Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Road Safety) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to two pieces of legislation, the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill 2019 and the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage (Regulatory Levies) Amendment Bill 2019. These bills build on existing legislation of the same name from 2006 that regulates offshore carbon storage activities. These bills shift the oversight authority of offshore carbon storage from the responsible minister to the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority, also known as NOPSEMA. NOPSEMA is a highly regarded Commonwealth agency that already regulates and enforces offshore petroleum operations. It performs monitoring, assessment, data analysis and enforcement across more than 900 offshore wells and their operators. The opposition considers that NOPSEMA is the best placed agency to have oversight of offshore greenhouse gas storage.

This bill proposes a number of amendments to strengthen NOPSEMA's ability to monitor, investigate and enforce breaches of offshore oil and gas operations, with the intention of keeping workers and the environment safe and healthy. Currently, offshore petroleum activities cannot commence unless NOPSEMA has accepted detailed risk management plans that document and demonstrate how an organisation will manage the risks to health and safety and the environmental risks to as low as reasonably practical.

As well as being a regulator of offshore petroleum activities, NOPSEMA is also a developer of safety and environmental benchmarks, and it undertakes an educational role in the offshore energy sector. NOPSEMA has an enforcement function and can pursue remedies that include offence provisions, civil penalties and enforceable undertakings. The monitoring and inspection role of NOPSEMA officers includes both warrant and warrant-free searches and inspections. Much of NOPSEMA's role occurs behind the scenes working with industry, and the authority has a team of scientists and engineers. A lot of their work entails detailed examination of data that has been provided to them by operators.

Let's look at the bills in detail. The Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill 2019 amends the legislation of the same name from 2006 which I mentioned earlier. It covers the well management and environmental management of offshore greenhouse gas storage operators and shifts oversight authority from the minister to NOPSEMA. The amendments bill strengthens NOPSEMA's role as it moves to regulate greenhouse gas storage. The bill reverses the burden of proof in specific incidents, requiring that the storage operators show that they do not do unlawful acts, rather than NOPSEMA having to prove it. Such a reversal is justified because in some cases the storage operator is the only party that could know what has actually occurred to produce a dangerous incident.

Secondly, the amendments bill empowers NOPSEMA to conduct monitoring activities on storage operators without a warrant. Labor believes this amendment will significantly increase the safety of workers and improve the environmental footprint. Thirdly, the amendments bill allows NOPSEMA to issue enforceable undertakings to offshore carbon storage operators, but not when the incident in question has resulted in a fatality or when the operator has a track record of incidents.

The amendments bill fixes up a taxation oversight. The frontier area tax scheme allows a petroleum explorer to claim a 150 per cent deduction on exploration expenditure in frontier areas under the PRRT. Four frontier areas were not included in 2005, and this amendment fixes the oversight retrospectively, with no revenue implications—very important. NOPSEMA is a cost-recovery funded agency. The regulatory levies bill establishes a schedule of levies to be paid by the offshore greenhouse gas storage operators.

Fundamentally, these bills help ensure that Australia has the safest and most environmentally responsible methods for pursuing carbon capture and storage in our offshore oil and gas fields. Carbon storage operates by taking carbon dioxide from industrial processes and pumping it deep underground into appropriate geology. The world's largest carbon storage projects take CO2 produced from power generation and LNG processing. This operation requires that carbon dioxide is compressed and then pumped under high pressures so it is injected into the geology. The sequestration site for the carbon dioxide can be up to two kilometres below the seabed. Typically the best formations for this carbon storage task are areas which have already been used for petroleum extraction.

Carbon capture and storage is recognised by the International Energy Agency as a key technology for reducing national greenhouse gas emissions. According to the IEA, carbon capture and storage can remove up to 85 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions from power stations. The IEA's Sustainable Development Scenario says that seven per cent of the required global cumulative emissions reductions to 2040 will come from carbon utilisation and storage. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, says that, without carbon capture and storage, the cost of achieving a two-degrees warming outcome by the end of the century increases by 138 per cent.

There are more than 40 carbon storage and utilisation project operating around the world. However, the biggest carbon storage projects are right here in Australia. The world's largest carbon capture and storage project is operating at an onshore site just off that magnificent part of Australia called the West, at Barrow Island—the Gorgon Project. I'm from Western Australia!

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Road Safety) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I just wanted to reiterate that! A joint venture between Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell, the project started injecting CO2 from the LNG trains in August. At full operation, it will sequester no less than four million tonnes of CO2 each year. The investment in this project is currently at US$2.5 billion.

In the next two years Australia will move its carbon storage efforts offshore, into the Gippsland Basin in the Bass Strait. The CarbonNet Project will be the largest carbon storage project in the world. It will store five million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, taking CO2 extracted from the Latrobe Valley power stations and piping it offshore, where it will be injected beneath the seabed.

As we gear up for offshore carbon storage projects, we need the best environmental and workplace safety protections. We support these offshore petroleum and greenhouse gas storage bills because they recognise an exciting and important form of future emissions reduction and they also acknowledge the appropriate agency to oversee these operations.

The operators of carbon storage use infrastructure similar to that used for petroleum extraction. It is not a risk-free activity, and, when carbon is stored in geology beneath the seabed, the highest standards of environmental protection and operational safety are required. In Australia, we have the offshore geology that is suited to carbon capture and storage, and, in NOPSEMA, we have the agency that will ensure this activity is performed in a way that keeps our environment clean and, even more importantly, our workers safe. I commend the bill to the Senate.

Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It's $324 billion and growing every year: that's the pile of accumulated tax credits that the gas industry is sitting on and that's why these multinational behemoths that are polluting our atmosphere and contributing to a climate emergency won't pay tax for a decade or more. Think about that figure for a moment—that staggering figure: 17.5 per cent of our entire country's GDP in avoided taxes for the sole benefit of the gas industry to use over the coming decades. These companies get to slowly work through $324 billion of taxable profits before they have to pay tax. Whatever of these tax credits a company doesn't use in a year uplifts by 15 per cent, plus the bond rate. That's a greater rate of return than Sydney's property market or the bitcoin bubble. Think about it and ask yourself, 'Why on earth do these companies get such generous tax treatment?'

As usual, the answer is, 'Follow the money.' The oil and gas industry have now donated $2.7 million to the Liberal Party and $2 million to the Labor Party since 2012. Every retired Labor or Liberal energy minister has worked for a gas company. That's pretty remarkable when you think about it—retired Labor and Liberal energy ministers all working for the gas companies. The former Minister for Trade, Craig Emerson, wrote an op-ed for The Australian Financial Review just last week, saying how gas is crucial for our energy transition. Of course, the online version didn't disclose that his clients are AGL and Santos.

Tax avoidance, lobbying and destroying our environment: the gas industry has it all—the trifecta. They perfectly encapsulate Australia's current political system: get rich quick, pollute the planet, destroy the climate and who gives a stuff about anything else. The carbon emissions from the gas industry have ballooned by 62 per cent in a decade. In fact, the damage that they have contributed to our climate is so big that the gas industry has completely wiped out all the gains from reaching 23 per cent renewable energy in recent years.

Even when we look at the government's own talking points, which we were privy to yesterday, they had the honesty to acknowledge that if it weren't for the gas industry our emissions wouldn't be going up. So there we have it: on the one hand, it's a good thing that we're seeing an increase in the renewable energy sector—23 per cent as a proportion of our energy system. But every gain that we make by replacing dirty energy with renewable energy is wiped out because of the contribution that gas makes to climate pollution.

I note that the industry is engaged in a huge PR campaign. In fact, I happened to take my kids to the show a week or two ago, and there on the big screen was a big advertisement for how important gas is to the economy. You see it on TV now and you see it through social media. But despite the best efforts of the gas industry—despite their greenwash and despite the PR campaign that they're engaged in—there is no hiding this fact: gas is a dirty fossil fuel that contributes to climate damage.

We understand that at the moment there are people who have no choice but to use gas. But the bottom line is that gas, like coal, has no long-term future if we're going to be able to live in a safe and stable climate. Look at the mining of gas: it leaks methane when it's fracked on land or extracted offshore—leaks that get in transport pipelines. It uses huge amounts of energy to freeze it to minus 161 degrees to turn it into a liquid, then more emissions are burnt through transport overseas on ships, and then of course there's the use of the fuel as it's intended. When it's burnt, there are more emissions. Don't be fooled: gas is a dirty, dirty energy source, and part of the transition we need to make is not just from coal but from both coal and gas, which are hugely greenhouse intensive and are contributing to the climate crisis we're now in. You'd think, given that, that the government would be doing what it could to speed the transition away from gas to renewable energy. Instead, we see a government continuing to subsidise the gas industry to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

That's why my colleague Senator Whish-Wilson is going to move an amendment that I'd implore all members of the crossbench to support. I'm not holding my breath for the Liberal and Labor parties, because they want to see those donations coming in, but we implore at least the crossbench to make a clear statement that this free ride has to stop. It's interesting, isn't it? You hear the coalition talk about the subsidies for renewable energy, but you never hear them talk about the massive subsidies to the coal and gas industries. Chevron's given far more in donations to either one of the major parties than they've paid in tax to the ATO. Woodside has given $220,000 a year to each of the major parties.

Our amendment's a modest one. It simply removes the section that would backdate the generous tax credits to a handful of recent gas projects for which there is some legal uncertainty about whether they're eligible for the tax rort that's currently in place. Of course, the amendment doesn't go anywhere near what needs to be done to make these gas giants pay tax in the next decade, but at least it will stop further damage to the tax base. We understand that at the moment there are some industries that need gas and there aren't alternative options available, but that technology is coming. We understand that many households still are reliant on gas; we get that. But unless we start planning for the future and driving the transition that needs to happen, we have no hope of reducing pollution and ensuring that we hand over a safe and liveable climate to future generations.

So I hope we have the support for this amendment. I hope that at some time in the future we will see a ban on political donations in this country—something the Greens have campaigned on for many decades. And I hope industries like the coal and gas industries will finally start to pay their fair share for exploiting Australian resources that belong to each and every one of us. That's the challenge for this government; it is the challenge for future governments. As I said, I don't expect either the government or the opposition to move while the rivers of gold keep flowing, but that is the challenge for those of us in this place: to ensure that the pressure stays on. This amendment is a sensible way of ensuring that they start paying their fair share.

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

The Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill 2019 gives me an opportunity today to say what I didn't get to say in the last day of the 45th Parliament. For senators who were here for the 45th Parliament, you may remember that on the very last sitting day the Senate jammed through this government's pithy changes to the petroleum resource rent tax, commonly known as the PRRT. Under a guillotine—and that is what it was—the government's scant changes to the PRRT were passed without debate. Obviously this was extremely disappointing to myself and to my Greens colleagues and no doubt would have been disappointing to a number of senators who have worked in this chamber for a number of years. The Greens initiated a Senate inquiry into the changes to the petroleum resource rent tax. At the time I called it the 'petroleum rort rent tax', because that is what it is: the biggest rort in the Australian tax system. Some of the biggest polluters and some of the wealthiest companies on this planet with some of the highest returns on shareholder funds have avoided paying tax on the resources that are owned by the Australian people. Why have they avoided paying tax for those resources? Because the system was deliberately set up that way to enable them to do this.

While we've all sat through numerous Senate inquiries and significant legislation trying to crack down on multinational tax avoidance—and I commend the government, the Labor Party and the crossbench senators for the combined focus and effort in this place to get results—how is it that this sector, this industry, gets away with this time and time again? I didn't get to put forward the details of the Greens amendments to try to fix the petroleum rort rent tax—amendments that, by the way, were reflected in recommendations from the Senate inquiry into how to properly fix this tax to get a fair return for the Australian people on the resources that they own. I think they would have gone a reasonable way towards addressing this deficiency in our tax system and I think this is something the Australian people would have supported. They have to pay their fair share of tax and they just don't get how some of the biggest polluters and biggest companies on the planet can avoid paying their tax.

Senator Di Natale mentioned earlier that it is not just the PRRT where they have been able to accumulate $380 billion in deferred taxes to the Australian people and to the Australian government; a number of these companies were also singled out for attention by senators in this chamber for not paying any tax at all. I was very encouraged that the Australian Taxation Office took on Chevron and other big polluters and forced them to pay at least some of the tax they owed to the Australian people. You can draw your own conclusions as to why this industry seems to be so sacrosanct. Why is it that the oil and gas industry gets away with it time and time again?

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Take them to court then.

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

I'll take that interjection, Senator Canavan, through you, Chair. It's probably because they're big donors to the Labor and Liberal parties, especially to the LNP. It's probably because former senior ministers from the Labor and Liberal parties walk these corridors, the corridors of power, and get influence in this building, and we get pay for play. That's how it works in this system. Democracy might have a lot of good things going for it, Senator Canavan, but it certainly can't control rampant capitalism, because, when you're in the pocket of big business, it is highly unlikely that you are going to do what's in the public good; you're going to look after your own self-interest. We see it happen time and time again in this place.

Did you know, Senator Canavan—through you, Chair—that in 1965 the US government officially raised the issue of climate change as being a threat to humanity? The oil and gas companies themselves in 1981 put out communications saying that we were running out of time for action on climate change, yet they have contributed billions of dollars to so-called think tanks and research institutions to sow doubt about climate action.

We have a situation where 20 of the biggest polluters on this planet—oil and gas companies—account for 35 per cent of global emissions, and we give those same companies a tax holiday. And if the Greens and the Labor Party had kept the carbon price in place—as hard as we fought for it—they would at least be paying for some of their pollution. But this Liberal government comes in and rips up the gold standard on international action on climate—the Clean Energy Package—and gives them another leg up, as if they needed it—another way of avoiding paying tax.

Every Australian would agree that the petroleum resource rent tax should be a tax that ensures that the public get a fair share of the profits that multinational oil and gas companies are making from being given the privilege of accessing Australian resources. That's what this is. The PRRT was designed over 30 years ago, essentially for the oil, gas and condensate industry—not for the massive booms we have seen in LNG. It is not fit for purpose. And all we have in terms of changes from this government is some tweaking around the edges. It has become a joke.

At last count, from last estimates—and we will be looking forward to getting an update at this estimates—it was $324 billion in IOUs to the Australian people. And that is growing, on average, at $40 billion per annum. That could pay for our Gonski package to fully fund higher education in this country. It could pay for dental care to be part of Medicare. There are so many things we could spend $40 billion on if these big companies, who can afford to pay their fair share, actually paid this tax. If we fixed the system, a rigged system deliberately set up to advantage big companies, we would have the money that we need to pay for infrastructure, hospitals and schools. This is against annual tax receipts of a measly $1 billion per annum from the PRRT. I will say that again. There is $40 billion in deferred tax credits, deferred tax payments to the Australian people, on a revenue of about $1 billion a year that they actually pay.

On these trends, it will be well into the next century, the 22nd century, before the Aussie people are square with big oil and gas—if ever. What a joke. We in this building could fix it if we just had the guts to stand up to big multinational corporations. So I plan to move an amendment today to assist the government in their pursuit of a surplus. I will put forward a number of amendments—bite-sized amendments rather than the full overhaul of the PRRT that is actually needed that would have ensured that multinational oil and gas companies that are profiting from public resources share just a little more of that profit with the public who own these resources.

I want to provide a quick summary of the amendments proposed by the Greens to the previous bill. We would establish uniform uplift rates to carry forward expenditure at the long-term bond rate of five per cent for the first 10 years and the long-term bond rate after 10 years. This is the new uplift regime established by the government but only for new projects. As a result, the tax bill of $324 billion for oil and gas companies will keep ballooning. Another amendment I would have liked to put up at the end of the last parliament would require companies to report deductible expenditure from the commencement of a project, irrespective of whether the project is generating income. This would address the problem of companies accumulating deductible expenditures during exploration, without the ATO being made aware of the size of potential future deductible expenditure until the company reports to the ATO when the project starts to record an income.

A third amendment I would have put up ends the transferability of exploration expenditure to counter the problem of companies transferring deductible exploration expenditure from onshore projects to offshore projects. Another amendment: I would have required companies to deduct outstanding carry-forward expenditure in the order of the size of the uplift rate. Currently, companies do the opposite so as to maximise their outstanding carry-forward expenditure and minimise their tax paid. This practice also results in the expenditure that is incurred first from exploration often being deducted last. But, alas, the government and the opposition are more interested in being nice to multinational oil and gas companies than they are in ensuring the integrity of the tax system or in ensuring public benefits.

With this bill, today this parliament is considering watering down the PRRT even further. Here is how the minister's office has explained it. Owing to a recently discovered failure in 2005, four exploration permits were awarded over areas promoted as frontier areas in 2005 that were not validly designated as frontier areas. To remove any doubt about the entitlement of relevant title holders to claim uplifted petroleum resource rent tax deductions under the scheme, it is proposed to amend the act to retrospectively designate the four areas that were not formally designated frontier areas in 2005 as frontier areas. In other words, the scope of eligible deductions under the PRRT is going to increase. Explorations conducted in frontier areas are to receive a 150 per cent premium on eligible PRRT deductions. As if $324 billion worth of tax credits isn't enough, this bill is making sure that a decision made 15 years ago falls in favour, again, of big oil and gas companies.

Our amendment today, senators, is modest. It simply removes the section that would backdate the generous tax credits to a handful of recent gas projects that have some legal uncertainty about whether they are eligible for the tax rort that is currently in place. Now, I believe, as you can probably guess, that this doesn't go anywhere near close enough to the changes that we need to make to this tax system. This will barely add an extra cent to the money that the Australian people should be owed if these companies were forced to pay the tax now—for example, by putting a floor rate on the PRRT so that companies have to pay an annual tax regardless.

I'll speak more about my amendment in the committee stage, but I just want to wrap up by saying that this is an issue that my party has been fighting for for at least the last five years to try to fix this tax rort. Not only do these companies not pay the petroleum resource rent tax that's owed to the Australian people, because of a system deliberately designed to give them a free kick in front of goals; but, when I asked Dr Craig Emerson, the architect of this tax scheme, directly in the Senate inquiry in Sydney why we couldn't fix the system, why we couldn't remove the 15 per cent per annum exploration uplift rates, why we couldn't put a floor—

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We've done that.

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

Yes, you did do that, but you still kept it at a very generous five per cent, Senator Canavan, including for uplift on operating expenses, which was entirely unnecessary. Why should you transfer the risky activities of these companies onto the Australian taxpayer or onto the Australian public? I asked Dr Emerson this point, and he said, 'You could change it, Senator, but it would introduce sovereign risk'—the old sovereign risk bogey again, as though that's somehow going to influence future investment in this country. We're talking about trillions of dollars of investment already, and the reason we're getting this investment is this overly generous tax system.

Now, I don't want to see Equinor, a Norwegian company, going out and exploring the pristine Great Australian Bight. If they find world-class reserves of oil and gas there, they're going to turn South Australia into another North West Shelf. Apart from the endless pursuit of profits that this industry is addicted to, they are doing that because of this tax system. This generous tax system allows them to write-off all those exploration expenses, uplift them at generous rates and use them against future profits. Those liabilities will never be paid to the Australian people.

I don't want to see a pristine body of water turned into another giant oil and gas field. It's a time of climate crisis. It's a time in history to be changing the way we do business. It's a time to stand up and say, 'Business as usual is not an option,' whether it's dealing with our tax system and changing the tax system the way we need to, whether it's pricing pollution, whether it's transitioning our economy to renewable energy, whether it's standing up and opposing all new offshore oil and gas exploration in this country or whether it's looking after future generations by acting on emissions and sending the strongest possible signal to these companies that their business model is defunct.

In a future of acting on climate there will be no more room for multi-trillion dollar oil and gas wells and developments off our coasts. It's high time we moved on. It's high time we act on emissions and we make the leadership decisions in this chamber and the other place to rapidly transition this country. This is why people are protesting. This is why people are rising in Melbourne, in Brisbane, in Sydney, in Perth, in Hobart, in Launceston and in Adelaide. They're standing up because we aren't making those decisions. We aren't showing the leadership on transition. I would have thought that the PRRT was a no-brainer—making changes to a tax system that at least forces some of the biggest, wealthiest companies on this planet to pay their fair share. They've got out of paying $324 billion in tax to the Australian people. Think about that just for a moment. Think about how much money that is and what that could be used for. This is a small first step—not giving these companies more deductions.

I would urge senators to consider that—indeed, and this was thoroughly explored by our Senate inquiry and you might want to pay particular attention to this one, Senator Canavan—this is the tail wagging the dog of the oil and gas industry in this country and it is deliberately designed to be so generous to entice and to incentivise companies to come in their endless exploration of dirty fossil fuels that they burn that pollute the planet, that warm the planet, that kill our oceans, that cause bushfires and that condemns future generations of Australians. It's all tied in to this tax system. We need to change it. I am very passionate about this issue, and I will continue to fight, with my colleagues, to change this tax system to fix this petroleum resource rort in Australia.

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank senators for their contributions to these amendments. It is some very important legislation on our books. It's the legislation that provides the oversight and regulation of activities in our offshore areas, primarily oil and gas development in those areas. Obviously, they're activities that require a substantial amount of regulation and, as the responsible minister, I take the responsibility to ensure that we have robust regulation of our environment and the safety of workers in those environments very seriously. These amendments today are quite simple. The Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill 2019 will transfer regulatory oversite for offshore greenhouse gas storage environmental management and well operations from the responsible Commonwealth minister—that is, myself—to the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority, or NOPSEMA.

The amendment in the miscellaneous amendments bill will also strengthen and clarify the powers of NOPSEMA inspectors to determine whether regulated entities are compliant with their obligations under the act and associated regulations. The bill further amends the act to introduce enforceable undertakings. Most of these measures are in response to some clear issues in the current legislation. The transfer of responsibilities aligns the regulation of other activities in their offshore areas with those that relate to offshore oil and gas activities.

The bill also makes some technical amendments to the act to futureproof specific references and provisions of the act to regulations made under the act. The Offshore Petroleum Greenhouse Gas Storage (Regulatory Levies) Amendment Bill 2019 amends the Offshore Petroleum Greenhouse Gas Storage (Regulatory Levies) Act 2003 as a consequence of the related amendments to the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act 2006.

NOPSEMA operates on a fully cost-recovered basis through levies and fees payable by the offshore petroleum and greenhouse gas storage industries. This includes well-related levies imposed in relation to petroleum titles to ensure NOPSEMA can also recover the costs of its oversight of well operations under greenhouse gas titles. This bill will amend the levies act to extend the application of the well-related levies to greenhouse gas wells as well.

In my brief time before question time, I thought I should respond to some of the contributions from the senators from the Greens political party first. The accusations that somehow the government is not appropriately enforcing taxation regulations on oil and gas producers are completely without merit. And, indeed, Senator Whish-Wilson at multiple points of his contribution contradicted himself on this very point, because as he did admit—sometimes to interjections from myself—the government has in fact strengthened our taxation laws in this area, the petroleum resource rent tax. There is a quite generous uplift rate for exploration. We did that one retrospectively, notwithstanding the issues that Senator Whish-Wilson made.

We've also put time limits on expenditure uplifts for non-exploration related expenditure. Although, admittedly those are running prospectively to keep the integrity of our system in place. As Senator Whish-Wilson also admitted they have taken the likes of Chevron, and the Taxation Office are pursuing others cases against companies in the resources space and they have been successful at recovering hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of the Australian taxpayer.

The fundamental point here is there is a distinction between the government and the Greens political party. We do not run or regulate our oil and gas sector to maximise tax revenues for the Australian people We run and regulate our oil and gas industry, like other industries, to provide the maximum benefit to the Australian people. Yes, tax revenues are part of the benefit but it is not the only benefit. The benefits include the jobs that hundreds of thousands of Australians have in the resource sector. The benefits include the economic and national development that these sectors contribute to. And, yes, the benefits also include the use of these resources both here domestically and often in overseas countries to help their economic development needs. That's what we run this sector for and that's the best way to do it to make sure it benefits most Australian people.

I also want point out the fundamental hypocrisy here of the Australian Greens. Senator Di Natale, you say: 'Gas has got to end. We've got to end the use of gas and oil and all these terrible products.' Meanwhile out the front this morning the Greens were at the front of a hot air balloon that they fired up with a nice big flare and floated into the sky to declare a climate emergency. We have been hearing from the Greens that apparently we are compromised by our donations from the fossil fuel sector. I can only conclude from the illogical and inconsistent behaviour we have seen from the Australian Greens in the last few months that they must be taking donations from the fossil fuel sector. How else can you explain this behaviour? How else can you explain that someone would logically campaign against oil and gas using a gas-fired hot air balloon? It makes no sense whatsoever. And not only that, that hot air balloon out there is not just fired by gas; the coating on it is made from nylon and dacron. They are fossil fuel polymers—

Senator Wong interjecting—

I'll come to you, Senator Wong. You guys aren't much better, because today I heard you've declared a climate emergency too. There is all this talk from the Australian Labor Party about how they now support the coal industry. They support workers. No, they are lining up behind the likes of Extinction Rebellion out the front. They are lining up against these people who are stopping people from going about their business. They are lining up with people who want to end the coal industry and put thousands of Australians out of a job. That is the Australian Labor Party. They're not about making jobs, creating jobs or supporting jobs. They're about putting people out of a job. They are combined with the Greens here today, with these protesters, whereas on this side we're standing up for our economy, standing up for jobs and standing up to make sure Australians can have a prosperous future for themselves and their families.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.