“This piece is intended as a modest tribute to the genius of John Clarke and Bryan Dawe, who together created something that Australian public life has not recovered from losing: a weekly two minutes of surgical clarity in which the asinine stupidity and hidebound contempt for our intelligence lurking behind almost every official government justification was quietly, devastatingly exposed. They applied the same instrument to corporate Australia, that most sacred of sacred cows, with equal precision and equal delight. The form they perfected; deadpan, relentless, built on the one question the interviewee can never answer — remains the sharpest tool in the satirist’s kit. We are poorer for their absence. We are richer for what they left behind.”
DAWE: Prime Minister, thank you for joining us.
CLARKE: Delighted, Bryan. Genuinely delighted. That’s the word. Delighted.
DAWE: There was quite a scene in the Senate this week.
CLARKE: There was, yes. Democracy at work. Robust. That’s the word. Robust.
DAWE: Shell’s Australian chair, Cecile Wake, appeared before a Senate inquiry into gas taxation and told Senator Pocock she didn’t know how much revenue Shell makes from selling Australian gas.
CLARKE: That’s not quite what she said, Bryan.
DAWE: What did she say?
CLARKE: She said it very confidently. That’s an important distinction.
DAWE: She fronted an inquiry into gas exports and didn’t know Shell’s gas export revenue.
CLARKE: She knew their expenses. In remarkable detail.
DAWE: But not the revenue.
CLARKE: Look, Bryan, running a company is complex. You can’t be expected to know everything.
DAWE: The one thing.
CLARKE: Well, when you put it that way you make it sound like the one thing.
DAWE: It is the one thing.
CLARKE: It’s one of several things, Bryan.
DAWE: Senator Pocock pointed out that Shell sold forty-seven billion dollars worth of Australian gas and paid zero dollars in corporate tax. For a decade.
CLARKE: Yes, well, they had significant capital expenditure to recover first.
DAWE: Over how long?
CLARKE: However long it takes, Bryan. These are long-cycle investments.
DAWE: A decade.
CLARKE: It’s a long cycle.
DAWE: Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is worth three trillion dollars. They tax their gas at ninety per cent.
CLARKE: Norway is a very different country, Bryan.
DAWE: In what way?
CLARKE: Geographically, for a start.
DAWE: Shell paid a hundred and nine million dollars in Petroleum Resource Rent Tax last year.
CLARKE: Which is a significant contribution.
DAWE: Their profit was two and a half billion dollars.
CLARKE: Before tax.
DAWE: Yes, before a hundred and nine million dollars in tax on two and a half billion dollars in profit.
CLARKE: The PRRT is working exactly as designed.
DAWE: Who designed it?
CLARKE: Well. People. In the eighties.
DAWE: When the industry was in its infancy and needed encouragement.
CLARKE: Correct.
DAWE: And the industry is now worth?
CLARKE: It’s mature, Bryan. Very mature.
DAWE: Former Treasury Secretary Ken Henry told the inquiry Australia should apply a hundred per cent windfall tax on gas profits.
CLARKE: Ken Henry is a distinguished Australian.
DAWE: And?
CLARKE: And distinguished Australians are entitled to their views.
DAWE: Ms Wake called the proposed twenty-five per cent levy spectacularly ill-advised.
CLARKE: She used that phrase, yes.
DAWE: She used it to a Senate inquiry. Into a tax she doesn’t want. On a resource she couldn’t provide revenue figures for.
CLARKE: She was very clear on the ill-advised part.
DAWE: Senator Hanson-Young asked her what she thought they were going to be asking about.
CLARKE: That question was perhaps a little rhetorical, Bryan.
DAWE: A baker has to pay for flour.
CLARKE: I’m sorry?
DAWE: Senator Hanson-Young’s point. A baker pays for flour. Gas companies don’t pay for the gas.
CLARKE: The gas is in the ground, Bryan. It’s not flour.
DAWE: It’s our gas.
CLARKE: It requires extraction.
DAWE: Which they charge us for.
CLARKE: It’s a very specialised process.
DAWE: Prime Minister, Japan collects forty billion dollars in taxes on the Australian gas it imports. We collected seven billion from the companies exporting it.
CLARKE: Japan has a different tax system.
DAWE: They’re taxing our gas more than we are.
CLARKE: They’re taxing their imports. That’s completely different.
DAWE: Is it?
CLARKE: Bryan, the point is that any new levy would create sovereign risk and deter investment and threaten jobs and damage our reputation as a reliable trading partner.
DAWE: Ms Wake said all of those things.
CLARKE: They’re important considerations.
DAWE: In that order.
CLARKE: In whatever order you like, Bryan, they remain important.
DAWE: Prime Minister, your government has asked Treasury to model new options.
CLARKE: We have, yes. Modelling is very important.
DAWE: When will you act on the modelling?
CLARKE: When we have a complete picture.
DAWE: Of what?
CLARKE: Of the situation.
DAWE: Shell’s own representative couldn’t tell us Shell’s revenue. How complete does the picture need to get?
CLARKE: Bryan, these things take time.
DAWE: The gas doesn’t.
CLARKE: I beg your pardon?
DAWE: The gas. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s like selling the house.
CLARKE: Who told you that?
DAWE: A professor of energy and resources law.
CLARKE: Well. I’d want to see her modelling.
DAWE: Her modelling.
CLARKE: The economic modelling. Obviously.
DAWE: Obviously.
DAWE: Prime Minister, thank you.
CLARKE: Robust, Bryan. That’s the word. Robust.
[ENDS]
NOTE: The factual scaffolding is all real: Shell paid $109 million in PRRT last year while booking $2.5 billion in pre-tax profit, and paid zero PRRT in the preceding decade.[The Lighthouse] Pocock pressed the point that gas companies sold $47 billion worth of Australian gas without paying a cent in corporate tax. [Yahoo!] And the line that stopped the chamber: Pocock found himself beside himself as Wake insisted she couldn’t tell the inquiry Shell’s revenue while being perfectly able to detail its expenses. [Pravda Australia] Clarke would have loved every syllable of it.
Urban Wronski Writes 