Think Australia controls its own fossil fuel wealth? Think again.

The gas extraction and mining industries that dominate our politics and digging up our continent act as local managers for the American-led global order, ensuring our natural resources serve US investors rather than domestic needs.

You just need to see who actually owns the largest fossil fuel companies operating in Australia:

• Woodside is 63 percent owned by US investors
• BHP is 71 percent US-owned
• Rio Tinto is 77 percent US-owned

Other major fossil fuel companies operating in Australia — Santos, Esso (Exxon), Whitehaven Coal, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Anglo American Coal — are significantly or majority owned by US investment firms like Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street, or UK investment firms. And massive fossil fuel companies like Inpex and Glencore are foreign owned by nations who are, like Australia, deeply integrated into the US economic and geopolitical system.

To see how deep the integration is, look at how Australia’s intelligence agencies have literally acted as corporate spies for the gas industry. During maritime gas field boundary negotiations with newly independent East Timor, the Australian spy agency ASIS installed listening devices to eavesdrop on its internal discussions during oil and gas negotiations. This appalling and unethical betrayal was authorised by Alexander Downer, the foreign minister under John Howard.

The East Timor negotiator, former US ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith said:

“The whole experience of the negotiation from 2000 on and through this whole episode was to see a country that – yes, in many ways focuses on the public good – but where corporate greed was a big part of it, because the Howard and Downer government, they were shills for the corporations. That was what was really important to them.”

The boundary between the Australian government and fossil fuel corporations does not exist. The politicians and diplomats who orchestrate the theft of regional resources often step directly into lucrative corporate roles at the very companies that profit from their policies.

For example, both former foreign minister Alexander Downer and secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Dr Ashton Calvert, went on to work for Woodside, and Woodside’s chairman Charles Goode sat “on the boards of top Liberal Party fundraising vehicles”.

However, this is not a case of “bad” lobbyists and unethical politicians. We can’t solve this with lobbying bans or bans on politicians joining corporate boards.

The primary function of the Australian state (and all states under capitalism) is to secure the conditions for capital accumulation. Australia’s professional managerial class and the corporate oligarchs that comprise Australia’s ruling class, have historically relied on the power and prestige of dominant imperial power of the day (first Britain, now the United States) to secure their own own position, wealth and prestige. The Australian state is not a neutral arbiter between the Australian public interest and US-corporate-military interests — it has picked a side and the side it picked is the Empire.

Our massive military escalations are also fundamentally tied to fossil fuels and energy control, primarily on behalf of the United States.

The multi-billion dollar AUKUS nuclear submarine deal is touted as national defence, but it is actually designed to project power and threaten global energy supply chains for the US’s Pacific interests. If Australia ever gets the submarines, they will form a key part of America’s strategy to “choke off China’s oil and gas imports through the Strait of Malacca”.

Politicians constantly justify this corporate and military aggression by invoking the “rules-based international order“. In reality, this is just polite diplomatic cover for a system that legally elevates corporate extraction profits over human rights, the climate, and national sovereignty. As Canadian PM Mark Carney said in 2025.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Mark Carney, Canadian PM speech at Davos 2026

Under this imperial arrangement, as Carney states, state sovereignty is subordinated to the interests of America and US private investors. Those investors routinely use American state power to attempt to enforce their will. The “rules based international order” was always a smokescreen to hide

Any attempt by Australian politicians to regulate these interests or chart an independent foreign policy is met with severe punishment. The imperial core and its domestic corporate allies will not tolerate a government that threatens the seamless extraction of resources or the military bases that protect that system.

History proves this. Gough Whitlam’s mild attempts at charting an independent course on foreign policy contributed to his dismissal in 1975. And when in 2010, Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan tried to introduce a modest tax on extreme mining company profits, the industry spent $100 million media campaign that resulted in Rudd being dumped as PM. Senator Mark Arbib, who was also the former Labor national secretary, was later revealed to be briefing the US embassy during this period.

Whitlam and Rudd were both deposed, in part, because they threatened Australia’s subordinate role within the US empire and its economic system.

This is the reason we don’t tax our minerals and fossil fuel exports. Because the political deal struck through Australia’s treaties, security guarantees and relationship with the US and UK establish us as a huge quarry that exports large parts of our continent overseas, protected and enforced by the military-corporate system.

At the time of this article being published, The Australia Institute estimates that more than $71.6 billion in missed revenue due to not taxing gas export profits.

In March 2026, a poll “found more than three in five Australians support a flat 25% tax on gas exports.” An April 2026 poll likewise “found 57% of voters are supportive of taxing profits on gas exports, with only 12% opposed”.

Fossil fuel companies know they operate without social license. The public does not support fossil fuel companies. For example polling showing that 60 percent of Australians agree fossil fuel sponsorships are the exact same as cigarette advertising. The vast majority of people in Australia want to transition off coal and gas. An industry with social license would not need to create misinformation campaigns.

When corporations ignore social license, the state steps in. Corporate authoritarianism is a form of neoliberal austerity. Democracy is curtailed to enable profits. To protect corporations and the fossil fuel industry from democratic resistance, governments pass anti-protest laws, criminalise dissent, and dispossess indigenous peoples.

I titled this blog post with a question: “why won’t Australia ever tax mining and fossil fuels?” This is a challenge to you, reading. They won’t be taxed unless the great mass of the Australian public make it impossible for them to not be taxed.

If you disagree with how our system and state operates, then take action. The first (very modest) step is supporting the existing campaigns for a gas export tax.