Factcheck: It's true, the sky won't fall in if we tax gas exports - just look at Norway

Raising money on the gas industry won’t make companies leave Australia, just look at Norway. 

That’s what Queensland Senator and Australian Greens leader Larissa Waters, said on the Australia Institute’s Follow The Money podcast. 

“We hear every time that a new proposal to tax the big corporations is made, they freak out and claim the sky will fall in, it’ll shut down industry, they’ll all go offshore. It is rubbish. It is absolute rubbish. If you look for example, at Norway, which taxes its resources quite heavily and appropriately so, the industry hasn’t fallen in there. And in fact there are new proposals for resource extraction being made even now. So it is perfectly clear this is an industry talking point to try and kill reform.“ 

Is she right? 

Back in 1974, with prices buoyed by supply restrictions in the Middle East, Norway’s oil boom was in full swing. And their Labour government wanted to make sure the country’s citizens got the benefits of the natural resources they collectively owned. 

As Professor Einar Lie of the University of Oslo told The Tyee in 2012, 

“At the time, oil companies in Norway were being taxed at about 50 per cent. In 1974, Norwegian officials summoned Exxon, Shell and others to a meeting and informed them the new petroleum law would raise taxes to close to 90 per cent. Representatives of the world’s most powerful industrial sector were not pleased. 

When the yelling died down, the hard-nosed minister of finance at the time noted that none of the companies present had surrendered their oil concessions. He then reportedly turned to his bureaucrats and said in full view of enraged oil executives, “We should have taken more.” 

According to Lie, “They were furious when they heard about the new taxation law. And then they started a media campaign saying that they would leave Norway and that it was impossible to work in a socialist country like this that does not understand the rules of international capitalism.” 

Sound familiar? 

But in all the furore, and even with a new, higher rate of taxation, none of the oil companies left Norway. In fact, Shell has made huge investments in  Norway’s oil and gas fields since then and extracted 4.9 billion cubic metres of Norwegian gas in 2024. 

As for the political consequences of the move, the Norwegian Labour government was re-elected in a landslide, their best result in the last 50 years. 

Larissa Waters is right, Norway didn’t kill its oil and gas industry when it raised their taxes. In fact, it has flourished in the five decades since then. 

Verdict: True.