Above all, remember this: Labor did come up with a package that would have financed a 2 percentage-point rate cut, but dopey big business let it slip through their fingers.
What was paying for the rate cut? The original resource super profits tax, of course. But business sat around with its eyes, ears and mouth closed while the largely foreign-owned big mining companies conspired to escape paying any specific tax on their huge resource rents.
Abbott is about to play out the last act in that monumental exercise in legal tax evasion by abolishing the mining tax before the exhaustion of accelerated depreciation allowances turns it into a much better earner.
Equally remarkable was the rest of business's inability to see it was they who were being ripped off by the miners, not some hated Labor government. It never crossed their tiny minds that the budget isn't a bottomless pit or a magic pudding; that if the miners get in first, there's not much left for everyone else. It's called opportunity cost.
It's time business woke up to the crude facts of fiscal life: the two most hugely profitable parts of our corporate sector are banking and mining. The more their economic rents are adequately taxed, the easier it is to afford to cut the company tax rate for everyone.
Abbott's abolition of the mining tax is the last nail in the coffin of the case for a lower company tax rate.
