Gina Rinehart said that the international competitiveness of Australia would be impaired by the proposed mining and carbon taxes. The iron ore heiress was speaking on the sidelines of the Boao Forum for Asia business conference in Perth.
Mrs Rhinehart who is the executive chairwoman of Hancock Prospecting Pty Ltd, said that costs in Australia were already quite high and if the Federal Government added the $23 per tonne carbon tax it Australian mining operations would likely become less competitive and Australian companies would lose business.
She said that overseas trading partners would not turn a blind eye to the increased business costs. They would look at other options to get things cheaper elsewhere and they may look towards Mongolia and West Africa instead of continuing buying from Australia.
She has been a vocal critic of the resources super profits tax (RSPT) that former prime minister Kevin Rudd wanted to implement and she also highly critical of the replacement mineral resources rent tax (MRRT) struck by Prime Minister Julia Gillard in a pre-election deal with Rio Tinto and fellow mining giants BHP Billiton and Xstrata.
Independent analyst Peter Strachan also supported her view point. He said that if you were a manufacturer in Australia and the cost of your emissions is killing you, you can take your manufacturing overseas but if you're a LNG producer in Australia, you can't take that overseas, and the Government's aware of that and so they're going to just slug them as much as they can bear.
He added that the major multinationals are diversified across commodities and diversified across countries so the percentage of their activities in Australia can be large, as in the case of BHP and Rio Tinto. The smaller miners are only in Australia and they are going to be slugged no matter what they do.