious. The issue has dominated the political agenda for weeks, and is even threatening to torpedo Mr Rudd's chance of being returned to power at an election due to be held before the end of this year.

Labour, which had an unassailable lead over the conservative Liberal-National Party coalition six months ago, is now trailing by six percentage points, according to a poll this week. If that were translated into votes on election day, Mr Rudd would become the first prime minister for nearly 80 years to lose office after just one term.

The so-called "super tax" – which will claim 40 per cent of profits above the long-term government bond rate – is not the only reason why Labor was so unpopular. There is a bungled home insulation scheme, blamed for four deaths. There is Mr Rudd's decision to freeze the processing of claims by Afghan and Sri Lankan asylum-seekers. And there is his postponement of a carbon emissions trading regime – this from a man who once called climate change "the greatest moral and economic challenge of our age".


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