University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities 1-1-2014 The minerals resource rent tax: the Australian Labor Party and the continuity of change John Passant University of Wollongong,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Passant, John, "The minerals resource rent tax: the Australian Labor Party and the continuity of change" (2014). Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers. 1772. https://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/1772 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library:
[email protected] The minerals resource rent tax: the Australian Labor Party and the continuity of change Abstract Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to look at the recent history of proposals to tax resource rents in Australia, from Australia's Future Tax System Report (the "Henry Tax Review") through to the proposed Resource Super Profits axT ("RSPT") and then the Minerals Resource Rent Tax ("MRRT"). The process of change from Henry to the RSPT to the MRRT can best be understood in the context of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) as a capitalist workers' party. The author argues that it is this tension in the ALP, the shift in its internal balance further towards capital and the lack of class struggle, that has seen Labor preside over what the father of rent tax in Australia, Ross Garnaut, describes as a "problematic" tax.