Clare Armstrong

Yeah, so this was your usual Senate estimates.

Senator David Pogo comes up against this Treasury official and it essentially gets the Treasury official to confirm that the government makes more money from the excise on beer compared to what it collects in revenue from what's known as the Petroleum Resources Rent Tax.

The views that this one got for Pocock, I think about 9.3 million on Instagram alone last time I checked.

Yeah, so essentially this idea that, you know, the average person going to the pub is chipping in more to the government coffers than these multinational, often foreign-owned gas companies...

has really taken off in the public.

You've got people like Punter's Politics, which is a podcast, satirist kind of commentary outfit online.

And Conrad, you know, it is interesting, I think, that shows the way this debate has gone, that he was invited to appear at one of the three days of this inquiry.

And essentially gets up to accuse or suggest that the government is giving away our gas and that that is not something that obviously he feels and many of his followers and readers and listeners feel is a fair deal for the taxpayer.

Yes, he had a bit of a viral moment himself in the inquiry.

He essentially just said we could be using this money in so many different ways to help so many people or to pay down the debt that obviously is about to reach a trillion dollars in the federal budget.

There's a lot could be done with this money and it's time to get on with it was essentially his view.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, so the PRRT is a tax that just applies to the profits and it specifically allows for companies to deduct their losses and expenses as well.

So it only really kicks in once they're well and truly making money, which is something that, you know, opponents of it say is too weak.

So representatives from the sort of broader industry groups say that for the financial year 24-25, it's

that all of the different taxes they pay, which includes company tax, state royalties, so that goes into state government coffers rather than the feds, is about $21.9 billion.

So they're trying to say that the comparison to the beer tax is not very fair.

I mean, I would add to that that obviously beer companies also pay company tax, so it's still not quite getting to an apples-to-apples comparison.

Yeah, so the country comparison thing is sort of the next phase of where this debate has gone.