MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator WATERS (Queensland—Leader of the Australian Greens) (16:20): Actions speak louder than words. Labor's national platform was just amended so that it says that the party wants to ensure a fairer return from our natural resources. Today, the Greens are giving the government a chance to vote the way that their own members want them to and to vote for a minimum 25 per cent tax on gas exports.
Right now, Australians are being taken for a ride. Japan makes more money off Australia's gas than Australians do. They've had a tax on gas imports for some 50 years.
They've made $8 billion a year for the last five years largely off our gas—$8 billion—while we give it away virtually for free. Those numbers just don't add up, and they're not adding up for Australians either. That's why poll after poll shows that a majority of people support a minimum 25 per cent tax on gas exports.
That's why, just a few weeks ago, my colleague Senator Allman-Payne and I had 80 people packed into a pub on the Sunny Coast, and 75 of them left with signs saying, 'Tax gas exports' for their fences. That's why hundreds of Queenslanders turned out last weekend to wave those same signs all the way from Gladstone down to the Gold Coast. People are getting behind this campaign because they know that the big gas corporations are ripping them off.
One in three big corporations pays no corporate tax at all, including Santos, one of the biggest gas producers and exporters in Australia. In the three months after the war in Iran began, Woodside Energy reported nearly a 30 per cent jump in revenue. Not only are they killing the planet; they're making a killing while they do it.
A minimum 25 per cent gas export tax could raise around $17 billion every single year. We could use that revenue to actually help people in what is a deep and abiding cost-of-living crisis. Imagine that.
Instead of leaving $17 billion in the pockets of the gas corporations, we could use it to put dental and mental health care into Medicare. Imagine that we could use it to build more public and affordable homes for people. We could fully fund public schools.
We could make university free again and cancel student debt. We could put solar and batteries on every single roof in this country and invest in sustainable biofuels so that we're protected from the next fuel crisis and have real energy independence in a way that helps us tackle the climate crisis at the same time. That's the sort of thing that $17 billion could be used for—to actually help Australians.
Labor is feeling the heat from the public on this, and that's why they've changed their party platform. But words are not action. Today, the Greens are giving Labor the opportunity to act and to vote for a gas export tax, because governments should work for people, not corporate profits.
It is about time that this government started saying no to their corporate donors and started acting in the interests of Australians. That is your job as representatives and as the government that the people have elected. You're meant to be working for people.
Instead, we see the Prime Minister continually delivering for the gas corporations and for the other corporate donors that fuel his re-election coffers. People are sick of it. They are seeing it more clearly.
This government works for big corporations and it puts Australians last, and they're sick of it, folks. So vote for a gas tax already. (Time expired)