Hanson’s plan for 10pc royalty on offshore gas production
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has called on the federal government to put a 10 per cent royalty on natural gas from commonwealth waters, in a move designed to boost takings from $170 billion worth of LNG projects built in the past decade.
Senator Hanson plans to make the call with One Nation senator Peter Georgiou in Perth today.
“The only way the government is going to retain my confidence is to put Australia first and that means a uniform royalty regime on offshore gas,” she will say.
“We have a mountain of debt our children can never repay. We can no longer afford to be ‘Treasure Island’ for other nations. It’s time to lighten the load on taxpayers and get multinationals to pay for our gas.”At the end of last year, Scott Morrison commissioned former Treasury official Mike Callaghan to conduct a petroleum resource rent tax review to look at why tax revenues were falling despite the recent construction boom.
But in April the Treasurer reported the review had found the revenue fall did not indicate Australians were not getting equitable returns from the gas.
One Nation sees it differently.
“Australia is the only country in the world where we allow companies to take our gas without paying for it,” Senator Georgiou said.
He said Western Australia received $650 million a year from royalties from the North West Shelf project. This would easily double if royalties were applied to new projects such as Chevron’s Gorgon and Wheatstone, Shell’s Prelude, Woodside’s Pluto and Inpex’s Ichthys, he said.
The Department of Industry, Innovation and Science expects $35bn of LNG export revenue in 2018-19 when all of the new projects are operating.
Excluding Queensland’s three coal-seam gas export plants, about 70 per cent the revenue would be from offshore projects.
Taking the value “at the well head” would mean processing costs would need to be subtracted before the royalty was calculated
The royalty would also likely cover the big Bass Strait gas fields owned by BHP and ExxonMobil, which brought in revenue of $US2.2bn in 2016-17.
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