Rex Patrick (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Benefit to Australia) Bill 2020. For decades the predominantly international oil and gas companies operating in Australian waters have engaged in economic pillaging and plundering on a national scale, and nothing has been done to stop it. The intent of the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Amendment (Benefit to Australia) Bill is to make benefit to the Australian community a guiding principle in the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act. We've heard, on a couple of occasions, that the objectives centre around an effective regulatory framework for petroleum exploration and recovery and the injection and storage of greenhouse gas substances in offshore areas.

I want to make sure everyone in the chamber and everyone listening understands what Senator Hanson's bill seeks to do. It seeks to add these words: 'and to ensure that the exploitation of these natural resources is for the benefit of the Australian community'. I am just flabbergasted that the members on both sides, Labor and Liberal, are going to vote against these words. The Liberal Party is going to vote against this: 'and to ensure that the exploitation of these natural resources is for the benefit of the Australian community'. The government is going to vote against that. Labor is going to vote against that too. I might have to go and look into the statutes for the words 'treason' and 'treachery'. I guess they will be relying on parliamentary privilege to prevent them from being found guilty of such a thing, because that's exactly what's happening here! It's a very mild amendment that seeks to direct officials' and ministers' attention to the fact that we should not be conducting these operations without considering whether or not the activities are for the benefit of the Australian community.

The balance is all wrong, with the scales firmly tipped in favour of exploration and extraction companies. Unsurprisingly they're all saying, 'Don't change anything,' because it's great for them. They try to spin and say that they're doing the right thing, but they're not. I saw Chevron's submission to this inquiry. They talked about employing workers; they talked about paying income tax. Well, I'm sorry; workers pay income tax. They're trying to chalk that up as their credit—that somehow we benefit because the workers pay income tax. Let me just explain to you what the corporate tax situation is for some of those companies. Thankfully, because we have ATO tax-transparency data, we can now see what's going on. ExxonMobil Australia: $56 billion in revenue, rounded, and no corporate tax paid. Chevron Australia Holdings: $28 billion in revenue over five tax years, and not a cent in corporate tax paid. ConocoPhillips Australia Gas Holdings: $7 billion, with not a brass razoo of tax paid. They take our resources and they pay no tax. They pay us nothing for it. Santos: $23 billion in revenue, with only $3 million in tax paid. Beach Energy: $6 billion in revenue, with only $360 million paid.

In the chamber this morning, we heard, correctly, that Australia has become the largest supplier of liquefied natural gas. Yet, in the financial year 2018-19, that delivered a paltry $1 billion through PRRT. By comparison, Qatar generated $26 billion—on less gas! How does that work? I've been around long enough to have watched what happened in 2015. The Labor government was to blame for this. They set up gas trains in Gladstone, which saw the production of gas go up significantly, to the point where, in 2017, there were constituent companies in South Australia coming to the office of my former boss, Senator Xenophon, saying, 'It's not that we can't get a reasonable price; we can't even get an offer to supply gas.' All of the gas was being ripped out of the local domestic supply so that companies could export it overseas. As a result of negotiations, which I was heavily involved in, for the Australian Domestic Gas Security Mechanism, we have seen the supply aspects of this addressed. As has also been pointed out in this chamber, we now have a situation where we're the largest exporter of LNG, but we pay more here in Australia for our gas than what people pay in Asia for our gas molecules. How does that work? It's unbelievable.

But wait, there's more! In 2016, the Australian company Woodside Petroleum dumped a floating production storage and offloading asset, the Northern Endeavour, on a small, undercapitalised company. We're now seeing these stranded assets being palmed off to little players. And what happened? NOPSEMA intervened after the new company took over the platform and drove the owners of the Northern Endeavour into liquidation. The end result is that the FPSO is now laid up in the Timor Sea, being crewed and maintained in lighthouse mode at taxpayers' expense, awaiting decommissioning. The cost thus far to the Australian taxpayer has been $100 million. Go and look at it in the budget papers; you'll see a line item associated with the Northern Endeavour. Woodside finished up with this platform, offloaded it, and then NOPSEMA put the company out of business. I'm not speaking from hindsight. In 2019, I talked to NOPSEMA at estimates. I said, 'You run the risk of having this company go under and the Australian taxpayer owning and having to pay for an oil platform.' They said, 'No, no, Senator, that's not going to happen.' That's exactly what did happen. These companies come into Australia, take our oil and gas and don't give us any return in terms of corporate tax, and then offload their ageing platforms, and we're paying for that now. The total estimate of cost to the Australian taxpayer to fix the Northern Endeavour, to uncouple it from its oilfield and to decommission the site and the vessel is somewhere between $350 million and $1 billion. This is for Woodside's aged vessel. The ironic and sad thing here is that the government went to Woodside and paid them by way of a contract to advise them on how to decommission it. So Woodside take this platform and offload it, and now they're charging us back to give advice on how to get rid of it. It's just unbelievable. You couldn't read about it. Woodside's conduct in this is grossly immoral, bordering on criminal, and what the government has done is mind-numbingly stupid!

We have a bill here before the Senate that seeks to place as an objective in the act some very, very sensible words, that when NOPTA and NOPSEMA are carrying out their work and when ministers are looking at things happening in the oil and gas industry they must ensure that the exploration of these natural resources is for the benefit of the Australian community. But, no: the government can't bring itself to vote for that and neither can the Labor opposition. I listened to Senator Ayres; he's normally quite articulate—he's normally very clear in what he says to this chamber—but he was all over the place. He talked about a lack of jobs and he talked about the fact that we're not getting any return from these gas companies. He talked about a whole range of things, such as the fact that we're paying higher prices and the fact of these import terminals. How crazy is that? We're the largest exporter of gas in the world and yet, at the same time, we're building import terminals. Seriously? That's how broken this is. Yet the government wants to maintain the status quo, supported by the opposition.

It's disgraceful. The very simple words in Senator Hanson's bill require people to consider the benefit to the Australian community, and traitors on both sides of the chamber are simply saying, 'No, we don't want that.' Senator Ayres recognises the problems but doesn't accept what Senator Hanson said, that this is a small nudge in the right direction. Why wouldn't you take it? It's unbelievable. I commend this bill to the Senate.