Two ads released last week neatly expose
Australia’s Madonna/whore relationship with the mining industry. In the first
campaign for the Minerals Council of Australia, mining is our great provider,
nourishing us with all that we desire. In the other campaign, from the Hunter
Valley Protection Society, mining is a trashy callgirl whose solicitations will
corrupt our way of life.
Reprising their successful 2010 “Keep
Mining Strong” campaign style of punchy headlines, bar graphs, long body copy
and unstylish art direction, the Minerals Council of Australia hope to pre-empt
any further imposts or taxes in the upcoming budget. “Australian Mining. It’s
not a bottomless pit” is a great headline, and the copywriter is no doubt patting
himself or herself on the back. It neatly nails the new strategy, which has
shifted subtly away from the campaign that helped bring down Kevin Rudd. (In
one of the great advertising ironies, the campaign was masterminded by Neil
Lawrence, also responsible for the Kevin07 campaign that brought Rudd to
power.) Implicit in this latest headline, however, is a subliminal acceptance
of the recent idea that mining is in a special category all of its own – not
like all those other everyday businesses – and has a unique role to play as the
nation’s chief bread-earner. Mining is the mother figure who will comfort and protect
us from that nasty, cold economic world outside. Courtesy of the current
resources boom, and the idea that mining “saved” us from the GFC, the accepted
wisdom now appears to be that mining has a moral duty to share its bounty far
and wide. This is a new idea, and one that comes from the near-hysterical criticism
from Wayne Swan, Bob Brown and others that mining was hitherto not paying its
full whack. Yet by happily acknowledging that mining is, if not bottomless,
then at least a very deep pit the ad feeds back into this narrative and
accepts, almost acknowledges, that it is the next best thing to a magic
financial pudding. In doing so, it runs the risk of subtly undermining (resources
pun intended) its own argument.
Already, Rudd supporter and ex-Union
boss Senator Doug Cameron has drawn the same conclusion: "They may not be a bottomless pit but
they are a huge pit," he said. "This is an industry that in 2009/10
made $51 billion worth of profits.”
Ex-fitter
and welder Cameron presumably believes the higher your profits, the higher your
taxation rate should be. The Scottish-born senator would have witnessed the
success of such ideas throughout 1960’s Britain, with super wealth taxes of 99p
in the pound, and a country brought to its knees as investment and wealth
creators fled abroad. Yet thanks to his and others efforts, there is now an
assumption that each and every one of us Australians “deserve” to get our hands
on a decent slab of the mining loot. It is our birthright, apparently. Premier
Campbell Newman has neatly twisted this concept to his own advantage, declaring
that Queenslanders alone should benefit from Queensland mining wealth.
As this latest ad
details, without actually using the phrase, the mining industry already is set
to pay more than its fair share of taxes. What it now fears is deductions on
exploration and on depreciation of assets will also be removed, threatening
investment. As Mitch Hooke has pointed out, this flies in the face of “what has been a fundamental platform of Australian tax policy– you
do not tax business inputs.” Not so mining, it may soon appear.
Meanwhile, a new TV campaign goes head to
head with APPEA’s
recent “We want coal seam gas (CSG)” campaign. Only now
we get “the real facts” from the Hunter Valley Protection Society. The argument
is that CSG mining will destroy, rather than save, the Hunter’s existing
businesses, job market and property values. The wine and tourism industries, built up over
200 years, are now being threatened by the seductive but fickle mining
industry, which only “has a life span of 15 to 40 years.” The ad also claims the
government can’t assess projects properly because “most scientists in the field
work for the mining industry.” Mining, in this instance, is a flighty,
destructive interloper responsible for all sorts of nasty spills, leaks and
explosions. Although the ground may well move for you (literally) if you fall
into this harlot’s “pockmarked” embrace, the ad
concludes that CSG mining will “be the death of the Hunter valley.”
It
appears we are keen to help ourselves to the mountains of cash that mining earns
so long as we don’t actually have to get into bed with her.
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