The political connections

In the 2024–25 financial year — the year of the federal election — gas and fossil fuel companies and their lobby groups donated at least A$3.98 million to the Australian Labor Party, the Liberal Party, and the Nationals. This is the disclosed figure. As we will document below, it is almost certainly an undercount.

Labor received more than A$1.06 million from the fossil fuel industry ahead of winning re-election. This figure includes direct donations from gas producers — Chevron, INPEX, Santos, Woodside, and Tamboran — as well as the industry’s peak lobby group, Australian Energy Producers.

The donations are, by comparison with what is at stake, modest. Chevron’s Australian income tax liability in 2024 was A$2.9 billion. Santos had underlying profit of US$1.2 billion. Woodside’s profit was US$3.6 billion. Against those numbers, a few hundred thousand dollars in political donations represents a tiny investment in access. The question the gas industry would ask — and has asked explicitly — is what the return on that investment is worth.

Money buys influence, and the fossil fuel industry spent generously ahead of an election with major consequences for the climate. These donations buy access to ministers and shadow ministers, often those who have direct decision-making power over controversial fossil fuel project approvals.Claire Snyder, Climate Integrity, February 2026

Beyond the disclosed donations, there is a second, less-scrutinised mechanism through which the gas industry purchases political access. It is called a ‘platinum corporate membership’, and it is not classified as a donation.

Peer-reviewed academic research published in the Australian Journal of Politics and History in 2024 found that Woodside Energy has declared platinum corporate memberships with both the Liberal Party and the Australian Labor Party simultaneously. These memberships cost approximately A$110,000 per party per year.

What does A$110,000 buy? The entitlements of a platinum membership to the Liberal Party’s Australian Business Network or Labor’s Federal Labor Business Forum typically include: seats at the Budget Night Dinner with the Treasurer; seats at multiple parliamentary briefings and boardroom policy forums; access to private dinners with the Prime Minister; and tickets to events with senior party leaders.

Because these are classified as fees for services — access to events — rather than donations, they face different and less stringent disclosure requirements. A gas company executive can sit at a private dinner with the Prime Minister and the Resources Minister for the cost of a party membership fee, and that arrangement is not required to be disclosed in the same way as a direct political donation.

In years where the Liberal Party did not disclose donations from Chevron, APPEA, Woodside, or the WA branch of the ALP did not disclose donations from Woodside and Chevron — the only reason those donations became public knowledge was that the companies themselves declared them. The parties did not.

If the donation system is the industry’s financial connection to political power, the revolving door is its human connection. And in the Australian gas industry, the revolving door has spun so consistently, and so blatantly, that researchers have compiled databases of more than 180 individuals who have moved between fossil fuel and mining industries and senior government positions over a decade.

The Martin Ferguson case is the most stark on the record, because the breach of the Ministerial Code is explicit and documented, and because nothing was done about it.

Ferguson served as Minister for Resources and Energy from 2007 to 2013 — the entire period during which Queensland’s LNG export industry was approved and built. In 2010, as minister, he approved BG Group’s A$20 billion Curtis Island LNG/CSG export project in Queensland — the project that would become one of the three Gladstone terminals whose exports have since tripled east coast gas prices.

Ferguson left parliament in August 2013. In October 2013 — six months later — he took up the newly-created position of Chairman of the APPEA Advisory Board. APPEA is the peak national lobby group for the oil and gas industry. The Ministerial Code of Conduct requires an 18-month cooling-off period for former ministers before they take up lobbying roles. Six months is not 18 months.

Simultaneously, and also within six months of leaving parliament, Ferguson took up a role as head of natural resources for Kerry Stokes’s Seven Group Holdings — and as a non-executive director of BG Group, the British company that had built the LNG project he approved as minister.

The Ministerial Code was not enforced. No action was taken. Ferguson remains a member of the Australian Labor Party.

His secretary, John Pierce, became chair of the Australian Energy Market Commission. His senior policy advisor, Michael Bradley, became Director of External Affairs for APPEA. The revolving door did not just take the minister. It took his staff.

Ian Macfarlane served as Minister for Industry and Resources under both the Howard and Abbott governments. He left parliament in 2016 and was appointed CEO of the Queensland Resources Council — the state-level resources industry lobby — within four months.

Macfarlane described himself, Labor’s Martin Ferguson, and Labor’s Gary Gray as ‘three peas in a pod’. Gary Gray was Labor’s Resources Minister in 2013. Before his ministerial stint, he had worked as a senior executive at Woodside Energy. He went from the gas industry to government, then back.

Former Labor Climate Change Minister Greg Combet — responsible for implementing the carbon price — became a consultant to AGL and Santos after leaving parliament.

Macfarlane’s chief of staff, Stephen Galilee, became CEO of the NSW Minerals Council. Another chief of staff, Malcolm Roberts, became CEO of APPEA itself.

The pattern is not partisan. It is structural. Both parties produce ministers who regulate the gas industry. Both parties produce ministers who then work for the gas industry. The industry maintains access regardless of which party governs.

Ferguson successfully fought against any efforts to impose a gas reservation scheme for the nation — the same scheme that WA imposed and that has since sheltered WA consumers from the east coast pricing disaster. He then became the chair of the industry body that lobbied against reservation.Independent Australia, 2018

The figures documented above represent only the disclosed donations — the amounts that exceeded Australia’s reporting threshold and were publicly declared. There is a significant additional layer of undisclosed industry influence.

In 2023–24, the disclosure threshold was A$16,300. Any donation below that amount did not need to be declared. Research by Guardian Australia estimated that almost half of all political party funding remains ‘dark money’ of unknown origin.

There are also the structural disclosure gaps: platinum party memberships classified as ‘service fees’; donations declared by companies but not by the receiving parties; payments to associated entities and fundraising arms that face different rules.

In the 2019–20 and 2020–21 financial years, academic research found that fossil fuel companies declared donations that the receiving parties did not disclose. In one documented case, the WA branch of the ALP failed to declare A$52,000 from Woodside and A$32,000 from Chevron in its party returns. The companies declared these amounts. The party did not.

In 2017, Origin Energy’s chairman addressed his company’s Annual General Meeting and said that political donations were ‘money well spent’ because they enabled the company to help ‘shape thinking’ on the energy policy debate. He was right.

The gas industry has invested heavily in political access over decades. What has it received in return?

No domestic gas reservation policy on the east coast — the policy that WA adopted and that would have protected east coast consumers from price tripling.

A PRRT framework so poorly designed for LNG that it collected zero resource tax from LNG projects for sixteen years and now collects less than beer excise.

A$14.9 billion in fossil fuel subsidies in 2024–25.

A Future Gas Strategy released in 2024 that entrenched gas extraction in Australia’s energy mix until at least 2050 — with both parties’ support.

A$1.5 billion in support for the Middle Arm gas infrastructure hub in Darwin.

The defeat of the Resources Super Profits Tax in 2010 — which this series documents in Article 6.

Gas companies donate a few hundred thousand and they get A$10 billion taxpayer dollars of subsidies in return to turbo charge their climate-wrecking projects. Our current system is one of legalised bribery.Senator Larissa Waters, Australia Institute Climate Integrity Summit, March 2024

The pattern of gas industry donations to major parties is documented and consistent. What is equally significant — and rarely noted — is who does not receive gas industry donations.

In 2023–24, the Australian Greens reported no fossil fuel industry donations. Independent Senator David Pocock reported no fossil fuel donations. The Climate 200-backed independents — Allegra Spender, Monique Ryan, Sophie Scamps, Kylea Tink, Zali Steggall, Kate Chaney, Zoe Daniel — all reported zero fossil fuel industry cash.

This is not coincidence. The crossbench parliamentarians who have most consistently called for gas tax reform — Pocock on the PRRT and beer excise comparison, the Greens on a 25 per cent export tax, the teal independents on broader resource rent reform — receive none of the money that flows to the major parties from the industry they are seeking to reform.

The gas industry does not donate to the people who want to fix the gas rort. It donates to the people who can prevent the fix.

The gas rort is not maintained by incompetence or inattention. It is maintained by a system of financial and human connections between the gas industry and both major parties that has operated consistently, across governments of both sides, for more than twenty years.

The donations are documented in AEC records. The revolving door is documented in ministerial biographies, company announcements, and academic research. The platinum memberships are disclosed in party financial reports and peer-reviewed analysis. The gap between what the industry pays in political access fees and what it receives in subsidies, tax concessions, and favourable policy is enormous — and visible.

Neither the Minerals Council’s A$300-million campaign against the carbon price nor Martin Ferguson’s APPEA chairmanship within six months of leaving the Resources ministry nor Woodside’s simultaneous platinum memberships with both the government and the opposition required anyone to act corruptly. The system is legal. The system is disclosed, partially. The system is operating exactly as it was designed to operate.

Article 6 of this series examines what happens when someone tries to break the system. In 2010, a Prime Minister did. The industry spent A$22 million and removed him in 53 days.