At its national conference in July 2026, Labor will vote on a platform amendment promising "a fairer return on Australia's natural resources, including through appropriate taxation arrangements." That language connects directly to the ACTU's proposal for a flat 25% tax on gas exports (Guardian Australia).

The ACTU wants the existing Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT) scrapped and replaced with a straightforward 25% levy on liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. The PRRT, set up in the 1980s, taxes natural gas at the wellhead — the point where it's extracted — rather than taxing the exported LNG product. That distinction matters because it lets companies use accounting methods to shift costs around so that the downstream LNG profit never triggers a PRRT bill. Greg Jericho, Guardian Australia's economics columnist, helped the ACTU with research behind the proposal.

The numbers are striking. The ACTU estimates a 25% export tax would have raised $17.1 billion in 2023-24 (ACTU). The Australia Institute gave a Senate inquiry a nearly identical figure: $17 billion annually (Macquarie University Lighthouse).

Those figures land hard because the current system is bleeding revenue. In 2025-26, Australia exported $52.6 billion more LNG than 25 years earlier — a 1,968% increase — yet PRRT receipts fell by $979 million, a 41% drop. Australia is now the world's second-largest LNG exporter, behind only the US and ahead of Qatar. Fifty-six per cent of those exports come from offshore gas fields that pay no royalties (Guardian Australia).

The case of Inpex shows the structural problem. The Japanese company has exported $195 billion worth of LNG from projects off the WA and NT coasts and has paid no royalties, no PRRT, and barely any company tax (Guardian Australia; Inpex). The ACTU separately published a submission claiming Exxon had nearly A$6.7 billion in total income in Australia but zero taxable income and paid zero tax (ACTU).

Reviews of the PRRT have a history of going nowhere. Scott Morrison, as treasurer, commissioned the Callaghan review nearly a decade ago; it recommended minor changes that were never implemented. In 2023, Treasurer Jim Chalmers commissioned another review, which recommended three changes. The government implemented the option least favoured by Treasury — a 90% cap on the share of PRRT-assessable income that can be offset — and the one most favoured by the gas industry. Ministers framed it as delivering "more tax sooner" rather than admitting it would raise more tax (Guardian Australia). Estimated PRRT revenue keeps being revised downward, though the May 2026 federal budget bucked that trend with an upward revision to the forecast (ABC News).

A 2026 Senate review into gas resource taxation, run by the Greens with support from independent senator David Pocock, added to the political pressure. Jericho co-wrote a submission to that inquiry. Pocock had already dissenting form on the issue: his report to the Senate Economics Committee inquiry into the Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Accountability and Fairness) Bill criticised the PRRT reform in Schedule 5 as inadequate (Parliament of Australia). Labor senators' additional comments to the gas taxation committee report expressed support for a 25% export tax and tightening of the PRRT regime (Parliament of Australia).

That puts the parliamentary party and the conference on a collision course with the Prime Minister. In April 2026, Anthony Albanese ruled out introducing a 25% tax on existing gas export projects (Guardian Australia). Yet the Australia Institute stated in March 2026 that Albanese had requested modelling on a potential new gas tax (The Australia Institute). So the PM has both ruled out the tax and ordered modelling on one. That gap is where the conference vote lands.

The Business Council of Australia opposes the proposal, arguing it could reduce investment and supply, push up energy costs, and undermine energy security (Accounting Times). ABC's 7.30 program reported that most Australians support a flat 25% tax on gas exports (ABC 7.30). Jericho has also reported that revenue from a gas export tax would fully cover the cost of adding dental care to Medicare (Guardian Australia) — a comparison that, whatever its merits, is calibrated to land hard with conference delegates.

The broader context here is a pattern anyone who followed the Rudd-era Resource Super Profits Tax will recognise: a resource tax that looks solid on paper but is systematically hollowed out by concessions, offsets, and transfer-pricing arrangements until the revenue base is a fraction of what was promised. The PRRT taxes upstream gas, not the export product, so LNG projects can structure their affairs so the profit crystallises downstream — beyond the tax base. That is not a loophole you can close with a rates tweak; it is an architectural mismatch. The ACTU's export levy sidesteps the problem by taxing the volume leaving the country, not the profit declared on it.

Whether a platform pledge translates into government action is another matter. Platform commitments are not binding on cabinet. Albanese's April ruling-out was explicit about existing projects, and the gas industry's lobbyists will treat the conference vote as the opening bid in a longer negotiation, not the final word. But the internal dynamics are worth watching: the ACTU is pushing hard, the parliamentary party's own senators have signed onto the substance, and the crossbench is circling. The PM's modelling request suggests the door isn't as firmly shut as his public ruling implied. For a government that has managed its left flank through three years of careful centrism, a conference vote in favour of a 25% gas export tax is a genuine internal test — not of whether the policy will be implemented this term, but of whether the platform language is broad enough to satisfy the unions without committing the cabinet to anything it doesn't want to do.