The governments of Nigeria, Indonesia and Malaysia - Australia's competitors in the oil and gas export sector - extract twice as much tax revenue from petroleum companies as a proportion of production than the federal and state governments combined.
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An analysis, based on International Monetary Fund figures and global resource production numbers, found Australia was at the bottom of the pile when it comes to charging multinationals for selling its natural wealth.
For example, Malaysia took $20.2 billion in oil and gas-related revenues in 2014 - nearly three times the $7.3 billion that went to state and federal coffers in royalties, corporate taxes and the federally-administered petroleum resource rent tax.
That's despite Malaysia's annual production being less than 30 per cent higher than Australia's.
As a percentage of oil and gas production, Australia receives less than 1.5 per cent of the value of product, according to research conducted by Tax Justice Network member Jason Ward on behalf of the International Transport Workers' Federation.
Nigeria, Malaysia and Indonesia all receive 3.0 per cent or more.
With the exception of the North West Shelf project area, Australia has no royalty payable on offshore oil and gas production in Commonwealth waters.
"The PRRT is not a royalty payment but a profit-based tax. While the tax rate is set at 40 per cent ,it is not forecast to collect any revenues on LNG [liquefied natural gas] production for decades. Effectively this means that Australia's offshore oil and gas is being given away for free," Mr Ward said.
"This is in contrast with global norms – and even in contrast with on-shore production regulated by the states and territories in Australia."
Fairfax Media revealed in October the massive disparity between forecast revenues from LNG production between Australia and the country it will leapfrog to become the world's biggest exporter, Qatar.
In 2021, when each country's production volumes will be virtually identical, Qatar will receive $26.6 billion while Australia will receive just $800 million.
On Monday, former Labor minister Craig Emerson, one of the architects of the PRRT system in the Hawke government, added his voice to calls for a parliamentary inquiry into PRRT.
Fairfax Media supplied Mr Ward's analysis to the oil and gas industry peak body, the Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association, which took issue with the countries used for comparisons.
"The limited number of countries that are used for comparative purposes in the report does not take into account the variety of factors that are unique to each jurisdiction, including the mix of oil and gas production, the type of taxation regime in place (a number of countries use production-sharing type systems as a means of obtaining revenues), project profitability, resource prospectivity and the stage of the production cycle in each country," an APPEA spokesman said.
"Most LNG projects in Australia have either only recently commenced production or are still under construction. Australia generally taxes projects on the basis of profitability. This recognises that Australia is one of the costliest countries in which to explore for and produce petroleum and the need to attract significant sums of capital from private markets."
That assessment conflicts with what Chevron Australia general manager, Gerry Flaherty, told the Society of Petroleum Engineers' Asia Pacific Oil & Gas Conference in Perth last month in relation to his company's operations in Western Australia.
"We have competitive shipping and finding costs, terrific reservoirs and can develop them at competitive prices," he told the conference, according to Energy News.
ITF President Paddy Crumlin said: "Our research shows that internationally, Australia is a soft target for the oil and gas industry. Companies like Chevron make wildly exaggerated claims about the benefits their projects will deliver to the Australian community.
"In fact, Chevron still claims its projects will generate $380 billion in federal government revenue from 2009 to 2040. For this prediction to come true they would need to contribute on average $12.25 billion a year. By comparison, industry giant BHP Billiton paid $3.3 billion in state and federal government taxes last year. If Chevron¹s claims were true, the federal government deficit would be nearly halved in the 2017 budget and it would be in surplus by $6 billion two years later."
