Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill 2019 gives me an opportunity today to say what I didn't get to say in the last day of the 45th Parliament. For senators who were here for the 45th Parliament, you may remember that on the very last sitting day the Senate jammed through this government's pithy changes to the petroleum resource rent tax, commonly known as the PRRT. Under a guillotine—and that is what it was—the government's scant changes to the PRRT were passed without debate. Obviously this was extremely disappointing to myself and to my Greens colleagues and no doubt would have been disappointing to a number of senators who have worked in this chamber for a number of years. The Greens initiated a Senate inquiry into the changes to the petroleum resource rent tax. At the time I called it the 'petroleum rort rent tax', because that is what it is: the biggest rort in the Australian tax system. Some of the biggest polluters and some of the wealthiest companies on this planet with some of the highest returns on shareholder funds have avoided paying tax on the resources that are owned by the Australian people. Why have they avoided paying tax for those resources? Because the system was deliberately set up that way to enable them to do this.

While we've all sat through numerous Senate inquiries and significant legislation trying to crack down on multinational tax avoidance—and I commend the government, the Labor Party and the crossbench senators for the combined focus and effort in this place to get results—how is it that this sector, this industry, gets away with this time and time again? I didn't get to put forward the details of the Greens amendments to try to fix the petroleum rort rent tax—amendments that, by the way, were reflected in recommendations from the Senate inquiry into how to properly fix this tax to get a fair return for the Australian people on the resources that they own. I think they would have gone a reasonable way towards addressing this deficiency in our tax system and I think this is something the Australian people would have supported. They have to pay their fair share of tax and they just don't get how some of the biggest polluters and biggest companies on the planet can avoid paying their tax.

Senator Di Natale mentioned earlier that it is not just the PRRT where they have been able to accumulate $380 billion in deferred taxes to the Australian people and to the Australian government; a number of these companies were also singled out for attention by senators in this chamber for not paying any tax at all. I was very encouraged that the Australian Taxation Office took on Chevron and other big polluters and forced them to pay at least some of the tax they owed to the Australian people. You can draw your own conclusions as to why this industry seems to be so sacrosanct. Why is it that the oil and gas industry gets away with it time and time again?