Excerpts from Lang Hancock’s Wake Up Australia (Sydney: Dwyer, 1979).

Wake Up Australia

Most people pass their days with no thought of the role mining plays in their lives. In fact, it never enters their heads that without mining they could not live.

The great bulk of people have probably never seen a mine and yet it is the foundation of their very existence with an impact that touches on everyone’s life. How could we live today without motor cars, telephones, television and modern medicine?

Imagine a world without steel, aluminium or glass. Without minerals we could not harvest our food, till our soil, build our machines, supply our energy, transport our goods or maintain any society beyond the most primitive. Our horn of plenty starts with a hole in the ground.

We are in great trouble if we forget it, and people in Australia, particularly in Canberra, and government circles generally, have forgotten it, whilst it would seem that the western world generally has never realised it.

Throughout history civilisations have been shaped by the use of minerals. Mineral supplies have determined the rise and fall of empires, patterns of populations and the evolution of human enterprise in industry and rising living standards.

Big Government The Killer

Before we can wake up we will need to outlaw the drug (big government) which has put us to sleep, no matter how uncomfortable or embarrassing the withdrawal process may be.

I don’t think anyone can deny that Australia is in an economic doldrum and getting worse, which is inexcusable considering our natural wealth, but which is inevitable because of the form of misgovernment in which we (in common with much of the western world) are hogtied. Describing our form of government as democracy is a misnomer; in practical application it is the most diabolical form of dictatorship imaginable — economic dictatorship.

Irrespective of what party is in power or who leads them, Australia is heading for bigger and bigger government with more and more restrictive controls, forcing us even further down the slippery slope to total socialism.

How to Develop Our Wealth

If we want huge capital investment in the north of Australia […] we must join in the international incentive race to make it worthwhile for capital to come in to develop our raw materials.

We have to raise the wind on the international money market, and do it so effectively that the wind we raise becomes a cyclone, blasting hundreds of millions of dollars into circulation north of the 26th parallel.

The proven method that has worked elsewhere in the world is to declare an income tax holiday. For example, in 1940, Puerto Rico had no factories and no capital. The administration decided to make Puerto Rico tax free. In came the capital, big and small, for everything from roads to brassieres.

Tax Holiday

“Operation Bootstrap” they called this tax free policy. In 17 years it brought Puerto Rico 667 factories, 80,000 new jobs and the expectation that by 1975 there would be 2,500 factories and a standard of living equal to the United States 1960 standard. In came General Electric, Maidenform, Union Carbide, Parke Davis, Remington Rand, and so on. In the 1950s and 1960s, Puerto Rico experienced a German-like economic miracle. But in the early 1970s the economy sputtered and then, with the quadrupling of oil prices, economic growth disappeared because at the behest of a blue ribbon committee of American economists, bankers and financiers, Puerto Rico raised taxes. The theory was that the increased taxation would reduce inflation and dampen consumer spending.

The programme was a flop. The economy continued to “sit down” as Puerto Ricans put it. In 1976 voters threw out the incumbent governor and his party.

Thanks in large part to the incoming ruler’s tax cutting moves, Puerto Rico’s economy is reviving. After experiencing no growth in 1974 and 1976, it expanded almost 5% last year and should do even better this year.

What makes the new governor’s actions more noteworthy is that, under their constitution, the budget must be balanced. The Government has therefore little margin for error. (Australia please note.)

Action Needed

The sensible way to develop Australia’s richest […] (without cost to the taxpayer) would be to declare north of the 26th parallel of Western Australia, the Northern Territory and a part of north-western Queensland (to be defined), a frontier country, (free from government controls) and in that frontier create a deliberate anomaly of a 100% income tax free holiday for a trial period of 20 years, with a 40% re-investment clause applicable to capital only, in order to qualify for this 100% income tax immunity.

Wage and salary earners would be exempt from this re-investment provision so that they would get the benefit in their first pay envelope.

Such a scheme would attract capital “know-how” and highly qualified technicians from all over the world, as well as from within Australia from those living south of the 26th parallel.

The point to remember about this is that it is to apply to income tax only, so that if this tax is foregone in order to get the scheme going, developments would soon snowball to the point where the indirect tax exceeded by far the amount of income tax not collected from current businesses. In other words a plus for the Treasury.

In addition, once new projects were developed they would generate their own field of ever-mounting indirect tax flowing to the Treasury. In this way no one can say we are asking for a big hand-out scheme. What we are asking is for the Australian government to be business-like and forgo a spra?y in order to catch the biggest mackerel in the sea.

No one is suggesting that the scheme is fair and equitable. (It wouldn’t work if it was). A deliberate anomaly must be created so that people south of the line think they are getting something for nothing by moving north.

No one is asking Canberra for a giant hand-out to promote some white elephant scheme. On the contrary, the government is being offered a development scheme for the north and the means of self-preservation for the whole of Australia; free gratis and for nothing as far as the taxpayer is concerned.

Surely […] it is not asking too much of leadership to display a little courage by making the north income tax free for a trial period of twenty years.

Tax on Nothing Is Nothing

In the instances where this move became successful in starting up new projects the gain is 100% to the Treasury because the tax on nothing is nothing. In other words, mineral lying unworked in the ground pays no tax, pays no royalty, creates no jobs, earns no foreign exchange.

By comparison, let’s look at a recent year’s tax from one of the areas biggest mines:

  • $22.8 million was profit after tax of which
  • $12.9 million was paid in shareholders dividends upon which the Treasury reaped tax.
  • $11.9 million royalty
  • $5 million payroll tax, plus sales tax,

and excise duties on the millions of dollars worth of equipment the mine buys, plus stamp duty, land tax and profits from rail freight charges, not forgetting that the Treasury also receives all the indirect taxes on everything that the employees buy. These indirect taxes would increase from existing projects as well as springing into being from minerals at present unworked and yielding nothing if my income tax free development proposals were implemented.

Parkinson’s Law the Killer

The fact that nothing has been done on a government level to develop the most vital part of Australia is not because there are not intelligent people in Canberra (far from it) but simply because the tax-free scheme does not appeal to the self-interest of those in influential places. For instance, it does not envisage the rapid expansion of any large government department, whilst as a source of votes in the political field, the Pilbara has not got a single representative in the Federal Parliament.

No Alternative

It is worth mentioning that since the tax-free scheme for northern development was first rejected some years ago, no one has come forth with any intelligent alternative method of developing our north.

In other words, Canberra must create a favourable climate attractive to risk capital. If it is to be effective all harmful restrictions must be removed and the government would need to declare:

  1. An absolute guarantee of security of tenure from the discovery right through to the production stage;
  2. That there will be no more Fraser Island repudiations;
  3. That export licences have been dispensed with henceforth;
  4. That the Foreign Investment Review Board is abolished and that there are no restrictions on the amount of foreign ownership of raw resources ventures;
  5. That the Variable Deposit Rule has been abolished;
  6. That there will be no more super tax levies such as the $6 per ton levy on certain coal mining companies just because they have made good profits;
  7. That there will be no “resource” tax;
  8. That the Government will honour agreements henceforth.
  9. That retrospective tax legislation will not be countenanced;
  10. That mining which is the basis of all civilisation must not be molested by environmental lobbies;
  11. That the rules won’t be changed once the ball has bounced;
  12. That our internal cost structure will be lowered by an across the board tariff reduction, at least equivalent to the amount of devaluation of the $Aust.

Nor-West Shelf

Unless the above guarantees are forthcoming from our government, can anyone except the more gullible of creatures, imagine that a hard headed consortium is going to invest billions of dollars is a high risk closed loop operation such as the Nor-West Gas — especially when competitive governments have a far more realistic approach to capitalism than do Australian governments at present. Such is the dominance of the real government over our elected representatives that according to Viv Forbes:

Politicians seems to think that oil is produced by taxes, levies, enquiries, commissions, regulations, export controls and senate standing committees.

At best these activities merely use up energy. Unfortunately they also deter exploration, defer development and restrict production. They also distract producers who are forced to spend valuable time and energy preparing submissions, appearing before tribunals, educating bureaucrats, and apologising to the media for their profits.

There are at least 10 State and Federal departments promulgating contradictory and often inept energy policies. In addition there are four Federal energy standing committees continuously debating all aspects of energy plus the Australian Science and Technology Advisory Council. As if this was not enough Canberra has appointed a new National Energy Advisory Committee consisting of 7 professors, 5 public servants, 2 laymen, 1 unionist, 1 energy consumers, 1 energy producer, and not one explorationist.

Should anyone be considering using foreign capital to build an oil refinery the approval of at least ten more government departments is required. We are approaching the time when the weight of submissions required for any project will exceed the expected production of oil.

What needs to be recognised is that government activity can never increase production of anything except laws, and red tape.

The role is entirely negative.