A new campaign, “Australia runs on natural gas”, uses this figure to argue that Australia needs new gas. But is it true?
Tue 11 Nov 2025 13.00
Photo: AAP Image/Darren England
This comes from Australian Energy Producers, which represents companies that extract oil and gas in Australia, in their flashy new ad campaign “Australia runs on natural gas”.
You might think from their claim that the gas industry directly employs 215,000 Australians – but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
According to the most recent official data, oil and gas (both extraction and supply) employs less than 39,000 people. That’s less than 0.3% of all of Australia’s jobs.
To put that in perspective, retailer Bunnings Warehouse employs over 55,000 people. And far more Australians work as nurses and midwives (over 400,000), or as teachers (over 320,000) than in gas.
The 215,000 jobs number is calculated using a type of economic modelling called ‘input-output modelling’, which the fossil fuel industry has relied on to overstate its impact for over a decade.
These models include directly employed people as well as the supply chains for these industries and the flow-on economic impacts of the industry, such as the money its employees might spend at coffee shops or the supermarket, and how many jobs they might support.
There are a bunch of flawed assumptions in these models, for instance they assume that all employees spend all of their income on buying things in their local community. This modelling has been described as ‘‘biased’’ by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘‘abused’’ by the Productivity Commission and ‘‘deficient’’ by the NSW Land and Environment Court.
Another problem is that flow-on effects aren’t unique to the gas industry – all businesses buy and sell from wide areas of the economy. This means that, if all industries claimed to “support” jobs like the gas industry does, it would add up to a lot more jobs (and even people) than exist in Australia.
That makes it incredibly misleading to use these “indirect” employment figures to inflate the supposed impact of the gas sector – especially when they only actually create one in seven of the jobs they claim to “support”.
80 per cent of Australia’s gas is currently exported – including two thirds of gas produced on the east coast. This has tripled the cost of gas on Australia’s east coast over the last ten years.
The annual list of Australia’s planned resource and energy projects has been released by the federal Department of Industry, Science and Resources.
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