Google, Facebook still pay less tax in NZ than Australia
Updated October 2025: This post includes new reporting on Google’s 2024 revenue and tax figures, and additional context about New Zealand’s approach to digital service tax.
In 2020, Massey University lecturer Victoria Plekhanova wrote about the tax giants and tax at The Conversation:
Victoria Plekhanova
"While the internet has created new opportunities for media and audiences alike, those opportunities have come at a price. Traditional media organisations now compete with giant digital platforms, not only for the attention of readers, but also for the advertising revenue that was once their lifeblood.
"Adding insult to injury, the digital platforms compete for audiences’ attention partly by distributing the news content that was first created and published by those now-struggling media organisations.This not only damages the media and public discourse, it is harmful to taxpayers."
Plekhanova says Google paid A$426.5 million in Australian digital service tax in 2018. That’s 66.5 times the amount of tax paid in New Zealand: “Given the New Zealand economy is about a seventh the size of Australia’s, this is an extremely wide disparity”.
A recent RNZ report shows how little has changed:
Google’s 2024 accounts show $1.139 billion in New Zealand revenue, with about $1 billion transferred to its Singapore parent as a “service fee”.
That’s 92 percent of its local earnings.
It paid $4.362 million in tax on what remained.
If that payment were treated as a royalty for using Google’s intellectual property — which is likely what much of it represents — New Zealand would collect about five percent in withholding tax.
It certainly looks as if New Zealand does not get a fair tax take from companies extracting vast wealth from the country.
Paying publishers
Some countries, including Australia, now require Google and Meta (Facebook) to compensate publishers when they reuse original news content.
The idea of a digital service tax isn’t that unusual. Other countries have a similar tax.
All of this makes sense. New Zealand still lets overseas digital giants operate largely untaxed and uncharged for the value they extract here. Part of their income depends on services that have been provided by taxpayers. Some of that money even comes directly from government agencies that buy advertising on Facebook and Google.
It amounts to a net transfer from the New Zealand taxpayer’s pocket to social media investors: some of the richest people in the world.
Tax a global problem
Ideally, the OECD would solve this, but progress has been slow and the profits keep flowing offshore.
Plekhanova’s argument falters when she suggests taxing Big Tech would rescue local media.
The damage was done ages ago. Survival depends on more than taxation — and, to a degree, New Zealand’s main media outlets rely on those same tech giants to reach audiences.
So yes, let’s tax Google and Facebook as we do extractive industries — and stop pouring government advertising budgets into their coffers
But let’s not kid ourselves this is going to fix our media problems.
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