Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Treasurer. Can you confirm that oil and gas giant Shell has for years paid no Petroleum Resource Rent Tax and, even with your recent changes and war prices for LNG, Shell will now at best only pay a few cents per dollar of revenue? Isn't it time for a 25 per cent tax on gas export revenue so gas corporations like Shell pay their fair share?

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

Thanks to the honourable member for Ryan for her question. I acknowledge that there are a range of views on this issue, and, as I understand it, the Senate agreed yesterday afternoon or last night to have a committee look into some of these matters that the honourable member raises with us.

This government believes that Australians do deserve a fair return from the natural resources that they own. That's why in our first term we made changes to the PRRT so that offshore gas companies pay more tax sooner. The ATO's latest tax transparency report shows that the introduction of the government's reforms increased the number of entities paying PRRT from 11 to 16 in the most recent data and that oil and gas companies paid almost $12 billion in PRRT and company tax in that year.

When it comes to individual companies, the honourable member asked me about Shell in particular. PRRT payments are not separately disclosed at the company level in the ATO's data, as I suspect the honourable member knows. I understand that, from publicly available information, Shell's most recent tax transparency report disclosed around $3 billion in taxes and other payments. A bit over two-thirds of that was corporate income tax, and almost a third of that was royalties and other taxes.

The other point that I make to the honourable member for Ryan is that a key feature of our changes to the PRRT is a 90 per cent cap on deductions, which applies seven years after a project begins generating revenue. For Shell, as I understand it, if you think about Gorgon and Prelude LNG projects, that seven-year period is expected to be exhausted, I think this year or next year—certainly soon— meaning the deductions cap will kick in and PRRT will be paid on those two projects.

The government has also taken significant steps more broadly to strengthen tax transparency, including the introduction of public country-by-country reporting and improvements to the transparency code released by the board of tax. I want to give a shout-out for the great work of Assistant Minister Leigh and, to some extent, Minister Mulino and, before him, Minister Jones. We work closely together to try and make the tax system more transparent in this regard, and we'll continue to focus on our big agenda to make sure multinationals, including oil and gas companies, pay their fair share of tax, including more disclosure and minimum tax, reforms to debt deductions and funding for compliance and, of course, those important changes that we made to the PRRT. I acknowledge the honourable member would like us to go further, but the government has made important steps in this regard already.