There are crowded buses … and then there’s the gas export tax bus. On board are unusual travelling companions: the Greens, David Pocock, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Clive Palmer, ACOSS, the ACTU and even the Commonwealth Bank.
Tue 12 May 2026 14.00 AEST
Photo: AAP Image/James Ross
There are crowded buses … and then there’s the gas export tax bus.
On board are the Greens, David Pocock, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Clive Palmer, ACOSS, the ACTU and even the Commonwealth Bank.
These are unusual travelling companions. But they all agree one thing: Australians aren’t getting a fair return for their exported gas.
What does this tell us?
Taxing gas exports properly is not a left-wing idea or a right-wing idea. It’s a common-sense idea. Australia has vast gas reserves. We are one of the world’s largest exporters of LNG. Yet the public return from this boom has been embarrassingly small compared with the scale of the resource being extracted and shipped overseas.
The gas lobby would like Australians to believe that asking multinational gas exporters to pay more is radical. It clearly isn’t. What is radical is allowing a handful of companies to profit from publicly owned resources while governments struggle to fund hospitals, schools, housing, cost-of-living relief and the list goes on…
We only get to sell these resources once. Can we afford not to levy them?
Pauline Hanson has, for a long time now, said that Australian gas should benefit Australians.
As far back as 2023, One Nation argued that “Australia is the world’s largest exporter but receives at most about $300 million a year in federal government revenue from this industry. Qatar, the world’s second-largest exporter, makes $26 billion a year.”
Earlier this year, Senator Hanson said that gas is “a resource that belongs to the Australian people […] This natural wealth – which should make every Australian rich – has been squandered by successive Labor and coalition governments over decades, allowing other countries to use our continent as a cheap dirt mine. It is fundamentally wrong any way you look at it. It is a betrayal of the Australian people, it is incredibly damaging to our economy and it makes us an international laughing stock”.
Even Malcolm Roberts is making sense on this: “One Nation will change the point at which the PRRT [Petroleum Rent Resource Tax] is levied. … One Nation will levy the tax at the wellhead. The volume will be counted and can’t be beaten at the wellhead at a dollar value rate per gigajoule of energy …. This will raise at least $10 billion a year in additional revenue. This isn’t a new tax. It’s the same tax being calculated differently, better and on multinationals. It will be important to ensure the tax is levied on exported gas only so that any tax revenue does not affect domestic gas prices.” (our emphasis)
David Pocock, meanwhile, has asked why Australians pay more in beer excise than gas exporters pay through the PRRT, comparing us to other countries: ““Currently we are squandering what Norway has turned into a $3 trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund.”
“We get one chance to capture the benefits of the LNG boom and invest in the things Australians need most: housing, health, education”, according to Senator Pocock.
The Greens have long argued that the PRRT is broken, with former leader, Adam Bandt, pointing out that gas company profits don’t stay in Australia: “Gas export operations in Australia are 95.7% overseas-owned. We’re giving our resources away for next to nothing.”
Clive Palmer has backed a stronger gas export tax regime: “We need Australian gas for Australians, not sent offshore to benefit other countries.”
And Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn has suggested a gas levy could help fund broader economic reform.
Independent polling shows that Australians from all walks of life and across the political spectrum believe the country is not receiving a fair deal from the gas export industry.
When environmentalists, independents, populists, business figures and welfare advocates all arrive at the same conclusion – the major parties should pay attention.
The gas tax bus is leaving. Labor and the Coalition should get on board or risk getting run over.
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A gas reservation scheme won’t raise a cent in revenue. Some Australians might benefit from lower gas prices, but multinational gas companies would continue to make huge profits selling Australian gas overseas, while the Australian public receives little benefit. Australia will continue to export gas so cheaply that Japanese companies can profit on-selling gas.
Taxing the gas industry fairly won’t make companies leave Australia; Norway didn’t kill its oil and gas industry when it raised their taxes. In fact, it has flourished in the five decades since then.
