National Australia Bank, Woolworths, Harvey Norman and AGL are among the companies to have made extra profits during a time of instability, an Oxfam analysis says.National Australia Bank, Woolworths, Harvey Norman and AGL are among the companies to have made extra profits during a time of instability, an Oxfam analysis says.Australia’s 500 biggest companies made $98bn in “crisis profits” off the back of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine, new analysis has found.
In Australia during that period, iron ore mining companies accounted for the vast majority of crisis profits, raking in $34bn in 2022 and $5.7bn in 2023.Supermarkets and grocery stores made $5.7bn in crisis profits in 2022, with the vast majority of that – $5.64bn – made by Woolworths alone, Oxfam found.
AGL Energy, meanwhile, made $429.2m in crisis profits in 2022, and retailer Harvey Norman made $181.6m. A tax on the iron ore mining sector alone would have yielded between $17bn and $31bn for the public purse. “They’re called crisis profits because they arise out of these exceptional crisis circumstances. And they are likely to be an ongoing feature of our economy as global conditions continue to be very volatile,” Morgain said.