Why nothing changes

The most recent confirmed PRRT forecasts tell the basic story.

In 2025, Budget documents revealed that the government’s 2024 PRRT deductions cap — the reform the industry publicly supported — would raise A$4 billion less over the forward estimates than the government had projected in 2023. This was not a minor revision. The government had said the reform would raise an additional A$2.4 billion over four years. Instead, PRRT revenue across the same period went down.

We are now getting less for our gas and still not a single cent of PRRT from offshore LNG. We are the second-biggest exporter in the world, it is a total scam on Australians. These companies have been taking the piss.Senator David Pocock, Accounting Times, June 2025

Treasurer Chalmers defended the revenue revision as a result of oil price volatility. His defence was technically accurate and strategically inadequate: a well-designed resource rent tax would capture more revenue when prices rise, not less. The design flaw in the PRRT is precisely that it does not behave this way.

This series has now documented the history of resource rent reform failure in Australia across two decades. The table reveals something important about how the system perpetuates itself: the industry has learned to deploy two strategies, not just one.

The first is overt opposition — the 2010 campaign against the RSPT, the campaign against carbon pricing. The second is co-option: supporting reforms weak enough not to matter, as with the 2024 PRRT deductions cap.

The immediate trigger for the March 2026 windfall tax discussion is the Iran war. Conflict in the Middle East has driven global oil and gas prices upward. Approximately 20 per cent of global gas supply passes through the Strait of Hormuz, substantially closed during the conflict. Australian LNG exporters — Woodside, Santos, Chevron, Shell, INPEX — are the automatic beneficiaries of surging prices on gas they committed to sell before the conflict began.

While working Australians are dealing with surging costs due to the war in Iran, giant gas corporations are set to make a killing off skyrocketing oil and gas prices.ACTU President Michele O’Neil, ACTU statement, March 2026

Within 24 hours of reports that the PM’s department had asked Treasury to model such a levy, the industry response arrived. Shell warned against ‘short-term measures or populist rhetoric.’ Chevron called it a ‘knee-jerk, sugar hit.’ Santos said the narrative that LNG exports take money out of Australia was ‘wrong.’ These statements were made at the Australian Domestic Gas Outlook conference — the industry’s annual gathering — on the same day. They are coordinated. They invoke the same language used in 2010: investment at risk, energy security threatened, populist interference in stable policy settings.

As analyst Rex Patrick noted, the industry had cried wolf in the UK in 2022 with identical arguments. The UK Chancellor introduced a 25 per cent Energy Profits Levy anyway, later raised it to 35 per cent, and raised £2.6 billion in the first year. Investment continued. The industry’s warnings proved false.

This series has now documented, across seven articles, all the major components of the system that perpetuates the gas rort.

1. A tax designed to fail. The PRRT was designed for oil in 1988. Applied to LNG, its compounding deduction uplift rates, its gas transfer pricing formula, and its ‘taxing point’ rules combine to produce an effective rate near zero for most projects, for most of their productive lives. The design is not an accident. It is the product of decades of industry consultation in which the companies subject to the tax had substantial input into its design.

2. A political system that is purchased. The gas industry donated A$3.98 million to Australia’s major parties in 2024–25 alone. Woodside held platinum corporate memberships — access to private dinners with the Prime Minister and Treasurer — simultaneously with both the government and opposition. The donation strategy is not ideological. It is designed to ensure that regardless of which party governs, the industry has access to the decision-makers.

3. A revolving door that embeds industry preferences. The minister who oversaw the approval of Queensland’s LNG export industry joined the peak gas lobby within six months of leaving parliament, in breach of the Ministerial Code. His staff became directors of APPEA and the Minerals Council. This is not corruption. It is a structural arrangement that ensures industry preferences are embedded in the institutional knowledge of the regulators.

4. A campaign template that has never been defeated. The 2010 mining tax campaign established a template that University of Melbourne academics have described as ‘now routine.’ Every resource rent reform attempt since 2010 has faced a version of the same campaign. The template works: warn of investment flight, manufacture grassroots opposition, declare the reform anti-Australian.

5. A reform process captured by the reformed. The 2024 PRRT deductions cap was supported by the gas industry because the industry had negotiated it. When the regulated industry publicly supports the regulation being imposed on it, the regulation is not asking much. As Senator Pocock noted, the government examined its options and chose the weakest one. The result: a reform that raised A$4 billion less than promised and left the PRRT on a downward trajectory.

The PRRT is complicated enough that only a handful of people understand it — mostly employed by the industry or its regulators. The Ministerial Code is not enforced. The donations are legal. The platinum memberships are disclosed, partially. And every time reform approaches seriously, the same campaign deploys the same language and the same warnings — which Australian policymakers have learned, from 2010, to take seriously. Even when the warnings are false.

It is tempting to conclude that nothing will change. The pattern is long. The structural barriers are high. But there are features of the current moment that did not exist in 2010 or 2022.

First, the Epstein files. The revelation in January 2026 that the 2010 anti-RSPT campaign was being coordinated by a British political operative who privately admitted there was no principled argument against the tax — and who forwarded strategy documents to a convicted sex offender — changed the public record permanently. The campaign’s dishonesty is now documented in primary sources.

Second, the Senate Estimates moment. Senator Pocock’s beer-and-PRRT comparison was watched 8.7 million times. The public understanding of the issue is qualitatively different from 2010 or 2022. Australians who have never engaged with resource taxation policy now know that the PRRT raises less than beer excise.

Third, the breadth of support for reform. The 25 per cent export levy is now backed by the ACTU, the Greens, independents, and even One Nation — a political coalition that cuts across every conventional ideological line. Even the opposition, in the 2025 election, conceded publicly that Australia had ‘a gas export problem, not a gas shortage problem.’

Fourth, the windfall context. The Iran war has produced exactly the circumstances that make the moral case for a windfall levy unanswerable: gas companies are making extraordinary profits from a geopolitical tragedy while Australian families pay surging fuel prices.

Fifth, the May 2026 Budget. Treasury has been asked to model the levy. The model exists. The political question is whether the government will use it — or whether, as in 2010, the campaign will succeed in preventing it.

This article is unusual for investigative journalism because it is being published while the story is unresolved. As of the last week of March 2026, the government has not committed to a windfall tax. The industry has deployed its campaign. The May Budget is five weeks away.

What this series has established, across seven articles, is the full context for that Budget decision. It is not a technical question about petroleum tax design. It is a political question about whether Australia is capable of doing what it has failed to do since 2010: implement a resource rent tax that actually captures the public’s fair share of the public’s resources.

The tools exist. The Pocock Senate inquiry has been proposed and would report in May 2026. The ANU’s Chris Murphy has confirmed that resource rent taxes have a negative marginal excess burden — meaning they generate economic benefits, not costs.

The only question is political will. And the only way political will materialises is if the public pressure for change exceeds the industry pressure to prevent it.

Article 8 of this series examines how Australia’s major media organisations have covered — and not covered — the gas rort.