The Principle Is Simple
Australia's minerals belong to the nation – the people. The Commonwealth owns Australia's offshore petroleum resources. The States own onshore minerals – coal, iron ore, gold, lithium, every extractable resource beneath Australian soil. Private companies do not discover resources and then own them. They apply for the right to extract resources that already belong to the nation, and that right should only be granted on the basis of a reasonable return to the people who own them.
This principle has been watered down. The Federal Government has allowed private companies – many of them foreign-owned multinationals – to extract finite, irreplaceable public wealth at scale while returning far less than the value of what is being alienated, and far less than Norway, the United Kingdom, and other comparable jurisdictions capture. Six of Australia's ten liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities pay no royalties and little or no Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT), despite generating billions in annual export revenue.
The Australian Taxation Office's (ATO) Corporate Tax Transparency data shows the oil and gas sector has been a systematic low payer of PRRT relative to its revenue scale. That pattern has prompted repeated policy intervention to secure a more timely and minimum return from the offshore LNG industry. These are not normal business profits on private assets. They are returns on resources that belong to Australians, and Australia is not receiving a fair share of them.
This is not an argument about government needing more money to spend. It is a prior question: on what terms should a government grant private companies the right to extract and sell public assets? The answer should be straightforward – only on terms that deliver a fair return to the owners. Norway has built a sovereign wealth fund worth \$1.9 trillion, roughly \$350,000 per citizen, on exactly that basis. The question for Australia is not whether to insist on fair terms. It is how to get there from where we are now, given two previous failed attempts and constitutional arrangements that complicate comprehensive reform.
