Everyday Australians currently pay more tax on their beer and student loans than multinational gas cartels pay on the gas they extract from our shores.

Australia is the world’s quarry. Our historic role in geopolitics and the global economy is to dig up our finite natural wealth to provide cheap fossil fuels to power cheap manufacturing for the US and UK. Australia was founded and effectively remains as an extractive colony rather than a sovereign economy.

The fossil fuel and extractive mineral taxation system has been designed to perpetuate this system.

The failure to tax gas cartels is a deliberate strategy by Australian capital and the state to integrate itself into global supply chains and global finance, securing high returns for local financial institutions and domestic subcontractors tied to the mining boom

The Petroleum Resource Rent Tax therefore purposely allows massive foreign-owned fossil fuel corporations to use complex deductions to ensure they pay zero or near-zero tax on their ultra-profits. There is no “free market” for gas. These corporations operate within and have structural power over national governments, and state and foreign policy.

This is a core feature and objective of neoliberalism. Corporate interests are shielded from democratic accountability or control, and the Australian population bears the cost of structurally underfunded social services while foreign mega-corporations and banks walk away with billions from non-renewable resources.

The scale of the wealth transfer out of Australia is staggering. Two thirds of Australian gas is sent offshore completely tax free, meaning Australia literally gives away natural resources to foreign owned mega corporations.

The absurdity of this arrangement is highlighted by our trade partners. Japan raises more tax revenue from importing Australian gas than the Australian government collects from exporting it.

This is what petro-imperialism looks like.

Multinational gas cartels have not become more productive in order to earn massively increased profits. Instead they rely on massive windfalls from global conflicts and energy price shocks. This profiteering worsens global inflation, as well as creating gas shortages in Australia for households, manufacturing and logistics.

Behind these corporate extraction cartels is the unrestrained power of global finance. Major banks have pumped trillions of dollars into fossil fuel expansion, bankrolling the climate crisis and benefiting from the fuel shocks from the US attack on Iran and Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

The global financial system of banks and financiers locks resource-rich nations like Australia into export-oriented extraction. This is far worse for Global South countries in Latin America and Africa, but it also affects Global North counties such as Canada. By demanding US dollars to service international debt, global finance forces countries to sacrifice their environments and communities to produce fossil fuels for the US Empire.

When local public unrest builds in Australia and threatens these profits, the corporations and bankers retaliate. The gas lobby spent millions on an advertising and public relations blitz. They mobilised other imperial governments like Japan to threaten that a modest increase in tax on gas would destabilise international trade ties.

The political class and the “deep state” within the senior ranks of the public service inevitably complied with corporate and imperial demands. The interests of foreign fossil fuel corporations will almost always win against the interests of the Australian public.

It is important to understand that the main benefit of this levy is not about increased revenue for the public purse. A gas levy is vital because it is a critical structural intervention to challenge the unrestrained power of the fossil fuel industry and reclaim sovereignty. We need a gas levy to reduce the political power of the gas companies, not because Australia is broke.

There has been a strong push from civil society, and especially from The Australia Institute for a 25 percent export levy on gas exports. For this campaign to be successful, it requires a greater mass movement and civil society institutions to go beyond economic debates in the media, and out into workplaces and communities. This is not to criticise The Australia Institute — without their work there would not even be any debate at all about this!

When we think about why the government has so far refused to tax foreign corporations that are plundering its finite resources during a severe cost of living crisis, it is vital to understand who the Australian state actually serves.

Without understanding that the state is the “committee for managing the affairs” of the ultra-rich capital owners, it is easy to get stuck believing that the state is some kind of neutral, independent arbiter of public policy, just waiting for better arguments. This is a myth. The Australian state is structurally dependent on resource extraction to maintain its position within the global economy and in geopolitics. It cannot be lobbied into submission merely with better public policy ideas.

The dominant neoliberal logic that allows private capital to endlessly exploit Australia and the earth for the profit of the few has created the current crisis of the status quo. We must look at how extreme wealth concentration, extreme corporate power and the enclosure of our shared natural wealth is responsible for the surge in far right politics.

Pauline Hanson’s recent decision to support a gas tax is a good example of how neoliberalism encloses radical demands. She is not genuinely supporting increased taxation on gas exports, but instead is co-opting genuine anger amongst the community and her own supporter base.

Her proposal is not a gas levy, but a flat tax (or royalty) and 30 percent government stake in new drilling projects that would function as a state-subsidy for gas companies. The government would take on the risk for more gas exploration (effectively offering a 30 percent discount on exploration costs) — this is corporate welfare that locks Australia into an indefinite future of endless fossil fuel extraction.

It tells us everything we need to know that no gas or fossil fuel company has criticised Hanson’s policy. In fact, the peak gas lobby group publicly welcomed her support for their sector!

Our goal ultimately must not be to better manage gas extraction with better market-based adjustments (levies). Therefore incrementalism like the gas tax is an important but not sufficient response.

Until we act collectively and at massive scale to demand and win common ownership of our natural resources, Australians will keep paying more tax on HECS than Santos pays on billions in gas profits — that’s the absurdity of neoliberalism.