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”.
Here is a truth that those in power have never quite figured out how to deal with: change doesn't start at the top. It starts at the fringes. It starts with people who have the least and stand to lose the most. And eventually, it ends up in the halls of power.
Delegates from more than 50 countries arrived in Santa Marta already primed by disruption: higher prices, tighter supply chains and renewed volatility. Many arrived with scaled-back delegations, as the same fossil fuel-driven conflicts dominating the agenda constrained travel, strained government bandwidth, and diverted political attention at home. The result has been a notable hardening of tone and urgency. Fossil fuels are being recast not just as the cause of climate change, but as a systemic risk to economic and political stability.
