On Thursday 23 April 2026 I spoke in Parliament about the ridiculously low tax and royalties paid by gas companies in Queensland, when compared to costs everyday Queenslanders pay like GST on coffee or car registration.
You can read my full speech below or in the official Parliamentary record of proceedings (Hansard) here.
Mr BERKMAN (Maiwar—Grn) (9.22 pm): Mr Speaker, I do not know about you or anyone else here, but some mornings I wake up and I just wish I was a big gas company. It might sound strange and I know no-one is quite expecting that from me, but why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't we want to be—even the Greens? It is true that these companies just have it so good. Why would we not want to be one of them? The war in Iran is making them richer while it is making us poorer. We here in the real world are seeing mortgages are up, rents are up, power bills are up, fuels are up, groceries are up, public transport feels like a total shemozzle, people cannot get to see the specialist they need to see in the public health system and they are waiting years for public housing. The gas companies win and we lose; it is the same old story. How did we get here? Ten to 15 years ago when Queensland and federal Labor approved the plan to drill and frack and ship our gas overseas, these big companies coming into Queensland promised us we would get billions of dollars in royalties and corporate tax money.
As it turns out, in reality nine out of 10 of these companies paid zero—literally nothing—in corporate tax over the last 10 years. Wouldn’t you know it, as it turns out these same companies only need to pay eight per cent in royalties to the Queensland government. Surely that has to be some kind of mistake. How could it be that these companies are paying less as a proportion on their royalties than what we pay in GST on a cup of coffee? It cannot be right. In fact, it is such a tiny amount of revenue that Queenslanders through our car rego payments are paying more into the budget each year than these companies are paying us in royalties. Surely that has to be some kind of mistake. Surely you need to pay more than eight per cent for Queenslanders’ gas—that gas that we own—before you ship it offshore and make a massive profit. If you think that, you are wrong, sadly, but that is the way the system is supposed to work. That is the way Labor designed it and it is the same system that the LNP now refuses to fix.
The same system that lets single parents get forced out by a rent hike lets these big gas corporations get away with paying only eight per cent. The system that says there is no money for more classrooms or teacher aides at the local school gives these massive gas companies a sweetheart deal and they just keep stretching it out. When Labor or LNP politicians, wherever they are in Queensland or across the country, tell you that there is not enough money for public housing or for public transport or for public hospitals, what they are really saying is, ‘We don’t want to make these big gas corporations pay a fair share.’ They set the system up like this because they do not want to upset the people who give them all of these massive donations—who literally give them money for the outcomes they want. Santos, which is selling our gas overseas and making massive profits, gave tens of thousands of dollars each to Labor and the LNP over the last decade. That is why we are getting screwed. That is why they will not talk about this, but I will keep banging on about it until Queenslanders get a fair share for our resources.