Despite all the hullabaloo, all the hand-wringing and the wailing from various sections of the mining industry, the passage of the Mineral Resources Rent Tax overnight confirms Australia as one of the world's most benign destinations for miners.
That's right. When it comes to taxing resource companies, Australia is a soft touch, a virtual tax haven.
Not that you will read that anywhere else. More than likely you will continue to be beaten about the head with dire predictions of impending doom and threats of mass defections from our big mining houses.
Cast your information net beyond these shores, however, and you will soon discover that Abbott is swimming against a mighty strong international tide.
For, almost every country with a resource base, rich and poor, has begun tightening the screws after witnessing in the past decade one of the greatest wealth transfers in history - away from the citizens who owned the minerals and towards the companies exploiting those resources.
It is a global trend that will make it increasingly tougher for the big resource houses to maintain their earnings growth, regardless of whether commodity prices continue to surge as they have done since the turn of the century.
During the past three years, the rest of the resources world has taken aggressive steps to ensure the one-off windfall gains from the resources boom are not lost forever.
Following is a brief summary.
- Indonesia: By 2014, miners must process minerals such as iron, nickel and coal into value-added products before export. Last month, the government announced possible export bans to avoid a minerals rush before the new laws come into place. Foreign companies will be forced to gradually reduce stakes in local entities after five years of production. In the sixth to 10th year, foreign ownership in any resource project is limited to 49 per cent.
- South Africa: The world's biggest mineral producer is debating a 50 per cent windfall tax on ''super profits'' and a 50 per cent capital gains tax on the sale of mining tenements.
- Ghana: Africa's second biggest gold producer plans to raise mining taxes from 25 per cent to 35 per cent, with a windfall tax on ''super profits''. Existing 5 per cent royalties on output remain in place.
- Guinea: The new frontier in iron ore and bauxite demands a 15 per cent stake in all mining projects, with an option to lift it to 35 per cent.
- Namibia: All new mining and exploration to be state-owned.
- Zimbabwe: Locals will own 51 per cent of all foreign miners.
- Nigeria: Wants all offshore oil contracts renegotiated.
- Mongolia: Wants a bigger stake in its Oyu Tolgoi project.
Add to that list new mining taxes in India, Peru, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chile, Kazakhstan and Zambia, all of which either are on the drawing board or have been introduced in the past three years.
Since the boom started in the early part of the new century, the earnings from our big resource houses increased more than tenfold. And in the years before the global financial crisis, the big companies were at a loss as to what to do with this embarrassment of riches.
Resource booms, typically with a life span of about three years, traditionally delivered the big miners just enough cash to survive another decade of lean times. It is for that reason mining companies always traded at a discount to ''normal'' industrial-type companies.
But the past decade has changed everything, including the way governments view their non-renewable natural resources.
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