Rio Tinto is 92% foreign owned and as such like other foreign owned resource companied (BHP is 93% foreign owned), they want to only dig it up and ship it out with minimal local content in order to minimise Aus tax . Both companies have been fined over half a Billion recently for avoiding Aus tax by transfer pricing via their respective Singaporean marketing hubs.
We can design SEZs to counter both excessive. taxation and electricity pricing. Its silly to have one of the highest electricity prices in the world when we export massive amounts on LNG to manufacturing countries who then generate electricity it much cheaper than we can...So much for our privatisation of electricity generation recently!
But of course if we repeatedly say that we can't....then we can't and the multinationals love us for that.
