A mining boom unlike all other booms?

The government invoked the report to argue that under the Coalition the country had effectively "been paying to be exploited" by multinational mining companies, and during the 1974 election campaign Whitlam declared that Fitzgerald's findings would be "the starting point for the formulation of policies aimed at maximising the return to Australia of her natural endowments of mineral and energy wealth". In turn, Coalition spokespeople criticised Fitzgerald's methodology, characterised his Report as "limited" and "emotive" and argued that the benefits the nation had gained from the boom outweighed the costs.

Labor narrowly won the 1974 election and amended the tax scheme for resource companies: it cancelled the exemptions for prescribed minerals (although it left the gold exemption in place); disallowed deductions for capital expenditure incurred on company formation and capital raising; and prevented companies from appropriating out of one year's income sums intended to be spent on development the following year. The Coalition opposed these changes, arguing that they would cruel the mining industry's future development in Australia and lamenting that "the management of our mineral and energy resources has made us the laughing stock of the world".

After the Whitlam government's dismissal and election loss in 1975, the Coalition returned to power under Malcolm Fraser, and in 1976 it passed its own tax amendments: for instance, capital expenditure on facilities used to transport minerals was made deductible on a straight-line basis over either 20 years as previously or 10 years, at the taxpayer's discretion, and expenditure on port facilities was included in the category of capital expenditure attracting special deduction provisions. Fraser later concluded that his government "provided much better tax breaks for business to encourage investment" and "modified taxation for mining".

Australia's brief and turbulent experiment in "resource nationalism" seemed to be over - the traditional pro-mining, low taxing approach had been challenged but not overturned.

Moreover, these events seem largely to have been forgotten. They have been overshadowed by other ideological battles of the Whitlam era and the circumstances surrounding the Dismissal, including Connor's role in the 1975 loans affair. Even the recent and ongoing mining tax debates have seen only a few references to the Fitzgerald Report: The Australian reported that "Rudd's resource tax grab" evoked the "feisty" Rex Connor; ABC Radio National's Rear Vision program covered parallels and differences between the two governments' approaches to minerals and energy in a rather more considered fashion, and David McKnight pointed out that struggles over the mining tax followed a familiar pattern.

The Fitzgerald Report and its fate show that the hoariest of clichés can be true - history really does repeat itself. There have been a great many changes in the Australian political scene since 1974, but some things, such as the difficulties governments face in setting taxes for the resources sector, remain the same.