Why do Australian nationalists love foreign companies so much?

Can you imagine what Donald Trump would say if an Australian company exported $17 billion dollars’ worth of American gas without paying a cent in tax?

That’s exactly what Texan gas company ConocoPhillips has done in Australia over the past decade yet what have we heard from the Make Australia Great Again crowd?

Crickets!

The Japanese Ambassador to Australia publicly attacked the elected government of then-Premier Stephen Miles for increasing the price Japanese coal companies had to pay for Queensland’s coal.

And what did Australia’s nationalists have to say? They backed Japan.

While right wing politicians around the world usually win votes by demonising foreigners and promising to put their nation first, here in Australia there is bipartisan resolve to give our resources away for free to foreign companies who don’t even pay company tax. Even our so called ‘National Party’ supports the gas industry grift, and sides with the fossil fuel industry over farmers.

For Australians accustomed to being told that we are broke and can’t afford to spend more money on health, education or transport, it’s hard to comprehend just how generous Australian governments are to foreign-owned gas companies. Not only do we give away more than half the gas we export for free, we subsidise the infrastructure gas companies want and don’t even bat an eye when they pay no company tax on billions of dollars’ worth of our gas.

The latest corporate tax transparency data from the Australian Taxation Office confirms what economists, farmers, and the Parliamentary cross bench have known for years: the gas giants are taking the piss.

Santos Limited has managed ten straight years without paying a cent of corporate tax — despite racking up $48 billion in revenue from selling our gas. Japanese-owned Ichthys LNG has achieved an equally impressive feat: six years of zero company tax from $43 billion in sales.

That’s not clever accounting. That’s an Australian tax system that is the opposite of clever.

Taxing the gas industry isn’t hard. Countries like Norway, Qatar and Saudi Arabia know how to tax the global gas companies. Our governments simply choose not to.

It gets worse, for Australians at least.

Revenue collected by the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax — the one that’s supposed to make sure Australians get some return for their own gas — has fallen to a three-year low of $1.5 billion, down from $2 billion just two years ago. Production is high. Prices are high. Profits are astronomical. Yet the PRRT is collecting less revenue than it used to.

A reminder, the Australian government collects more from HECS repayments than it gets from the PRRT.

To be clear, the visa fees paid by Japanese students studying in Australian universities make a bigger contribution to the Commonwealth budget than Ichthys who sold more than $43 billion worth of our gas.

The people we elect to parliament could fix this if they wanted to.

After the 2022 election, Anthony Albanese called for a new kind of “progressive patriotism.” While he is yet to expand on precisely what this means, it’s hard to imagine that it includes spending billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidise the export of tens of billions of dollars with of gas that we gave away for free to foreign gas companies.

The ACTU’s proposal to tax all gas exports at 25 percent and raise around $12 billion would be a great start. As would scrapping the $10 billion per year we spend on the diesel fuel rebate that mainly benefits the mining industry. Those two simple changes would deliver more than $22 billion in extra revenue, per year. Just imagine how much better our public hospitals, schools and housing could be if we put Australians first.

Oh, and here’s the cherry on top. The gas industry say that if we make them pay some tax they will stop building new climate wrecking gas projects. Great. Let’s tax the ones that are already here and we can all agree they shouldn’t build any new ones. Win-win.

Richard Denniss is co-chief executive of the Australia Institute.