Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Health Administration) Share this | Hansard source

The minister’s answer just now is absolutely unbelievable. The minister has just exposed the core claim of the government—that they are putting an end to an unfair taxation advantage enjoyed by the North West Shelf—as an absolute fraud. He has just exposed the core claim put forward by the federal government to justify this $2½ billion tax grab as a fraud. Essentially he refused to answer directly whether they have had a close look at Woodside’s assertion that they would have paid $8 billion less under the PRRT arrangements.

This is the core question. The Treasurer goes out and makes an assertion, ‘We are putting an end to an unfair taxation advantage.’ The question asked during the inquiry, ‘Have you—the government—done any modelling to substantiate that assertion?’ ‘No, we have not,’—even though Mr Hartwell, head of the Resources Division in the Department of Resources, Energy and Tourism, very clearly said in evidence to a Senate estimates committee in 2005 that in his opinion the taxation liability would have been about the same. This is what happened: we had an arrangement between a project proponent, the state government and the federal government with all the parties working together to get this important resource project off the ground—the biggest resource project to this day.