I made a scrolling site about how little tax gas companies pay in Australia
TL;DR: I built a scroll-driven page that lets you watch tax contributions accumulate in real time — teachers, nurses, and the oil & gas industry racing side by side over a decade. The gap is obscene. See it here.
Why this?
I've been reading a lot of Australia Institute research lately and one stat absolutely floored me: over the ten years to 2023–24, Australia's school teachers paid $95 billion in income tax. The entire oil and gas industry — company tax and Petroleum Resource Rent Tax combined — paid $45 billion. On $560 billion in revenue.
Teachers paid double. On a fraction of the income. Let that sink in.
And it gets worse. Santos racked up $47 billion in gas sales over the decade and paid zero corporate income tax. Ichthys LNG (owned by Japan's Inpex) earned $43 billion and also paid zero. Queensland's coal seam gas exporters have never paid company tax since they started exporting in 2015 — on $36 billion in income.
Meanwhile, the government collects more from beer excise than the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax. More from HECS repayments than the tax specifically designed to capture gas super-profits. Norway shares 78% of petroleum profits with its citizens. Australia shares 18%.
The idea
Numbers like these are hard to feel when they're just printed on a page. I wanted to use scroll as a storytelling mechanic — where the physical act of scrolling through a decade makes the gap between what ordinary Australians pay and what gas companies pay viscerally obvious.
As you scroll, three bars race: teachers (gold) and nurses (blue) climb steadily, because their tax is deducted automatically from every pay packet. The oil & gas bar (red) barely moves for years — then lurches forward in 2021–22 when the Ukraine war sends energy prices through the roof. But even after that windfall, it still can't catch the nurses.
Under each bar, the revenue or wages figure climbs too. Teachers' combined wages reach $320 billion. The gas industry's revenue reaches $560 billion. The contrast between "modest wages, high tax rate" and "obscene revenue, laughable tax rate" is the whole argument.
There's a second scroll race for the beer/HECS comparison, plus the Norway stat, plus a table of companies that paid literally $0.
How it's built
It's a single self-contained HTML file. No framework, no build step, no dependencies beyond a Google Fonts import. All CSS inline, all JS embedded. I could have built it in Next.js but honestly, for something like this — a standalone, shareable, single-purpose page — a flat HTML file felt right. Drop it in a public/ folder and it just works.
The scroll mechanic uses IntersectionObserver for reveal animations and a simple requestAnimationFrame scroll listener for the race engine. Each "lane" interpolates through cumulative data arrays tied to scroll progress.
Go have a look
All data is sourced from ATO Corporate Tax Transparency reports and Australia Institute research. Sources are listed at the bottom of the page.
If it makes you angry, good. That's the point.