Former Treasury chief Ken Henry says all new taxes are unpopular but concedes the previous Labor government's mining tax was more disliked than most.
Taxing a booming mining sector was a key proposal taken by the Rudd government from Dr Henry's 2008/09 tax review, even though the result - the minerals resource rent tax (MRRT) - may not have been the design he envisaged.
The Abbott government finally ditched the MRRT in August after it raised little revenue in two years.
Dr Henry told an ANU conference on Tuesday that none of the tax reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, other than tax cuts, enjoyed bipartisan political support and most were deeply unpopular in the broader community.
"New taxes are not easy," he told the ANU's Crawford School of Public Policy.
"But the task of legislating a new tax on mineral and energy resources faced headwinds that the GST and those other tax reforms did not."
The resources industry was already having difficulty accepting a loss of international competitiveness due to currency appreciation and wage inflation, so its intolerance of higher taxes on the sector should not have been a surprise.
He said even a consummate communicator was going to have difficulty explaining why it made sense to apply a new tax to an accelerating export sector while at the same time saying exports were the principal driver of growth, jobs and living standards.
"One might even have been accused of wanting to kill the goose that was laying the golden eggs," Dr Henry said.
