Our Gas, Their Profits: The Resource Tax Debate We Keep Having

There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from watching the same political movie over and over again. You know the plot, you know the ending, and yet somehow you find yourself sitting there hoping this time it’ll be different. That’s pretty much how I feel every time the resource tax debate bubbles back to the surface in this country.

It’s been doing the rounds again lately, and honestly, the conversation online has been equal parts enlightening and maddening. Someone pointed out that LNG companies are apparently patting themselves on the back over a $22 billion tax figure — plastered on a billboard at Canberra Airport, no less — without any context about what their actual profits were. That’s a classic move. Throw out a big number, let people feel vaguely impressed, and hope nobody asks the follow-up questions. It’s the political equivalent of telling someone your salary without mentioning you blew the rest on Bitcoin.

The deeper frustration here isn’t just about gas companies being canny with their PR. It’s about how we got here in the first place. Rudd had a crack at a proper resource super profits tax back in 2010, and the Minerals Council essentially declared war. The advertising campaign was relentless, the media amplified every worst-case scenario, and Labor eventually buckled. Gillard watered it down so significantly after taking over that the industry basically wrote their own get-out-of-jail-free card. Then Abbott came in and dismantled what little remained.

And here’s the kicker — plenty of voters who are now asking “why doesn’t Labor just tax the gas companies?” were the same people who were convinced back then that doing exactly that would bring about economic armageddon. That’s not me being smug, that’s just the reality of how effective sustained media campaigns can be. Someone in the online discussion made a sharp point about this: the 61% of Australians now supporting a gas export tax aren’t necessarily thinking independently — they’re being influenced by a different media ecosystem than the one that killed the mining tax. We swap one set of influencers for another and call it forming our own opinion. Worth being honest with ourselves about that.

That said, I do think the conditions have genuinely shifted. Social media has fractured the Murdoch stranglehold on public discourse, even if it’s introduced its own problems. The contrast between what Norway gets from its resources and what we let walk out the door is now common knowledge in a way it simply wasn’t fifteen years ago. Norway built a sovereign wealth fund that’s worth something like $250,000 per citizen. We got… a series of billboards at airports telling us to be grateful.

The Albanese government’s hesitation is at least partially explicable. There’s apparently a real diplomatic tangle around gas supply commitments to Asian partners that makes slapping on an export tax politically complicated right now. That’s frustrating, but it’s also governance — you can’t pretend geopolitical trade-offs don’t exist. The petrol price coming down from nearly $3 a litre to under $2 suggests there’s some real leverage being played here, even if the mechanisms are murky.

What I keep coming back to, though, is the Norway comparison — and specifically why we can’t replicate it. Someone made the uncomfortable argument that Australians simply don’t have the patience for a 30-year investment horizon. We’d elect someone who promised to raid the fund within a term. That stings because there’s real truth in it. We’ve sold Telstra, carved up the NBN, and watched state governments flog off energy infrastructure. The long game isn’t really our thing, politically.

Maybe the more realistic path is what some are suggesting — use this moment to build momentum, let the lobbyists embarrass themselves with their advertising blitz, and take a serious, comprehensive resource tax to the 2028 election as a central platform. Not just gas, but the whole extractive sector. Make it the conversation. Because if we keep having it piecemeal, industry will keep picking it apart piecemeal.

The resource wealth sitting under this country belongs to all of us. That’s not a radical left position — it’s the kind of thing a mainstream conservative government in Norway would say without blinking. The fact that we treat it as some dangerous, fringe idea says a lot about how successfully vested interests have shaped our political imagination over decades.

It’s not too late. It’s never too late to start doing the right thing. But we need a government with the spine to see it through — and a public willing to hold the line when the advertising blitz inevitably comes.