Next week the Budget will reveal who is being taxed and who is not. In a fair society, some of the most profitable companies would be paying much more than students. But once again the budget will show that Australia collects much more from student debt repayments than the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT).

While this is bad enough, the ATO’s most recent figures in its annual report reveals that this gap has widened: in 2023-24 the ATO collected more than four times more from student debt repayments than the PRRT.

This raises serious questions about what kind of society Australia’s tax policies are creating. During his 2024 address to the National Press Club, the Australia Institute’s Executive Director Dr Richard Denniss lamented Australia’s current priorities, noting:

In Norway, they tax the fossil fuel industry and give kids free university education; in Australia we subsidise the fossil fuel industry and charge kids a fortune to go to university.

He then dropped the killer statistic: “the Commonwealth collects more revenue from HECS fees than it gets from the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax”.

The Petroleum Resources Rent Tax (PRRT) is a special tax designed to ensure that Australia benefits from the high profits generated from extracting our gas and oil resources, yet even as the industry has boomed, the PRRT has barely grown. Meanwhile student debt repayments continue to trend upwards.

When Dr Denniss made that claim at the National Press Club the most recent data was from 2022-23, when HECS/HECS revenue was worth $4.9bn and PRRT revenue was less than half that amount at $2.3bn. But in 2023-24 HECS/HELP revenue rose to $5.1bn while PRRT fell to less than a quarter that amount to just $1.1bn. And this was at a time gas companies were making record profits off the back of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In 2024, the Albanese Government passed a reform to the PRRT. However, this reform was so weak that even the gas industry supported it. Predicted revenue has repeatedly been revised downward, and the government’s budget papers predict it will continue to raise relatively little.

Gas companies like to argue that they also pay other forms of tax (such as company income tax and payroll tax), but students and graduates (who pay income tax and GST) also do as well. Indeed, students appear to pay much more in these kinds of taxes than gas companies. Analysis of the latest data from the ATO reveals that people with HECS debts paid (at a minimum) more than 2.5 times as much income tax as the gas industry in 2022-23, or at least $14.87 billion more.

These misplaced priorities are not inevitable. Other countries, such as Norway, have ensured that their citizens benefit from collectively owned resources. What is stopping Australia from passing laws to ensure gas companies pay their fair share?