The inquiry that couldn't agree

On 7 May 2026, a Senate select committee handed down a report on how Australia taxes its gas. Buried in it is a single sentence that does the work of a decision without ever being one. The committee, it says, 'has not been able to reach agreement on a set of recommendations.'

Read that again. A parliamentary committee took evidence on a tax that, on the figures placed before it, lets some of the largest companies operating in this country pay nothing on billions in revenue. Then it wrote down that it could not agree to recommend a single change.

This is not a scandal of a leaked memo or a secret deal. It is the opposite. The leak sits in the public record: itemised, tabled, and then left exactly where it was found.

01The inquiry documented the problem, then recorded that it could not agree

The Select Committee on the Taxation of Gas Resources was established on 30 March 2026 and chaired by Greens senator Steph Hodgins-May. It was a snap committee with a short life, built largely around one specific proposal: a new tax on gas exports. Five weeks later, on 7 May 2026, it tabled its final report and closed its work.

Here is the mechanism to watch, because it is the whole story. The committee did not, as a body, declare the tax broken. It heard strong evidence to that effect, and its members' views genuinely diverged. Coalition and Nationals senators rejected any new gas tax outright. Labor declined to endorse reform. That divergence is precisely why there was no consensus, and why the operative outcome of an entire inquiry is a recorded inability to recommend anything.

An inquiry that cannot agree does not stop the clock or force a choice. It simply hands the question back, unchanged, with the evidence attached.

02The numbers the inquiry heard: billions in revenue, near-zero resource tax

The instrument in question is the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax, the PRRT, meant to be Australia's charge on the super-profits of extracting a public resource. This is the switch: the PRRT taxes profit only after generous deductions are carried forward and uplifted year on year, so a project can produce and export for a decade or more before it owes the Commonwealth anything at all.

The figures below were placed before the committee as evidence, drawn from Australian Taxation Office transparency data. They are what submitters and witnesses put on the record, not an independent finding of the committee. Read as a set, they describe a pattern rather than a handful of outliers.

03The public take is falling as the clean-up credits rise

The direction of travel matters as much as the level. The 2025-26 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook downgraded projected PRRT revenue by A$1.5 billion over four years, and the report records this was in part due to an increase in credits for decommissioning expenditure.

That is the second switch. As offshore fields age, the companies that own them claim credits for the cost of decommissioning against the PRRT they would otherwise pay. The industry's own estimated bill for pulling that infrastructure out of Australian waters, overseen by the offshore regulator NOPSEMA, runs to roughly A$60 billion over coming decades. So the offsets grow precisely as the resource take shrinks. The public share does not just start low. It is engineered to fall further.

04Reform was modelled, costed, and set aside

It is not the case that no alternative existed. The Australia Institute told the inquiry that a flat 25 per cent levy on LNG exports would raise about A$17 billion a year, and the inquiry heard from figures including former Treasury secretary Ken Henry, who urged the government to adopt such a levy.

Before the May 2026 budget, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet had asked Treasury to model levy options, including a 25 per cent gas export levy alongside PRRT and company-tax changes. The government then ruled the export levy out. In the budget itself, the projected PRRT take was revised up by only about A$100 million for 2026-27, against roughly A$63.9 billion in gas exports.

To keep this honest: a 25 per cent levy on gross export value is an illustrative alternative, not foregone revenue in any official sense, and it is a different instrument from a rent tax. The Point, drawing on Australia Institute analysis, put the order of magnitude of such a levy at about A$16 billion. The point is not the exact counterfactual. It is the distance between what is collected and what a fair return might look like: The Conversation puts Australia's effective take on gas at around 15 per cent, against roughly 48 per cent in Norway.

While that gap sat in front of the committee, Chevron, which began paying PRRT for the first time only in August 2025 and expects to pay around A$800 million by the end of 2027, campaigned publicly that a tax rise 'risks prosperity.'

05The silence is the mechanism

It would be too easy, and not quite true, to call this pure regulatory capture. The committee's failure to agree was framed in part around energy security and global supply concerns. The report references the current conflict in Iran, and members who opposed a new levy leaned on the risk of destabilising supply. That context is real, and the extraction thesis does not need to overstate it.

But strip the caveats back and the machinery is plain. A public resource generates tens of billions in export value. A tax lets some of the majors, Chevron, INPEX and ConocoPhillips, lawfully pay nothing while decommissioning credits expand. A parliamentary process that could have narrowed the gap inquires, documents the leak in its own pages, and then records that it cannot agree to plug it. Regulatory Capture and The Revolving Door are the usual suspects. This time the accomplice is procedure itself.

A report with no recommendations generates no headline. That is precisely how the giveaway is entrenched.

The story stays live. On 22 June 2026 the chair tabled a follow-up report documenting how LNG interests, in her account, deployed 'energy crisis narratives' to oppose the tax during the inquiry, a characterisation the industry contests. The original report itself put no recommendation to the government: the committee recorded that it could not agree on any, and invited the government only to reconsider the fuel-security question once the conflict in Iran is resolved. ⁸ Anthony Albanese's government has not been forced to say yes or no, because an inquiry that could not agree never put the question.

That is the return you are owed on gas taken from your territory: documented, tabled, and quietly declined. The credits keep growing. The take keeps falling. Nothing is stolen in the dark. It is filed in the light, with no recommendation attached.

If it's a rort, we cover it.

Correction, 7 October 2026. This section and the brief said a government response to the original report was still outstanding. This outlet could not find a record of that status, and the committee's report made no recommendations: it recorded that members could not agree on any and invited the government only to reconsider the fuel-security question after the conflict in Iran. The text now says that instead. ⁸