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

Acting Deputy President O'Neill, you, yourself, remember the fights we had five years ago in this Senate chamber and through numerous committees to get companies like Chevron to actually pay some tax in Australia. It really hit home to me today, listening to the Liberal Party get up in here and talk about what a great taxpayer Chevron is and how many billions of dollars they're putting into our tax system, when the Australian Taxation Office had to take Chevron to the High Court in 2017 to get them to pay any tax. Chevron were Australia's biggest tax avoider. They ended up having to pay $340 million, thanks to the Australian tax office and senators in this chamber—

pressing for some political action, Senator Scarr, and pressuring senators on your side of the chamber, Acting Deputy President, to actually do something to make big oil and gas corporations pay their fair share of tax.

We had a Senate inquiry, which the Greens initiated, into the petroleum resource rent tax in 2017—chaired by the very capable Senator Sam Dastyari, may I say. Right then, the government had what was called the Callaghan review, which they'd been sitting on for two years because the petroleum resource rent tax, called the PRRT, was the petroleum resource rort tax. These companies had clocked up nearly $340 billion in tax credits. In other words, they were going to pay no tax for the life cycle of the large gas projects in this country—a tax system invented in the 1980s and totally out of touch with the reality of the 2000s.