Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

As I was going on to say, in the last budget we updated and revised the MRRT revenue to $13.4 billion over the forward estimates. As Senator Cormann well knows from questions in this place and in Senate estimates, the government acknowledges that the revenue take from the MRRT obviously depends on a range of factors such as commodity prices, exchange rates and production volumes. By virtue of being a profit based tax, it is obviously more volatile than other types of revenue.

In terms of the quantum, the senator knows that I release monthly statements of the budget. Those are released every month from the preceding month, and he can consider those statements when they are released and made public, as is usually the case. I make this point about the position that Senator Cormann asserts.