Eight documented policy failures across Coalition and Labor governments. A fact-checkable assessment of what they cost Australian taxpayers — and what the Future Fund could have been.
Every figure on this page is sourced from official Australian government bodies — the ATO, the Parliamentary Budget Office, the Australian National Audit Office, Royal Commissions and Senate inquiry testimony — or from recognised independent research institutions. All sources are named and verifiable. Failures are documented across both Coalition and Labor governments.
Australia is one of the world's largest LNG exporters — at times surpassing Qatar in volume. Yet it captures a fraction of the resource revenue that peer nations collect. The gap between what Australia receives and what comparable countries earn on the same resource represents the largest sustained wealth transfer in Australian history.
Research by the Australia Institute (2024) found that 56% of all gas exported from Australia attracts zero royalty payments. This includes all gas exported from the Northern Territory and four of five major LNG facilities in Western Australia — Chevron's Gorgon and Wheatstone, Shell's Prelude, Woodside's Pluto, and Inpex's Ichthys. Over the four years to May 2024, multinational companies made $149 billion exporting this royalty-free gas. Australia Institute, May 2024
The Petroleum Resource Rent Tax was designed to capture resource rents from offshore gas. It has not performed. In 2024–25, the federal government received just $1.42 billion in PRRT from the 70% of LNG production it oversees — while Queensland collected $1.69 billion in royalties from the remaining 30%. The federal offshore effective rate amounts to just 3.2% of export value, versus Queensland's 8.8%. The government's own 2023 Budget Papers confirmed: "To date, not a single LNG project has paid any PRRT and many are not expected to pay significant amounts of PRRT until the 2030s." IEEFA, May 2026
Japanese company INPEX — which exports more gas each year than NSW, Victoria and South Australia combined consume — paid no royalties, no PRRT, and no corporate tax on $21 billion in gas exports between 2015 and 2025. It is hard to make money when Australia gives you the gas for free. Australia Institute, March 2026
Beyond foregone revenue, LNG exports have imposed direct costs on Australians. Since Queensland LNG exports commenced in 2015, domestic wholesale east coast gas prices have tripled. Residential gas costs increased by an estimated $2 billion when prices peaked in FY2022–23. Manufacturers report paying nearly 50% more for gas in 2025 than they did in 2019. IEEFA Australia, October 2025
A Senate Select Committee on the Taxation of Gas Resources was constituted in March 2026 and is actively examining these issues. Despite this, Prime Minister Albanese has pledged no new gas export taxes in the 2026 federal budget.
The mining super-profits tax saga is one of Australia's most studied policy failures. The Henry Tax Review recommended a Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT) levied at 40% across all extractive industries, projected to raise $49.5 billion over five years.
Mining companies — led by BHP, Rio Tinto and Fortescue — spent an estimated $22 million on advertising and lobbying in just the six weeks that contributed to Kevin Rudd's removal as Prime Minister in June 2010. Incoming PM Gillard struck a deal directly with the three largest miners, replacing the RSPT with the watered-down Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) — a tax those same companies helped design.
The tax was so weakly designed that BHP, Rio Tinto and Xstrata — expected to contribute over $1 billion in the first year alone — had zero liability. The MRRT was repealed by the Abbott government in 2014, having effectively served as a revenue-free compliance exercise.
The Parliamentary Budget Office estimated in 2023 that had the original RSPT been implemented, it would have raised a net $33.2 billion in additional fiscal revenue between 2012 and 2020. PBO, Lost Revenue from the Original Mining Tax, 2023
Australia has long struggled to ensure large multinational corporations pay tax proportional to profits earned here. Primary avoidance tactics include profit-shifting through Ireland ($37.26B in related-party expenditures, 2016–2021) and the Netherlands ($43.49B), transfer pricing manipulation, and tax haven holding structures. Tax Justice Network Australia / CICTAR, 2024
The Tax Avoidance Taskforce, established in 2016 with $679M in funding, has been a genuine success: it secured $25.1 billion in additional tax revenue from 2016 to 2025. But its success equally illustrates the scale of what was being missed before it existed — and what continues to be missed by companies outside its scope. ATO Taskforce Highlights, 2025
In 2013, PwC partner Peter Collins was engaged by Treasury to help draft Australia's Multinational Anti-Avoidance Law. He secretly shared confidential Treasury information with at least 53 PwC partners and used it to help at least 14 companies — including Google, Uber and Facebook — restructure before the law came into effect. The ATO estimated this would have cost $180 million annually in lost revenue. No individual has been criminally charged. Wikipedia: PwC Tax Scandal, 2026
The National Disability Insurance Scheme is a landmark reform providing vital support to hundreds of thousands of Australians with disability. But systemic governance failures in its design and implementation have allowed extraordinary levels of financial leakage.
A parliamentary inquiry heard in May 2026 that losses to "integrity leakage" — fraud, billing errors and non-compliance — amount to approximately 8.3% of the NDIS's total annual expenditure. With the scheme costing $52 billion in the current financial year, this translates to roughly $3.7 billion per year in misused or fraudulently claimed funds. NDIA official John Dardo, parliamentary inquiry testimony, May 2026
The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission found much of the outright fraud is being perpetrated by "a significant number of high-end organised crime groups" based in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and South America. ACIC, parliamentary testimony, May 2026
The NDIA official told the inquiry: "The scheme was deployed in a rush. Entry standards were quite low. Claims were largely being paid in an unverified setting. The resourcing for integrity work was not commensurate with the level of funding being paid."
The independent e61 Institute described the NDIS as sitting between "not a functioning market, and not an actively managed insurance scheme — getting the discipline of neither." Competition among providers is almost non-existent, removing incentives to lower prices or improve quality for participants.
From July 2015 to November 2019, the Department of Human Services ran an automated debt-recovery scheme that raised $1.73 billion in unlawful debts against more than 400,000 Australians — many among the most vulnerable members of society. The scheme used averaged annual income data to calculate debt, which bore no relationship to the fortnightly income tests that actually govern welfare eligibility.
Internal legal advice obtained before the scheme commenced warned it did not comply with legislation. This advice was concealed. The Royal Commission found that when a Treasury lawyer received an unfavourable draft legal opinion, she simply left it as a draft and did not act on it. Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, July 2023
Multiple deaths by suicide were linked to the receipt of Robodebt notices. The Royal Commission's 2023 report described the scheme as "a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal. People were traumatised on the off chance they might owe money. Robodebt was a costly failure of public administration, in both human and economic terms."
No individual has been criminally prosecuted. The Royal Commission referred six individuals to four separate agencies in a sealed section of its report. A pending further $475M settlement awaits Federal Court approval in mid-2026. Services Australia, May 2026
The National Broadband Network is Australia's most expensive single infrastructure project in history. Its failure is bipartisan — but the costliest decisions were made when the Abbott/Turnbull Coalition government scrapped a fibre-to-the-premises rollout in favour of using ageing copper telephone lines for the "last mile."
Malcolm Turnbull, as Communications Minister, promised the project would cost $29.5 billion and be completed by 2016. Neither was true. The final cost reached $51 billion; the completion date became 2020; and minimum speeds fell from 100 Mbit/s to 25 Mbit/s under the copper-based design. Wikipedia: National Broadband Network
Australia is now spending further billions upgrading the copper-based network back to fibre — work that could have been done once, at lower cost, in the original Rudd-era build. The political decision to use copper was driven partly by a desire to differentiate from Labor and concerns about Telstra's commercial interests, not network merit.
The Community Sport Infrastructure Grant Program was established in 2018 with $102.5 million in funding, intended to fund community sporting facilities on merit. The Australian National Audit Office found in January 2020 that grant decisions systematically overrode independent merit assessments to favour Coalition-held and target marginal electorates ahead of the 2019 federal election.
41% of approved projects were not on Sport Australia's merit-assessed recommendation list
70% of approved projects overrode the independent merit process entirely
73% of approved projects had not been initially recommended by Sport Australia
The Car Park Rorts ($389M) and Community Development Grants revealed the same systematic override of merit-based assessment across multiple programs
Sports Minister Bridget McKenzie resigned after it emerged she had undeclared conflicts of interest involving gun clubs that received grants. The ANAO found the Minister's office ran a parallel assessment using colour-coded electoral spreadsheets. The process was described by former Liberal leader John Hewson as "even worse" than the original 1993 sports rorts affair. ANAO, January 2020 Wikipedia: Sports Rorts Affair (2020)
Each foregone dollar below is compounded from its year of policy failure to May 2026. The Future Fund's actual 10-year annualised return to March 2025 was 7.5%, beating its 6.9% mandate target. Adjust the slider to explore scenarios.
Australia's tax treatment of investment property is among the most generous in the developed world. Together, negative gearing (allowing investment losses to be offset against all other income) and the 50% Capital Gains Tax discount for assets held over 12 months represent an enormous structural tax expenditure — one whose benefits flow overwhelmingly to high-income earners.
More than 80% of those benefits flow to the top income quintile of earners. The 50% CGT discount was introduced by the Howard government in 1999 to replace an inflation-indexing regime. Critics note it has substantially over-compensated investors beyond what pure inflation adjustment would have justified — particularly during the sustained period of rapidly rising property prices. PBO, July 2024
Note: Negative gearing and CGT reform are politically contested, with ongoing debate about their effects on housing supply. They are listed here for completeness as a structural tax expenditure, and are not included in the main Future Fund calculator, which focuses on more directly measurable policy failures and foregone revenues.
This analysis is designed to be independently fact-checked. Where estimates involve modelling assumptions, those assumptions are stated explicitly. All primary sources are official government documents, statutory authority publications, or peer-reviewed / independent research institutions.