I wonder what disability the lady in the photo has?
Australia’s biggest fossil fuel subsidy is the Fuel Tax Credit Scheme, which cost the federal budget a staggering $10.8 billion in 2025-26. That’s more than is spent on the Australian Army.
The Fuel Tax Credit Scheme is basically a tax break for mining companies and other major users of diesel and petrol.
When you fill up your car with 50 litres of fuel, you pay 52c per litre in fuel tax, or $26 in total.
Many suburban families would do that every week, paying over $1,300 in fuel tax each year on the 2,600 litres of fuel they use.
By contrast, BHP uses nearly 1,300,000,000 litres of fuel each year and pays zero in fuel tax.
To be more accurate, BHP pays around $627 million in fuel tax that the government later pays back to BHP under the Fuel Tax Credit Scheme.
To summarise, suburban drivers pay $1,300 in fuel tax per year, while BHP pays nothing on over a billion of litres of the same fuel.
The context of this rebate is the tax is designed to pay for roads. These companies have to split their diesel use between vehicles that use roads and those that do not (e.g. mine trucks).
So they managed to get someone in government many years ago to say "why yes, you don't use roads so you don't need to pay the roads tax on fuel".
Considering how profitable these companies are ... well.
Happy to be corrected in this background if someone knows better.
I think the article has focused purely on these supermassive companies and their profits but not looked at the scheme as a whole, here is a counter article:
https://www.rga.org.au/media-releases/fuel-tax-insanity
If you took these 2 blog posts and put them into 1 article then it'd actually go someways to having a decent article
It IS precisely imv focusing on the the supermassive companies for the obvious reason they get a lot more than they need.