“You can’t always get what you want,” sang The Rolling Stones. The Australian mining lobby never received the memo. For decades, it has secured its every wish: a royalty regime that ranks among the world’s most generous, a tax system engineered for exploitation, and a political duopoly that has systematically obstructed a renewable future to protect fossil fuel profits. Australia’s Midas Curse means our pursuit of short-term mineral wealth is systematically choking our democratic institutions and flogging off our planet’s stability for the self-interest of a privileged and powerful few.
The Perfect Capture
This is not mere lobbying. Lobbying is when an interest group makes representations to government. What we have is something far more advanced and insidious: the effective veto power that mining capital holds over Australia’s national policy-making apparatus. Over entire governments and beyond.
The evidence is everywhere. Watch Scott Morrison, as ever on the edge of self-parody, in 2017, as he waves a lump of coal in front of Parliament, as if it were sacred. Yet it’s a fool’s bauble; a cheap trick from the PM who mistook gimmickry for government; to steal the spotlight, taunting Labor with the words, “This is coal; don’t be afraid.” The sealed and lacquered prop, couldn’t have him getting his hands dirty with actual coal, helpfully supplied by the Minerals Council. They played him like a fiddle. He thought he was conducting. He was the instrument.
Could the Bunnings-style coal-promotion stunt better symbolise a political culture captured by fossil fuels? It was vintage ScoMo: a performative photo-op from a bloke who never worked with his hands in his life; nor tried to read a room he didn’t first fog with tone-deaf slogans.
It’s a natural sequel to another odd bod, Tony Abbott; schooled by the Institute of Public Affairs like a dutiful altar boy; tearing up the carbon price and declaring coal “good for humanity.”
What followed was a decade of governments shovelling billions into a “gas-led recovery” nobody in the market actually wanted, all to appease an industry that has treated Australian politics like a wholly owned subsidiary.
But here’s where it gets huge; Labor voters, please note. The total vitiation of the Liberal and National parties; their transformation into de facto subsidiaries of mining corporations, would be a matter for grim satisfaction if Labor offered a genuine alternative.
They don’t.
Labor’s Thirty-Year Capitulation
The capture of Labor is older, deeper, and more complete than most allow. It begins with the Hawke-Keating government and the 1983 Prices and Incomes Accord, an elaborate exercise in triangulation where Labor decided to betray its traditional base in working-class fraternity for the flash-as-a-rat-with-a-gold-tooth-and-every-man-for-himself logic of capital. By Julia Gillard’s government’s carbon price; a real achievement however modest; Big Mining had already worked out it owned both sides.
The proof is in the present. The Albanese government’s climate policy is Kabuki theatre, front of house, while backroom boffins guarantee the dirty deals of fossil fuel expansion. Engineer our extinction. We have a net zero target for 2050. We also have new coal and gas projects, such as the Bowen Gas Project, approved to operate decades past that deadline. A government spruiking renewables while dishing out environmental approvals like party favours. A Resources Minister, Madeleine King, who sounds like she’s rehearsing for a role with Santos.
The Kabuki theatre continues. Backstage, the dirty deals get done.
When pushed on the contradiction, government ministers retreat behind the shield of “independent regulators.” This ruse would be more convincing if those regulators weren’t operating within a policy framework written by and for the fossil fuel industry, and if the “proper process” didn’t feature a revolving door for former mining executives.
The Dark Money Pipeline: How Capture Is Purchased
But how exactly does an industry purchase two entire political parties? Follow the money, and the architecture of capture becomes visible.
The Cormack Foundation is exhibit A. This Liberal Party fundraising vehicle exists for one purpose: to launder mining donations while concealing donor identities. Between 2019-2022, Cormack funneled over $100 million to Liberal campaigns, much of it from undisclosed “associated entities”; code for mining interests that prefer anonymity.
When you can’t see who’s paying, you can’t trace the policy outcomes they’re purchasing. That’s not a bug in the system. That’s its core design feature.
The money flows in predictable patterns. BHP, Rio Tinto, Woodside, Santos donate millions across federal and state branches, splitting contributions to stay under disclosure thresholds. When major policy battles loom; mining tax debates, carbon price legislation, environmental approval reforms; donations spike. The correlation isn’t subtle. It’s blatant.
But direct donations are just the visible layer. Beneath lies the revolving door:
- Martin Ferguson: Labor’s Resources Minister (2007-2013) now sits on the board of multiple oil and gas companies, including as advisor to APPEA (Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association).
- Ian Macfarlane: Liberal Resources Minister (2013-2015) jumped straight to CEO of the Queensland Resources Council.
- Brendan Pearson: Minerals Council CEO became Liberal candidate, then advisor.
- Gary Gray: Labor Resources Minister (2013) now chairs multiple mining boards.
The message to current ministers is clear: serve the industry, secure your future. Cross them, and you’re Kevin Rudd—destroyed, discredited, removed.
This isn’t lobbying. Lobbying is when you ask nicely. This is when you own the people making the decisions, fund their campaigns, write their talking points, and guarantee their post-political income. This is systematic institutional capture, and both parties are wholly compromised.
The Institute of Public Affairs: The Ideological Laundromat
Mining’s stranglehold is also nurtured by the Institute of Public Affairs. The IPA isn’t a think tank in any real sense. Think tanks analyse evidence. The IPA is an ideological laundromat, taking fossil fuel money in one end and producing climate denial, anti-renewable propaganda, and pro-coal talking points out the other, all wrapped in the language of economic freedom.
Tony Abbott was their most successful creation. But the IPA’s influence extends far beyond one individual. They have populated the Liberal and National parties with alumni, placed their people in ministerial offices, and created an entire media ecosystem where questioning the primacy of mining is treated as economic vandalism. (Never will you hear one admit that jobs in mining are two per cent of the workforce.) This network is amplified by sympathetic outlets, from the editorial board of The Australian to talkback radio, which together create a superheated environment of hostility for rational climate policy. Or any plan for our own survival.
The beauty of this system, in the mining lobby’s eye, is that it’s bipartisan. When the Coalition is in power, the IPA provides the intellectual heft for pro-fossil fuel policies. When Labor is in power, the same arguments about sovereign risk and regional jobs are deployed to ensure that nothing fundamental changes. The players change, but the game remains the same.
The mining lobby owns the board.
The Murdoch Amplification Machine
But the IPA’s influence would be marginal without its media amplification partner: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire.
This isn’t coincidental alignment. It’s strategic partnership.
Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person and mining billionaire, doesn’t just dig iron ore. She funds the IPA, owns significant News Corp shares, and uses both to wage ideological war against climate action. When the IPA produces “research” claiming renewables destroy jobs, The Australian runs it as news. When mining interests want a minister destroyed, News Corp provides the artillery.
The pattern repeats with mechanical precision:
2010 Mining Tax: Murdoch papers ran front-page attacks on Rudd’s proposed Resource Super Profits Tax. Full-page ads funded by mining lobby. Editorial coordination across all Murdoch mastheads. Rudd removed within months.
2011-2014 Carbon Price: Systematic campaign of distortion. “Electricity bills will explode.” “Industries will collapse.” “Jobs will vanish.” None of it true. All of it amplified daily across Murdoch platforms until Abbott killed it.
2015-present Anti-Renewable Crusade: Wind turbines cause illness. Solar destroys grid stability. Battery technology doesn’t work. Chinese wind turbines will spray us with asbestos. A relentless propaganda campaign designed to delay the transition and protect fossil fuel assets.
This is three-way capture:
- Mining money purchases political compliance.
- IPA ideology provides intellectual cover.
- Murdoch media manufactures public consent.
The result? A closed loop where dissent becomes nearly impossible. Question coal, and you’re an economic vandal on the front page of The Australian. Propose a mining tax, and you’re destroyed before the legislation is drafted. Advocate for renewables, and you’re blamed for blackouts that haven’t happened.
The players own the field, the rulebook, and the referee.
The Economics of Capture
Let’s talk money; the ultimate bottom line. Australia has some of the lowest mining royalties in the developed world. In Western Australia, iron ore royalties max out at 7.5 percent. This pales in comparison to Norway’s petroleum tax rate of 78%. The federal government’s Petroleum Resource Rent Tax, designed to secure a fair return from gas projects, has been so comprehensively gamed that for years it raised less revenue than the cost of its administration. Chevron’s Gorgon LNG project paid zero PRRT for years while booking billions in profits.
Norway provides the devastating comparison. They tax petroleum at 78%, invest the returns in a $1.4 trillion sovereign wealth fund, and have built one of the world’s most prosperous, equitable societies.
We tax mining at a fraction of that rate, let companies dodge even those minimal obligations, and have nothing saved for future generations.
The difference isn’t geology or economics. It’s political will. Norway never let the industry capture the state. We did.
When confronted, the industry points to the jobs and export income it generates. These are not trivial points. However, this argument deliberately ignores the greater economic opportunity cost; the green industries we haven’t built and the jobs we haven’t created. It also ignores the stranded asset risk we are creating for the future and the fact that a fair royalty scheme could fund a sovereign wealth fund to secure regional communities long after the mines close.
We are, in effect, giving away our non-renewable national wealth to some of the most profitable companies on Earth, companies that have calculated it is far cheaper to rent the political system than to pay a fair price for the resources they extract.
The Renewable Energy Obstruction Racket
But the real genius of the mining lobby’s capture isn’t what they’ve taken. It’s what they’ve prevented us from having.
For more than a decade, the fossil fuel lobby and their political assets have run a systematic campaign to delay, obstruct, and undermine the transition to renewable energy. Not because the technology isn’t ready or cost-competitive, it manifestly is, but because every year of delay is another year of super-profits for assets that should be retired.
The campaign has been devastatingly effective. The Abbott government’s destruction of the carbon price. The endless uncertainty around the Renewable Energy Target. The “gas-led recovery” that was a massive handout to political donors. Angus Taylor’s guerrilla warfare against wind and solar, and his determination to keep coal and gas on life support.
Now we have the Coalition’s abandonment of net zero itself; the most brazen capitulation yet to fossil fuel interests. In November 2024, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley formally junked the Liberal Party’s commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050, following the Nationals who had already walked away from the target. The new policy would see taxpayer subsidies flow to new and existing coal plants; public money transferred directly to private fossil fuel interests under the guise of energy affordability.
But The Saturday Paper’s Karen Barlow’s reporting reveals Ley had no choice. Liberal sources confirmed she would have been rolled if she’d resisted the hard right’s demand to dump climate action. At the party room meeting to rubber-stamp the decision, rival Andrew Hastie made what insiders described as a gratuitous intervention praising fossil fuels and thanking the leadership for the coal subsidies, rubbing the moderates’ faces in their defeat.
The moderates capitulated completely. They got nothing. One Liberal admitted that campaigning on the new policy in city seats means being labeled climate deniers, and rightly so. Another called the coal subsidies a massive stretch that nobody takes seriously except as a victory flag for the hard right. Yet not a single moderate resigned over the policy.
Because there are no moderates in the Liberal Party anymore. There are only people who privately disagree but publicly comply. Liberal moderates? Not so much a faction as a fiction. An oxymoron.
Ley’s capitulation is complete. She understands science. She knows coal subsidies are indefensible. She knows she’s condemning her grandchildren to climate chaos. And she does it anyway because her leadership depends on the hard right who depend on mining money. As Groucho said, “I have principles. And if you don’t like my principles, I have other principles.”
This is institutional capture at the cellular level. The party has metastasized into a wholly-owned subsidiary of fossil fuel interests. The infection is terminal.
Ley defends this surrender with practiced duplicity. She claims to care about climate; she has six grandchildren, she believes in renewables, but refuses to accept her children inheriting a lower standard of living. It’s the classic mining lobby formula: frame climate action as economic sacrifice, ignore the catastrophic costs of inaction, pretend subsidising coal represents responsible stewardship.
The Midas touch again: everything she touches turns to political gold for fossil fuels, worthless ash for her grandchildren.
This is what total capture looks like. A major political party, led by a woman who claims to care about the future, has been reduced to arguing that protecting coal profits is protecting her grandchildren. The mining lobby has achieved what it set out to achieve: both major parties now compete to serve fossil fuel interests, differing only in the sophistication of their rhetoric.
Labor’s Complicity: The Faustian Bargain Renewed
Here’s what makes Labor’s capture more insidious than the Coalition’s: they know better. The Coalition can feign climate skepticism; it’s a consistent, if fraudulent, position.
Labor has no such excuse. They accept the science. They speak of the urgency. They talk about the opportunities of the transition. And then they approve new coal mines and gas fields.
Why? Because Labor concluded decades ago that it couldn’t win without mining money, couldn’t govern without mining’s acquiescence, and couldn’t survive if the lobby decided to destroy them as it did Kevin Rudd over the mining tax.
In this, they are abetted by elements of the union movement, particularly within the CFMEU, whose leadership sometimes acts as useful idiots for the industry. Their focus on short-term membership in existing mines, however understandable, undermines the broader labour movement’s interest in a sustainable future and a just transition, effectively negotiating the terms of their own industry’s long-term demise.
The mining lobby loves a Labor government. It provides bipartisan cover for fossil fuel expansion. It proves that there is “no alternative.” And it demonstrates that Labor, desperate to avoid a wedge on the economy, will ultimately always choose the path of least resistance—the path the mining lobby has already paved.
The “Just Transition” Weaponization
The cruelest manipulation is the industry’s cynical use of workers as human shields.
Suddenly, mining executives who spent decades casualizing labor, busting unions, and automating jobs are deeply concerned about workers in fossil fuel communities. Resources Minister Madeleine King speaks movingly about not abandoning coal miners, while approving projects that will operate for decades, ensuring those same workers face catastrophic stranded asset collapse when the global transition happens without us.
This is hostage-taking dressed as compassion.
The truth: Mining employs 2% of Australia’s workforce. The renewable energy sector could employ many times that number in manufacturing, installation, maintenance, and grid development. But every year we delay transition, we lose the opportunity to build those industries and provide genuine alternative employment.
Real just transition means acting now while we still have time and resources to retrain workers, diversify regional economies, and build new industries. The mining lobby’s version means delaying until catastrophic collapse makes transition brutal and chaotic.
They don’t care about workers. They care about extracting every dollar before the stranded asset crash they know is coming.
The Cost of Capture: What We’ve Lost
The price of this decades-long capture is staggering. Start with the obvious: a livable climate. Every year of delay locks in more Black Summer firestorms, more Lismore floods that drown entire towns, more marine heatwaves that bleach the Reef into skeletal white, more uninsurable homes, more climate refugees from Pacific nations we helped destroy, and more summers where Brisbane and Sydney become uninhabitable without air conditioning that burns more coal that makes it worse.
The curse compounds: we’re not just destroying the climate; we’re destroying our capacity to respond to that destruction.
But the curse extends further. It’s the future industries we didn’t build. While we debated the cost of lamb roasts, other nations seized the lead in renewable technology, green steel, and hydrogen. We are being left behind in the global race for the green industrial future.
It’s the corruption of our democracy itself. When a single industry can determine who leads parties, which policies are permissible, and which politicians have a future, we have a plutocracy, not a democracy. Elections become a selection process for the middle managers of a mining colony.
The only federal party not wholly captured by mining interests is the Greens; which tells you everything about why they’re treated as unserious extremists by both Labor and the media. Not being owned is the ultimate disqualification from “respectable” politics in a captured democracy.
The Midas Curse is this: in our desperate grasp for golden wealth, we are turning our democracy, our economic resilience, and our planetary life-support system into inert, worthless assets. We possess the riches but are losing the capacity to enjoy a viable future.
Breaking the Curse
So how do we break a stranglehold this complete? The answer is both simple and profoundly difficult: we must build a political movement powerful enough to challenge it directly. This requires moving beyond tinkering and accepting that the problem is systemic.
Breaking a stranglehold this complete requires political courage that doesn’t currently exist in federal parliament. But movements create that courage. So here’s what a genuine liberation agenda would look like:
- A Federal Anti-Corruption Commission with a mandate to investigate undue influence and the revolving door between mining executives and government.
- A Ban on Political Donations from all industries with a direct and significant regulatory interest, starting with fossil fuels. Shut down the Cormack Foundation and its equivalents.
- A Climate Trigger in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to mandate that all new projects be assessed for their full climate impact.
- A Genuine Royalty Reform to ensure the Australian people receive a fair return for the non-renewable resources we own, benchmarked against international standards like Norway’s 78% petroleum tax.
- A Legislated Just Transition Authority, funded to actively create new economic futures for fossil-fuel-dependent communities, making them stakeholders in the new economy rather than hostages to the old one.
Most of all, we need to stop normalising. It is not normal for an industry to dictate national policy. It is not normal for a government that accepts climate science to approve projects that sabotage its own climate targets. It is not normal for an opposition leader to abandon her party’s climate commitments while claiming to care about her grandchildren’s future.
The mining lobby has gorged itself for decades. They’ve extracted our wealth, minimized their taxes, blocked our progress, and corrupted our politics so thoroughly that both major parties compete to serve them.
Ben Chifley spoke of the Light on the Hill. The mining lobby has strip-mined that hill and left an open-cut pit.
Reclaiming it isn’t a policy problem. It’s a power problem. No five-point plan will break capture this complete. Only a political movement powerful enough to threaten the entire system has any chance.
The question isn’t what policies we need. We know what we need. The question is whether we’re willing to build the movement powerful enough to force them through against the combined resistance of mining capital, media monopoly, and a captured political class.
That’s the fundamental political challenge of our time. The Faustian bargain was signed by both parties.
Are we, the people, willing to tear it up?
Urban Wronski Writes 
Crikey!
I have often wondered why Australians are being exploited into trouble-filled hardships and poverty.
Now I know!
Thankyou so much, David. Your have put it all so clearly and brilliantly!
LikeLiked by 1 person
David, I believe you are correct, the truth is African countries have been exploited for years by European colonists and Australia has allowed itself to be exploited in the same way! Worse, we have is European colonist’s being exploited by European colonists. how dumb are we?
I don’t know what the answer is, as discussed previously we have made ourselves reliant on the mining industry. We started a vehicle (now lost) industry, when we should have started a ship building industry (we are an island after all) and an exporter of raw materials.
I see our only hope and it’s a small one, in removing ourselves from the arms race and redirecting the money into home grown industries and research.
LikeLiked by 1 person