Sophie Scamps (Mackellar, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. Over the last three decades, Australia's petroleum tax has collected a paltry amount of revenue from the sale of our natural resources, compared with other countries. While Norway collected trillions of dollars of wealth for their citizens, Australia's petroleum tax has declined from 19 per cent of total oil and gas sector revenue in 1992 to just one per cent in 2020. What will the government do to fix Australia's broken petroleum tax system?

Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Mackellar for her question and for her engagement on the budget and on the PRRT in particular. It's worth the House noting that, with the member for Mackellar's one question, she has asked more questions about the budget in the last two question times than the shadow Treasurer has—already, with that one question.

As the member for Mackellar knows, the war in Ukraine is pushing up, substantially, the price of gas, and that has a range of consequences which I'll come to in a moment, but it also does have consequences for the budget. What we've seen in the last little while is an increase in the PRRT take, but I do understand that there is a view in the community, perhaps a view that the member for Mackellar shares, judging by the question—that there is an appetite for Australians to get a decent return on the resources that they own. But it is worth noting that, even in the budget I handed down a couple of Tuesdays ago, the PRRT take for last year was about $1.6 billion, and for this year it's expected to be about $2.6 billion. That's about $200 million more than was anticipated before the election, and next year it's a little bit more than was anticipated as well. In addition to the PRRT take going up a little bit over the next couple of years, the company tax take is also up, as people know, and we've got policies and plans to make multinational taxes fairer as well.

When it comes to the gas market, we've talked about the consequences for the budget when gas prices are high. But there are, obviously, consequences as well for Australian industry and for Australians everywhere when gas prices are high. And that's why our priority—whether it's the good work of the Minister for Resources in negotiating more supply; whether it's the work that we are doing, together with the minister for industry, the minister for energy and others—has been to strengthen the code of conduct to make it mandatory and to introduce considerations of price into that work. This is important work.

When it comes to the PRRT, there's an element of bipartisanship, in the sense that the member for Cook and the former member for Kooyong introduced a review of the PRRT that the Treasury is yet to conclude. When they conclude, obviously I'll take their recommendations seriously. But, even if we were to go down the path being proposed by a number of people around changing the PRRT, that wouldn't change some of the near-term pressures on the gas market and on the energy market more particularly as a consequence of the war in Ukraine. So our near-term focus is on the code of conduct and on price and supply. We think that's where our time is best spent, without taking some of these other options off the table when it comes to future tax arrangements.