Australia's gas belongs to all of us — so why are we paying retail for our own resources?

Guardian Australia · Rod Sims · Monday 23 March 2026

Australia's gas belongs to all of us — so why are we paying retail for our own resources?

Rod Sims argues the Albanese government must go beyond temporary levies and fix Australia's chronic undertaxation of gas producers, who extract public resources while paying some of the lowest effective tax rates in the world.

Australia's gas resources belong to the public the way a pub belongs to its regulars — except these regulars pay nothing at the bar and take the till home. The petroleum resource rent tax was designed with more loopholes than a knitting factory, and every government since has watched the revenue vanish and called it policy. Rod Sims is right, but the scandal isn't that it took a crisis to act — it's that the crisis was always there, sitting in the accounts, wearing a tie.

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