I have accrued hundreds of thousands of QFF before realizing that getting business classic rewards flights for long haul trips is basically impossible for bronze members.
I'm wondering if its worth starting to accrue points with someone else. Velocity, Krisflyer, AMEX membership rewards etc.
Or are they all basically the same in terms of difficulty in getting actual long haul business flights?
Most of our gas is from offshore projects, which means they come under the PRRT. The PRRT is a superprofits tax, designed for oil projects. Oil is relatively low CAPEX, but gas is fucking massive CAPEX, in the hundreds of billions. Meaning they get to deduct hundreds of billions from their tax bill under the PRRT to cover their costs of building the plants as well as their operating costs.
Some of it is profit shifting (see here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-11/australian-gas-giants-using-singapore-to-reduce-taxes/106632272)
but most of it is because the PRRT is not fit for purpose.
Some of you might be too young to remember, but Kevin Rudd tried to fix the PRRT in 2010. He wanted to bring in the resource super profits tax, which would have fixed the way the PRRT fails to bring in money for our gas. I flicked through the original PBO paper and I reckon by now it would have raised at least 100 billion in extra money.
This point is very important, because when we are talking about that many billions of dollars you need to set up the tax framework before the projects start. If the tax is there first then they have to plan around it. If they are established and then you massively change the tax it's not really workable.
The industry freaked out, the media turned on him in a big way, the minerals council started attack ads etc. The voters didn't turn against the tax specifically, but they did turn against the government because of all the mud being thrown at them. They tried to educate the public about the taxes, but even that got turned against them
Labor MPs started panicking about losing their seats, Rudd kinda crumbled under the pressure and kinda stopped leading the party. Everything was super toxic and hostile. Gillard took over, and in her very first press conference she publicly asked the mining companies to stand down, and that they could renegotiate the tax. This watered down tax got dumped by Tony Abbott anyway.
In 2022, when a gas tax started picking up some steam again, the fossil fuel industry threatened to unleash another campaign like they did in 2010. So the Government made some changes to the PRRT in 2023 that would raise a little bit of extra money, but nothing like Rudds tax would have.
Then even though TAI/Punters/Pocock etc kept up with the noise and built more public pressure, the war in Iran started and the focus turned to our fuel security. Albo went to asia and secured our fuel supply, by leveraging our gas.
So in short, on one hand Australians deserve money for our gas. But on the other hand, Australians don't deserve shit because they turned on the guy who tried to get us money for our gas and it's 1000x harder now that they are established.