Larissa Waters: gas companies treat tax as optional, and they leave the rest of us with the cleanup bill

Australian Greens Leader Larissa Waters has accused the major parties of being too close to big mining, revealing that in the past 25 years, every single Resources Minister – but one – has gone on to work in the industry after leaving parliament.

“Offshore gas companies pay no royalties, which means they get the product that they’re selling for free,” she told the Australia Institute’s Revenue Summit in Canberra.

“This is a deal that both the Labor and Liberal parties are both fine with … I wonder if there’s just a little coincidence there.

“Gas companies treat tax as optional, and they leave the rest of us with the cleanup bill for the natural disasters that they are turbo charging.”

Senator Waters said while many Australians are struggling to pay for basic items “they need to survive … corporate profits and bank balances of billionaires soar. It feels unfair because it is.

“Inequality in Australia is the driving force behind the concurrent existential crises that we face, and the gap just keeps getting bigger.”

The Greens Leader took aim at the petroleum resource rent tax (PRRT) describing it as “an elaborate con that gas companies are readily happy to game”.

She backed the Australian Council of Trade Union’s (ACTU) call to introduce a 25% tax on gas exports.

Liam O’Brien, ACTU Assistant Secretary, told the summit the profits-based tax is “broken”, and Australians are, “getting ripped off by the gas industry”.

“The rate of tax we collect from PRRT is laughable… (it is) riddled with loopholes.”

Analysis by the Australia Institute shows ACTU’s call for a 25% tax on revenue from gas exports to replace the PRRT would raise around $12.5 billion annually, enough to triple the Australian government’s housing expenditure.

However, Queensland Senator said the major parties “simply do not have the guts to stand up to big corporations and say, enough is enough.”

“To do that, they’d need to start taxing big corporations and those with extreme wealth more fairly.

Senator Waters said, “1 in 3 big corporations pays zero tax” and pointed out that over the decades, successive governments have handed out, “$60 billion of public money in fossil fuel subsidies to a tiny handful of massive mining companies.

“And we’ve seen the major parties not blink an eye at committing $375 billion of taxpayer money to AUKUS.”

“What a dud deal,” she said.

“We’re hitching our wagon to increasingly erratic and fundamentally self-interested America for nuclear submarines that we might never receive.”

She said the money would be better spent on developing Australia’s own independent foreign policy and warned the Labor party was losing its way.

“Despite the Labor Party’s supposed political philosophy, they are serving big corporations and billionaires, big corporations and billionaires know that the rules are stacked in their favour, and they are hellbent on keeping it that way.”

Senator Waters urged Australians to demand more from Canberra.

“The major parties lack the courage to change anything on their own, lest their big corporate donors stop donating and the many lobbyists that haunt the halls of this place start banging down the cabinet doors.

“These politicians have forgotten who they work for and we must all remind them.”