A Critical Evaluation of Australian Mineral Resources Rent Tax

The Absent Presence of the State in Large-Scale Resource Extraction Projects

“…His successor, Julia Gillard, introduced a weaker Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) which was initially forecast to raise AUD3.7 billion a year, but net revenue was only AUD88 million in its two years of operation, 2012-14. Reasons for its failure have been split among weak commodity prices, 'industry capture' of the process of designing the legislation-BHP, Rio Tinto and Xstrata had a hand in this-and insufficient technical expertise in the Treasury (Valle de Souza et al 2016). The situation is no better in the energy sector, where it could be decades before the PRRT brings significant returns from new gas projects coming online in the north of Australia (AFG 2016: 4).…”

Australian Government failure and the VET FEE-HELP loan programme

“…A small but growing scholarly literature has examined various cases of government failure in the Australian Federation, mostly national public policies at the federal level launched by the Australian Government. Scholars in this line of enquiry have examined numerous programmes, including the fiscal stimulus programme following the global financial crisis (Makin, 2010a, b), the Home Insulation Program (Kortt and Dollery, 2012a), the Green Loan Program (Kortt and Dollery, 2012b), the Building the Education Revolution program (Lewis et al , 2014), the Mineral Resources Rent Tax (de Souza et al , 2016a) and the NBN (de Souza et al , 2016b). Notwithstanding work by Warburton (2016) and Fellows and Dollery (2019), as yet no analysis of the evolution and nature of VET FEE-HELP policy failure have been undertaken.…”