For all the biffo and bluster over backpackers, you'd think Australia's future hinged on a flip flop-led, campervan-powered economic recovery.
Raiding the purses of people who wear them on a string around their neck is never going to plug the hole in the budget.
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Oil and gas giants face tax inquiry
The federal government is going to make sure energy giants pay their share of tax with Treasurer Scott Morrison announcing a Parliamentary inquiry. (Vision courtesy ABC News 24)
The difference to Scott Morrison between a backpacker tax of 15 per cent or 10.5 per cent is $80 million - about 0.02 per cent of the budget.
Chicken feed.
At the same time, the political establishment has until now ignored a potential multi-billion budget fix quietly sitting off the coast in federal waters.
It was 12 months ago that Fairfax Media first sounded the alarm bells that Australians were in danger of missing out on the wealth generated by a once-in-a-lifetime export boom in liquefied natural gas.
Because the industry is located out of sight in remote parts of Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory, some people may not yet appreciate the staggering scale of LNG, a $200 billion infrastructure investment that will propel Australia past Qatar to become the world's biggest gas exporter within five years.
But whereas Qatar enforces a stringent royalty payment based on output, the mounting evidence is that Australia is all but giving away the world's richest reserves of LNG for the profit of shareholders in New York, London and other corners of the globe.
Offshore LNG pays no state-based royalties like those on iron ore and coal. The only charge it pays the public for extracting a resource owned by 24 million-odd Australians is the super profits-based, petroleum resource rent tax.
In November, Fairfax Media revealed evidence that PRRT receipts were in freefall and any meaningful contribution from the industry could be decades away, according to briefings to the government of Western Australia.
The numbers begged not to be ignored by Canberra.
LNG revenue was set to mushroom from $5 billion to $60 billion over a decade but PRRT returns would sink from a paltry $1.2 billion to a frankly embarrassing $800 million.
Currently, the only PRRT payments are coming from mature oil rig operations in Bass Strait.
Effectively, Australia is giving away 85.5 million tonnes of LNG a year for free. Well, to be sold by fossil fuel companies to Japan, Korea and China.
It was a dogged group of Tax Justice Network advocates - the same people who launched the corporate tax avoidance research that eventually resulted in the Coalition's diverted profit tax - who saw the scandal in the PRRT.
TJN spokesman Mark Zirnsak, strategist Anthony Reed and researcher Jason Ward drilled into frightening numbers that contributed to a series of stories acknowledged by shadow treasurer Chris Bowen on Wednesday as having precipitated political action this week.
Morrison's announcement of a "comprehensive" inquiry led by respected bureaucrat Mike Callaghan was a moment where the fiscal wood has been separated from the trees by Morrison.
Callaghan must work out how the industry has been allowed to stockpile an eye-watering $187 billion in tax credits. No PRRT has to be paid until those credits are written off against revenue.
This week's Auditor-General report into the North West Shelf project found a multi-billion dollar bonanza of deductions being taken, some highly questionable.
There is little doubt Callaghan will find the same in the wider LNG sector.
At long last, the industry has been put on notice.
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