Is Australia giving away $45 billion a year in resource wealth?

Updated 3 November 2026 with the latest figures.

Shell told a Senate inquiry in April 2026 that it had paid $109 million in petroleum resource rent tax the year before. In the decade before that, it paid none.

The rent tax is Canberra's main levy on offshore gas profits. The May 2026 budget forecast it would raise $1.4 billion in 2025-26 and $1.9 billion in 2026-27 across the whole industry.

On 14 October, the think tank Prosper Australia put a far bigger number beside it. Its report says Australia misses out on about $45 billion a year by taxing resource booms too lightly.

That is more than 20 times what the rent tax will raise in 2026-27. Unions and crossbench senators want a 25% tax on gas exports, while miners say they already hand over about half their profits.

Labor ruled out a gas export tax in the May budget. So is the $45 billion real, or a campaign number?

Partly. Australia probably does under-tax gas, by somewhere between $7 billion and $18 billion a year on the report's own figures. The $28 billion mining half borrows a benchmark from three boom years in Queensland coal, and it doesn't travel well.

Confidence: Likely. Three parts to this: the gas, the mines and the price of asking for more.

Prosper measures a "public capture ratio": the share of an industry's value added (its sales minus what it buys in) that ends up with governments. For Australian oil and gas, it puts that share at about 14%. Norway collects about 40% after an adjustment for its state-owned stakes, and Alaska about 42%.

Norway charges oil companies 22% company tax plus a 71.8% special tax, a combined rate of 78%. Australia's version has struggled. In 2023, Treasurer Jim Chalmers changed the rent tax so the offshore LNG industry would pay "more tax, sooner".

By 2025, the forecast for those four years had dropped from $10.8 billion to $6.3 billion, the ABC reported. The May 2026 budget expects the rent tax to slide to $1.25 billion by 2029-30, AAP reported, well below the $3.1 billion forecast from beer excise. Even matching what Australia already takes from its own mines would add about $7 billion a year from gas, on the report's figures.

Here the report is kinder to miners than its headline. Australian mining already sends about 26% of its value added to governments. That beats Chile (12%), Peru (11%) and Québec (8%), on Prosper's own table.

To find $28 billion, the report lifts all mining to Queensland coal's 41%. That benchmark comes from 2022-23 to 2024-25, when Queensland's new royalty, which climbs to 40% on the slice of price above $300 a tonne, met a historic price spike. Premium coking coal hit US$662.65 a tonne in March 2022 and was down to US$174.40 by June 2025, on Argus price assessments.

Royalties followed the price down. Queensland's coal royalties fell from a record $15.3 billion in 2022-23 to $10.5 billion, then an estimated $5.5 billion in 2024-25. The June 2026 state budget expected just $4.7 billion in 2025-26, Argus reported, rising to $6.9 billion in 2026-27.

A ratio set in the boom window describes a boom year. The higher take also carried a cost the ratio can't show.

In September 2025, BHP Mitsubishi Alliance said it would cut 750 Queensland jobs and mothball its Saraji South mine. Its asset president, Adam Lancey, blamed royalties along with market conditions. The Mining and Energy Union's Mitch Hughes said BHP chose to "close a mine as soon as coal prices come off the boil".

Prosper's report finds Queensland coal held up overall. Operating mines rose from 53 to 60, and coal jobs stayed around 26,000. Yet the report also says its method ignores project costs and maturity, and that its numbers are indicative, not project models.

Gas has its own version of this fight. Woodside's finance chief, Graham Tiver, told the Senate inquiry he couldn't see how any project would survive a 25% export tax. Norway's answer is design: firms write off new investment straight away, so a project that pays before tax should still pay after it.

The Minerals Council of Australia makes the strongest case that there is no giveaway. Its report, prepared by EY, says the minerals sector paid $48.9 billion in royalties and company tax in 2024-25, and $63.8 billion the year before. That was a fifth of all company tax collected.

Gas producers say they paid $21.9 billion in taxes and royalties in a single financial year, according to Australian Energy Producers. On scale, the industry is right: resources fund a big slice of the budget.

But totals rise and fall with prices, and they don't show what share of the profit the public keeps. The Point, a fact-check site run by The Australia Institute, rated the council's "54 cents in every dollar" claim not true. Royalties pay for the resource, it argued, so they don't belong in a tax rate (the institute itself backs a gas export tax).

Nobody has modelled, project by project, how much investment Australia would lose at a 40% take. The verdict assumes the gas gap mostly reflects weak tax design rather than higher costs. If Australian LNG simply costs more to produce than Norway's gas, the true gap sits nearer $7 billion than $18 billion.

Australia probably leaves $7 billion to $18 billion a year in gas money on the table, but the $45 billion headline treats a coal boom as a normal year. Confidence: Likely.

If that's right, taxpayers and the federal budget gain from fixing the gas tax. Gas exporters' shareholders pay, and so might the next big LNG projects.

This piece draws on 16 sources: three primary reports (Prosper Australia, EY for the Minerals Council, the Norwegian government), state and federal budget data reported by Argus and AAP, original reporting from the ABC, SBS and Macquarie University, and industry and think tank material from both sides. The value-added figures behind the $7 billion, $16 billion and $28 billion gaps are back-calculated from the report's ratios on our maths, and Shell's April 2026 evidence comes from two independent reports of the hearing. Coal prices are Argus benchmark assessments, quoted in US dollars; royalties are in Australian dollars. Researched with AI tools; checked and edited by VOID.

A think tank says Australia misses out on $45 billion a year from mining and gas. The gas part holds up: Australia takes about 14% of the industry's value, against about 40% in Norway. The mining part assumes every mine could pay what Queensland coal paid in a once-in-a-generation price spike, which it can't.