On Wednesday it was reported that resource giant Xstratra was unhappy it is not a member of Prime Minister Julia Gillard's business advisory round table on climate change. Some of the companies at the round table are BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Woodside Petroleum and Origin Energy.
Well, now Xstrata knows bow the small and medium sized miners felt when Xstrata, BHP Billiton, and Rio Tinto were exclusively, and secretly, negotiating with the federal government on changes to the resource super profits tax. And now Xstratra knows how everyone who believes Australia should not have a carbon price feels about not being able to be included in the federal government's climate change consultation process.
As Gillard has made very clear, the only people she'll be talking to during her consultations are people who agree with her.
Xstrata has good reason to be worried. It was inside the government's tent on the resource super profits tax. It saw what happened to everyone who was outside of the tent. The big three miners, got most of the deal they wanted and the small miners were reduced to pleading their case to a committee of bureaucrats.
Ministers should be free to talk to anyone they want. But they can't claim the legitimacy of ''consultation'' if they only ''consult'' with people who share their opinion. Further, if ministers do engage in consultation, the process must be transparent and they must be careful not to be seen to be extending privileges to some groups and not others.
Based on what's happened over the past few months it looks like the Gillard government is less interested in genuine consultation and more concerned about getting public relations outcomes. Worse, there's the issue that the federal government appears to be giving preferential treatment to some groups and not to others.
Imagine what would be the public reaction if Wayne Swan announced he planned to increase personal income tax rates for all 11 million Australian taxpayers, but the only people he was going to consult were taxpayers who earned more than $1 million a year. Further, imagine if Swan held his meetings with these millionaires in secret and he gave the millionaires confidential information from the Treasury department about the predicted impact of these tax changes on the condition that such material could not be made public.
Finally, imagine if at the end of this process Swan declared that, as a result of his consultations with the millionaires, he had decided on a revised set of arrangements that would apply to every taxpayer in the country, regardless of whether they earned $20,000 or $20 million a year. There would be an outcry. As there should be.
Yet this is almost exactly what happened in relation to the resource super profits tax. The only difference between this imaginary scenario and the reality of the RSPT is that in the latter case the government was driven to the negotiating table by a multi-million dollar advertising campaign against it.
What's worrying is not even that the sort of behaviour witnessed over the RSPT is what passes for normal these days. In Victoria, there's been the episode of an adviser to the planning minister being caught inventing an entirely sham consultation process for a building development in central Melbourne.
What's alarming is that few people seem to care that this is what government in Australia has come to. To his credit, independent senator Nick Xenophon has called on Wayne Swan to publicly release the information from Treasury that was made available to Xstrata, BHP Billiton, and Rio Tinto during the negotiations on the resource tax. So far the Treasurer has refused. He's claimed that releasing such information would be damaging to the government and to those three companies. Maybe the Treasurer is right. But a broader principle is at stake. Government should not be conducted in secret. And there's something else too. It should not be forgotten that the resource tax is actually a law. And it is a law that applies to more than just three companies. The idea that government should secretly negotiate a law with only some of the people to whom the law potentially applies is abhorrent.
The way the federal government and Australia's three biggest mining companies acted over the resource super profits tax set a dangerous precedent. Hopefully, when it comes to setting a potential price on carbon, government and big business will act differently.
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