Clare Armstrong

The Japan story, though, I think is where this gets really interesting because, as you said, they don't have their own gas.

They're an importer of gas.

They import more than they need sometimes, which means they can...

profit off selling it on.

But they also have an import tax, so everything that comes into the country, the government collects a tax from.

Japan has collected almost $40 billion over the last five years from imports

taxing its imports of these fossil fuels, while the PRRT over that same period has only delivered about $7 billion to Australia.

Again, obviously the PRRT is not the only way that gas companies contribute taxes, but I think that the Japan example in particular is so interesting here.

Yeah, so some modelling that I think the Australia Institute has done on a lot of people's site is that if you had a flat 25% tax on all exports, so that's just the flow of gas going offshore, it would raise about $17 billion and bring domestic prices down because obviously there would be more incentive to just sell gas locally, there'd be more competition to do that.

Yeah, so the Norwegian government imposes an effective marginal tax rate of about 78% on North Sea gas projects.

And so that is making them a huge amount of money.

They've got a massive sovereign wealth fund that they can use to prop up all sorts of things in the country.

This idea, this comparison in particular, is something that has been really frustrating the business community.

BCA chief Bram Black has been out really trying to highlight that the Norway example is no good because the way their system works is so different to ours, particularly because Norway allows much more gas exploration, fast tractor approvals, and a lot of the companies extracting this gas are state owned.

The other big thing is they have lost refundability, which basically means in a year where a gas company, for example, if they went out and spent $100 million on various gas extraction projects and lost $70 million, the taxpayer would refund them that $70 million.

That is not something I think that would be particularly tenable to the Australian taxpayer.

So as much as there are proponents saying Norway is the case study for how to collect a lot of revenue off a flat tax, it's also becoming the example the other side of the debate are using to say, well, if you want to let a rip gas exploration and approval system where we also refund losses, then that's really what you're signing up to with that model.

Yeah, so the big argument is that having a tax like this risks future investment in gas.

And one thing that is broadly agreed at this point across political lines is that Australia is going to need more gas for the future to back up its renewables transition.

And so if you have this tax burden placed on these companies, the argument is that