Updated Treasury figures have confirmed that the excise collected on a middy of XXXX Gold raised more for the federal budget last financial year than the entire Petroleum Resource Rent Tax collected from offshore LNG projects, a situation officials have described as ‘working as designed’.
The disparity – $2.6 billion in beer excise against $2 billion in PRRT — has prompted calls for reform from every Australian outside the gas lobby and three cross-bench senators, but has been defended internally as ‘a feature of mature resource policy’.
‘The PRRT settings reflect decades of careful negotiation between the gas industry and the gas industry,’ a senior Treasury official explained. ‘It would be inappropriate for a government to intervene in a market it had only designed, legislated and subsidised.’
The figures resurfaced after TikTok-based advocacy account Punters Politics posted a fourteen-second video of a man in a high-vis shirt explaining the gap using two schooners and a visibly confused accountant. The video was viewed 4.8 million times before the Energy Minister’s office declined to comment on it through a media adviser who also declined to comment.
Industry body APPEA welcomed the findings, noting that the sector contributed ‘billions in indirect economic activity’, including jobs in Perth, Houston and the Cayman Islands.
A spokesperson for the Prime Minister said the government remained committed to a ‘sensible, balanced’ approach to resource taxation in which pensioners pay a beer tax and multinationals do not.
The Greens have called for the PRRT to be replaced with a flat five per cent royalty. The Coalition has called for the PRRT to be replaced with a thank-you note. Labor has called for a review.
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