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

It was this chamber, Senator Scarr—through you, Chair—and senators who actually worked hard to get changes to the PRRT. But let me say how disappointing those changes were—25 per cent uplift on exploration rates. At the time of our inquiry, oil and gas companies could uplift their exploration expenditures by 15 per cent per annum and all their offshore operating activities costs by five per cent per annum. The Australian public would even pay for the clean-ups of oil and gas fields, because that was also deductible under the petroleum resource rort tax. The government, thanks to the pressure from this chamber, at least reduced that uplift on exploration expenditure to five per cent. But still we have hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits, and tax that could be paying for schools, hospitals and other important things in this country is not being paid. It is still a rort.

My colleague Senator Cox very shortly will talk about how the Greens have a very simple solution to this. I know crossbenchers in this place—One Nation, Senator Lambie and previously Senator Patrick—have all tried to bring in proper reform to the petroleum resource rort tax. We need a royalty rate of at least 10 per cent—a base royalty rate that deductions don't work against so that we actually get a return for the Australian people. Yes, some of these companies pay tax and, yes, they employ Australians. But remember: what other industry apart from mining gets its resources and inputs into its production for free? These companies are taking our gas, our oil, our condensate and other products, and they are paying nothing for them. Yes, they are extracting them and they are employing people, but they are paying nothing for them to the Australian people, who own these resources.

It's so typical of the LNP to come into this place and say: 'Well, leave it to the free market. They're employing people. Let them get away with these superprofits. Let them get away with paying no tax.' They're still doing transfer pricing. There's still dodgy related-third-party financing going on. There are a whole range of things that these companies are still doing. But I'm proud to be part of a party that, over the last decade, has led to at least some reform in this sector, and we need to see more of it.

But here is where the Greens fundamentally disagree with One Nation: we believe that the form of exploitation—to focus on that word 'exploitation'—of our oil and gas reserves offshore that would best suit the Australian people would be no new oil and gas projects. There are already enough hydrocarbons—enough oil and gas—in reserves that, if we exploit those, we will exceed our Paris target. We will exceed two degrees of warming. Even the conservative International Energy Agency said that, if we are to limit warming to 1½ degrees to protect the future generations on this planet—some of whom are watching this Senate debate today in the chamber—we have to stop exploring and exploiting new fossil fuel projects not just in Australia but internationally. We need to, as quickly as possible, move to a 100 per cent renewable energy footing. Of course we're still going to use petroleum products in the decades to come. There has to be a transition. But we need to move as quickly as possible. The last thing we should be doing is putting in place incentives in legislation, financial or otherwise, that encourage more greedy oil and gas companies exploiting our ocean with the exact same product that, when we burn it, is boiling our oceans, killing our coral reefs and the ecosystems off my state in Tasmania, like our giant kelp forest, and decimating our fisheries and decimating biodiversity in the womb of this planet that is our ocean. It is insanity in this day and age to be doing exactly that.

So what we actually need to do is have legislation in this place that stops all new oil and gas exploration, and the Greens have a bill before this august chamber to do exactly that—to amend the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act to ban all new fossil fuel exploration. But I totally accept the spirit in which One Nation has brought this bill forward today: seeking to get a benefit for the Australian people from the big, greedy oil and gas companies that currently pay very little tax, thanks to an overly generous—extremely generous—and totally out-of-date tax system that relates to the royalties on oil and gas extraction from this country. I remember that we actually called a number of witnesses before the Senate, including the architects of the PRRT, and, as senators, we put the simple question to them. We said, 'Why shouldn't this system be totally reformed? This system was set up for oil production in Bass Strait in the late 1980s and 1990s. Now what we have is vertical integration and massive multibillion—in fact, trillion—dollar projects that extract gas. This was not set up for the gas market or the condensate market.'

I remember speaking to Dr Craig Emerson who was one of the architects of the PRRT. He said: 'Senator, if you change the system now, it will lead to sovereign risk. We won't see any more investment in new oil and gas projects.' Putting aside the fact that I didn't have a problem with that, I don't accept that changing a tax system purely for the benefit of corporations is in the public interest or that not changing a tax system purely for the benefit of oil and gas corporations is in the public interest. We have a duty to make sure that any mining company pays its fair share of tax in this country. Tax is not a dirty word. We need royalties; we need resource rents.

It is for you, Senator Scarr. It is for you and the Liberal Party, and I totally understand that. But most Australians want to see corporations pay their fair share of tax. They know what it's like when they get a letter from the Australian Taxation Office or they get a call from their accountant and they're told that they didn't fill in their tax return properly or they owe tax to the Australian tax office. Individuals in this country know what that's like. Why should corporations, because they have access to power and influence, get away without paying their fair share of tax?

Once again, I am very proud to be part of a political party that has spent so much time and effort in this chamber, over many, many years, trying to get a fairer tax system for all Australians because, if we had a fair tax system for all Australians, we wouldn't actually have a revenue crisis. We would have the money we need to have a social security safety net and to invest in our people, in better health for Australians and in better education—all the kinds of things, Senator Scarr, I'm sure you would agree, would be an investment in the Australian public and in our future. But, more importantly, we would have the money we need to actually pay to avert the biodiversity crisis we have in this country. We would have the money to fully fund our recovery plans for 150 species and habitats—recovery plans which the previous government tried to have removed from the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which were never resourced. We would have money in this country to assist farmers, to assist communities and to restore degraded habitat both in our oceans and on our land. We would actually have the revenue we need to pay for schools and hospitals and all those critical things. That comes down to one thing: do we have the courage as politicians—do we have the spine in this place—to take on big corporations?

Senator David Pocock talked about state capture in this place. It is a very apt description for the polity I have seen in the decade I have been a senator in this place. State capture is a simple concept. It means big political parties are captured by vested interests through donations and other influences, and they deliver policies those vested interests want. I don't think the Australian public voted for that; I think they voted for change at the last election. A third of all Australians didn't vote for major political parties; they voted for the Greens and other parties. They want to see change. They want to see us break this state capture that, let me tell you, has absolutely paralysed climate action in this parliament, in this building, in the last 15 to 20 years.

I'm glad we are finally moving on with some climate action in this parliament, and I know the Australian people support that. But if we really want to get to 1½ degrees warming—and I want to remind senators: if you believe in the science of climate change and if you look at the changes we are seeing in Australia and around the planet, that is happening at one degree of warming above pre-industrial levels. Record floods, record heatwaves, record fires, loss of habitat—that is happening at one degree of warming. The Paris Agreement wants to limit warming to 1½ degrees. That is a 50 per cent increase on what we've already got. That's not reducing warming in the system by 50 per cent and taking us back to half a degree of warming or reducing warming by 100 per cent and taking us back to 350 parts per million; that is already saying, 'We wave the white flag and accept this planet is going to warm by another 50 per cent on what we've already seen.' That's supposed to be a good thing. Yet the current government's plan is to have us on two degrees of warming. That's a 100 per cent increase on what we've already seen in our lifetimes.

Under the previous government we were on a business-as-usual scenario of three to four degrees of warming, which means that large parts of this planet won't be inhabitable. I don't need to tell senators what the costs of that will be not just to the environment, ecosystems and habitat but to us as a species and to everything we love and stand for. The only thing that's going to fix that is systemic change, and systemic change means political change. It means coming in here with courage and standing up for policies and changes that will at least limit warming on this planet to 1½ degrees.

If we are serious about that, the most important thing we can do is stop all new oil and gas exploration, offshore and onshore, in this country. You can be sure that's what the Greens stand for. That's what we will come into this place and fight for every day, as we have fought through the swamp-and-desert years of the LNP over the last decade in this building.