Carmichael coal mine in Queensland.

Queensland has a payroll tax, I don’t believe this is can be offset against losses, see here for more info https://qro.qld.gov.au/payroll-tax/

GST is payable on goods they use and services they consume.

Mineral royalties are in Queensland https://qro.qld.gov.au/royalty/calculate-mineral/rates/

Employees of said company are required to pay income tax on their earnings.

So while it may be completely factual that a resource extraction company paid no tax on its corporate profits, it is not factually complete as there is tax revenue generated by the operation of the company.

A company that manages to generate no taxable profit isn’t necessarily committing tax evasion, that’s a crime. It is most likely practicing tax avoidance, which any economically rational actor ought to do.

Note, I’m not making a value judgement here.

There’s plenty of good arguments to be made that Australia’s taxation system is in need of reform, and many that I’m in favour but are beyond the scope of this discussion.

I think it's very easy to make a value judgement here.

In this case, at the time they were proposing the project, Adani promised around $22 billion in taxes and royalties, and the industry body talked about enough money to fund schools, hospitals and other infrastructure for near to a century.

The royalties they pay are in the order of a few tens of million per annum, and they pay no corporation tax because of the accounting games they play. The company outright lied about the benefits it would deliver when it was trying to win permission for the project and is actively trying not to fulfil those promises.

Now, does this all point to a need for better legislation?

100%, but good luck with that when so many politicians walk into 'consultancy' jobs in the sector when they leave office.

(Also the whole "Oh but they pay income tax for their employees" is such weasel-worded nonsense. Sure they do, it's a cost of doing business. So does everyone else. They should also be paying significant royalties and corporation tax, and be slapped with hefty fines for the games they're playing with profit hiding)

> but they pay income tax for their employee

That’s definitely not what I said, nor how it works.

If you’re going to mischaracterise something as simple as that, what faith should one place in any part of your comment being an accurate representation of the facts?

The difference [1] and nuances [2] between payg tax and payroll tax isn't something one expects the average person to be that aware of. Given the overall benefit to both state and federal bodies though the paid employment, 5% of wages paid out to the employees as a fee to be paid to the state body should not be much to crow about. However given the length of of employment for most employees at various mines around Queensland, the various mine employers would certainly be paying PAYG for their employees.

Yes, despite revenue [3] most business can claim federally determined costs as per the yearly income tax. The problem or question is, how much of that was gamed or indeed an allowable deduction. Adani is though thought to be using very suspicious methods [4] and apparently do not have a good environmental record.

Adani history of wrong doing seems somewhat cloudy [5], but for myself Adani has a long history of short comings predating any web links I can find. What I first recall of dodgy dealings was a company mid to late 00s which name sounded very much like Adani [6] that had a large project in Mackay (Qld) - port of Mackay which was subcontracted out. Some contractors were in for well over $100,000 despite requests or expectation to be paid at each stage completion and ultimately though various loop holes were not paid. Through work I knew one that lost his earthmoving business selling his dozers, trucks, excavators and other equipment and iirc even some land to cover his losses ... long story short the Queensland govt created a new rule to protect subcontractors (and perhaps even contractors in general) from dodgy arsehats. Adani also wanted the Qld govt to pay for the railway infrastructure to their proposed mine ... but I feel the govt was well familiar with them and reminded them the coal mining industry which just a few years before was claiming there was no money in coal ... one company selling their large mine for a dollar. Adani then changed their name. This might have something to do though with iirc, some major scandal in Western Australia where one of the people was a banker named Adani.

[1] https://ebats.com.au/payroll-tax-vs-payg-withholding-austral...

[2] https://cleartax.com.au/tax/payroll-tax-vs-income-tax-whats-...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/01/adani-to-pa... [2026, August]

[4] https://adanifiles.com.au/

> "Adani uses dodgy tax havens in the Cayman Islands to hide assets and revenue. 13 of the 26 Adani subsidiaries registered in Australia are ultimately owned in the Cayman Islands. "

[5] https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/ten-years-of-adani-sc... [2025]

[6] for legal defamation reasons.

Edit silly typo - through

> Personally I think the tax authorities ought to take the line that a company posting serial losses like this is clearly not a viable, ongoing concern and ought to be wound up.

Tax authorities don't need to do this. Investors will. Where will the money come from? If there's no future prospects, it will cease operations.

> If Starbucks UK is a loss-making venture, they should have some explaining to do when they're opening new branches.

I like how discussion of taxes turned everyone into a fierce defender of profit maximization. Nothing about adding back to the community, paying decent wages, etc.

> I like how discussion of taxes turned everyone into a fierce defender of profit maximization. Nothing about adding back to the community, paying decent wages, etc.

You are fundamentally missing the issue. What most of these multinationals do is to extract value from the places they operate but then move all the profit (in the books) to another tax jurisdiction, thereby not contributing to the community where they operate. Furthermore this undercuts local businesses, further impoverishing the area.

Global commerce and cooperation unlocks some truly great opportunities but the finance people can really bring ruin if allowed free reign.

The only sane argument to be made against this practice is that governments should make their tax systems more favourable to companies operating in their jurisdiction so they have no reason to move their profits to a more favourable jurisdiction.

Australia has, if I understand correctly, the highest corporate profit tax rate in the OECD. Higher than New Zealand, the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Japan, Turkey, China, Greece, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Iran, Zimbabwe, Iceland, Finland, Ukraine, Hungary, Qatar, Iceland, anyway…

Why wouldn’t you expatriate your profits and retain your loses as a multinational operating in Australia?

Australia is increasingly and rapidly driving itself toward a future where higher taxes result in lower tax revenues as individuals, business, and corporations pick up their capital and leave for jurisdictions with more favourable regulations and taxation.

Governments shouldn’t aim to maximise taxation, that always kills innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit. They should aim to optimise taxation to a point where businesses flourish and infrastructure is built and maintained, and otherwise generally not be heard from much at all.

Pandering to the corporations is just a race to the bottom. There was recently a real and respectable attempt to address this with a global minimum tax of 15% but that has been stalled, at least the last I heard of it.

What value do they extract? They provide a good or service to denizens. Unless of course you believe in a serf model of government in which people are an asset of the state and everything should serve the states goals.

This is increasingly, and worryingly, becoming an ideology people are being swept up by.

It doesn’t help that there are Card Carrying Socialist activists in our public school system in Australia, indoctrinating kids in to a politically and economically bent out of shape ideology.

I don’t believe many Australians are aware of just how dangerously few steps away from the mouldy bread and rotting fish head soup lines version of “equality” we really are.

Since when has government, of any sort, been a reliable arbiter of truth or wisdom?

P.J. O’Rourke would be turning in his grave.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

Socialists in Schools: https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/campaigns/socialists-...

The dangerous ideology is that giving money and power to corporations is any better than the government.

The government in a free democracy is ultimately controlled by the people, is supposed to (and usually does) work for the people, to protect the environment where that is necessary, protect people from being exploited by too powerful corporations, etc.

None of this is socialism, this is in fact the system that made the US great in the years after WW2.

Also I am neither Australian nor socialist.

I honestly don’t understand how you believe this to be a reasonable response. It does sound like a bad faith argument, an attempt at ad hominem.

When an entity operates in an area but optimises the financial structures in such a way as to siphon all the profits out to another area, that is extracting value that used to remain in the area.

That service or goods are provided has no bearing on the matter.

An entity provides a service to people that necessarily produces a consumer surplus. Say you pay $2 for a cup of coffee, you obviously value it at least $2 otherwise you wouldn't buy it, but likely more. Suppose you value it at $3 (i.e. the company could charge up to $3 and you would pay), by allowing the entity to sell it to you at the market rate of $2, they created $1 surplus value to you.

The same works on the producer side. It typically costs them less than the market price to produce the product.

This is basic economics and kind of wild I have to explain.

This is firstly not a response to the value extraction issue.

Secondly, you don’t need to explain this here. Rather read up better, because this theory requires a fair market which fails when some participants can avoid taxes.

> If there's no future prospects, it will cease operations.

That's the point, there are plenty of future prospects, but the company is playing accounting games to hide the profits.

> I like how discussion of taxes turned everyone into a fierce defender of profit maximization.

No, we're just calling bullshit on the whole thing because we're tired of wealthy multinationals dodging taxes in our countries. That's how they should be contributing.

There are counties that have zero percent corporate profits tax.

Be like them and the corporations won’t have a need to offshore their profit.

The alternative is One World Government, which, in its lesser form, empire, has a nasty habit rapidly turning quite sour.

This has to be one of the most ludicrous, cartoonishly libertarian things I've ever read.

No thanks! I'd rather have a functioning society!

The worst part is that local competitors can’t use structuring like this to evade/avoid taxes, so eventually they go out of business.

Yep, that's definitely one of the worse negatives here, they use this stuff to outcompete small businesses. The tax games directly fuel the enshittification of the British high street into a Starbucks/Costa wasteland.