At last one of history's most idiotic pieces of legislation, the Minerals Resource Rent Tax, has found a use. Its repeal has served as a bargaining chip between the (generally) hostile Senate and the Coalition on a raft of other issues, the biggest being a pause in the increase of compulsory superannuation contributions.

The debate about effectively crimping the pool of superannuation is a worthy one. But as far as the death of the MRRT: may it rest in peace.

Under the terms of the new deal devised between the Coalition and the crossbenchers, low-income super contributions will remain the same until June 2017, the schoolkids bonus will be means tested so that only families earning up to $100,000 will qualify and it will remain until December 31, 2016.

Compulsory super will not increase from its present level until July 1, 2021, when it will rise to 10 per cent. It will then increase annually until it reaches 12 per cent. This is an outcome that will be contentious and will recast the forecasts of the size of the super pool, making if even less likely for older Australians to self-fund their retirement.

Finance Minister Mathias Cormann said the measures will be revenue neutral.

In isolation, the mining tax didn't raise any funds. However, the previous government had earmarked the phantom revenue it was to generate from the MRRT to pay for a variety of goodies that Clive Palmer's PUPs were fighting to retain.

Tony Abbott went into last year's election promising to rid the country of the mining tax. But in the end seeing this off as a standalone measure seemed more ideological than meaningful.

It is the end of a chapter of government business relations that most would rather forget.

For the Labor government, the introduction of the MRRT's predecessor, the super profits tax, became a symbol of how low relations could reach between corporates and the federal government.

It became a key feature in the mutiny against Kevin Rudd and a salient reminder to Canberra that when large well-resourced companies are mobilised, they can cause a lot of damage.

The super profits tax would have been particularly expensive for the Australian resources industry and it was dumped on the industry without consultation.

As a revenue-generating exercise, it would have been far more effective than the MRRT. But the industry launched the mother of all anti-government campaigns, which managed to convince even the average Australian that the super profits mining tax would undermine investment in Australia, increase the country's sovereign risk profile for international investors and, in effect, kill the golden goose that was powering the economy.

Whether this was any more than a commercially self-serving argument from the mining industry will never be known.

But the political threat of the anti-super profits tax lobby was sufficiently large that it opened the door for Julia Gillard to topple Rudd and come to a tax accommodation with the big players in the mining industry.

From the start the replacement tax, the MRRT, was never going to raise much money because the way it was structured ensured that earnings could be shielded. It was ridiculously complicated but, given it was actually devised by three of the major mining companies, one didn't need to understand its particulars to appreciate that it was never going to deliver any onerous tax impost.

After a couple of years it was easy to lose track of how many times the estimates for its revenue contributions were revised downwards by treasurer Wayne Swan.

The mining companies and Swan ascribed the poor MRRT contributions to falling commodity prices. There may have been an element of this but the real story is that its design was so cunningly engineered that it was never going to raise much. The falling iron ore and coal prices were a convenient camouflage.

In the end, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and Xstrata never paid much (if any) MRRT.

The smaller mining companies, lead by Andrew Forrest's Fortescue Minerals, lobbied the hardest against the MRRT because they believed they would be disproportionately and unfairly affected. And they were right. (Having said that, the small miners also lobbied hard against the super profits mining tax.)

But in recent months even the big miners that engineered the MRRT were keen to have it abolished. It was an embarrassment, leading to an awkward public relations moment every time the media inevitably asked the question about how much MRRT they had paid during the period.