Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I don't think there's anything more Australian than a fair go—than wanting a fair go. It's fine for the National Party to care about a fair go for big, multinational tax avoiders. It's not fine for them to stand up for the average Australian who would actually like to see the big, foreign owned, multinational companies pay their fair share of tax and royalties. From the good senator from the National Party, Senator McDonald, it's quite fascinating to hear the turning of the tables on the dark money coming from the green sector when she's been part of a political party that has been quite happy to campaign against renewable energy alongside massive misinformation and disinformation campaigns funded by the fossil fuel industry, including mostly foreign fossil fuel interests. It's interesting to hear the tables being turned there.

I want to make a few comments because I did participate in one of the hearings. I want to congratulate Senator Hodgins-May for her work chairing this committee. It was a very intense three days of hearings in Canberra and Western Australia. Other senators were there.

When Senator McDonald talks about this un-Australian campaign against a gas tax, or against the PRRT, I want to remind senators that it has been a long, long road to try and get these big, multinational companies to pay their fair share of tax. We had nearly three years of inquiries, from 2017, 2018 and 2019, into companies like Chevron who were avoiding tax through profit shifting and managed to, through the ATO, get some revenue for the Australian people—in fact, many billions of dollars of revenue for the Australian people. We had an inquiry specifically into the PRRT where we did also go to Western Australia in 2018 and 2019, and the government, to try and undercut the Senate inquiry, released the Callaghan review, which recommended some changes to the PRRT system. Even a Liberal-National government, as the government was at the time, realised it was a completely unfair tax system designed for another era. The PRRT—and this came from Craig Emerson himself, who appeared before the inquiry at the time—was designed for Bass Strait oil and gas exploration in the eighties, not for large, value-added LNG projects. That's not what the PRRT was designed for. It was completely not fit for purpose. The government tweaked the edges. We had some changes to uplift rates. But there was no substantial reform.

I say to the Liberal Party and the Labor Party: this issue's not going to go away. Australians have a pretty good idea about a fair go, and they know when they are being conned. And they are being conned. One thing that really struck me from the hearings in Perth, listening to the executives that did turn up from the big oil and gas giants, was that it was really obvious that they felt like they were doing us a favour. They more or less said: 'We are doing you a favour. If it weren't for us, none of your resources would be exploited. None of this gas that we are basically profiting from and sending overseas and paying very little tax on would happen without us. So you have us to thank for opening up your resources.' Well, I pointed out to them that the taxpayer actually does deleverage a lot of their risk and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in doing so over the years. They're not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. They are doing it because they make significant profit out of this, as they do all around the world. You could say the same thing of any company that's saying: 'We see a business opportunity. We're going ahead. We're going to invest in it. We don't want to pay any tax because we are doing you a favour by employing people.' Hello! That's not how the world works. The sheer arrogance of these answers was like, 'You owe us! You, the Australian people, owe us for coming in and making billions of dollars of profits out of your resources which you, by the way, own. They'd be sitting out there in the ocean and nothing would be happening to them at all if it weren't for us. You owe us, so how dare you ask for us to pay a fair share on the export of your resources overseas.' Really? It was that simple to me. I was absolutely dumbfounded by the attitude of some of these big companies.

It's time for that to change. It's time for the Australian government to say to these companies: 'Now you need to pay a fair return to the Australian people, who own these resources.' If they don't, then too bad. Don't exploit these resources. Kick them out. We don't need more fossil fuels. We don't need new developments like the Browse project off the North West Shelf. What we need to do is transition to renewable energy. Of course, Senator McDonald deliberately ignored the fact that Australia has an abundance of sunshine and wind power. We have geothermal and hydro. We have so much renewable energy. Renewable energy is already producing 50 per cent of our wholesale power, and it's only going to increase into the future. We don't need more fossil fuel projects. We need the ones that are here now to pay a fair return to the Australian people. Here's an idea. If they did pay a fair return, there are plenty of things we could do with that money. We might start by compensating communities for the damage that their fossil fuel emissions are doing to our climate and environment. That might be a good place to park that money. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.