What Australia Charges For Its Resources

Eight jurisdictions, eight different royalty regimes, on the same minerals. The current rates, what each actually collects and from which commodity, why no state raises them, what the sector pays in company tax on top, why native title negotiation takes years, and what Traditional Owners are entitled to in each jurisdiction.

1. Who owns the ground

Minerals in Australia belong to the Crown in right of the state or territory in which they sit. Not to the landholder above them, not to the Commonwealth, and not to the company that finds them. A mining company buys the right to extract and sell — and the royalty is the price of that right. It is a payment for an asset, which is why it is charged whether or not the mine makes a profit.

The Commonwealth owns the resources beyond the three-nautical-mile coastal limit. That has been settled since the Seas and Submerged Lands Act 1973, with collection running through the Offshore Petroleum (Royalty) Act 2006 and the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax. The North West Shelf sits off Western Australia and pays Canberra.

The Northern Territory levies and keeps its own royalties under the Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act 1978. Its Treasury states the position plainly: minerals in the NT are owned by the people of the NT. Royalties are typically the Territory's largest single source of own-source revenue.

Two exceptions run the other way. Uranium recovered in the Northern Territory is charged a Commonwealth royalty under the Uranium Royalty (Northern Territory) Act 2009, which applies the NT's own royalty legislation as a law of the Commonwealth. And royalty equivalents for mining on Aboriginal land in the NT are credited by the Commonwealth to the Aboriginals Benefit Account rather than paid to the Territory.

2. What each jurisdiction charges

Most Australian royalties are ad valorem — a percentage of the value of the mineral, with the percentage set by how much processing was done before it was sold. The more refined the product, the lower the rate. That structure is deliberate: it prices the raw export higher than the processed one, and rewards value added onshore.

Every rate above is drawn from the responsible revenue or resources authority in the jurisdiction that sets it. Rates for most jurisdictions sit in regulations rather than in the principal Act, and can therefore change without a bill.

3. What it actually collects

Australian states and territories are forecast to receive more than $73 billion in mining royalties across the four years from 2024–25 to 2027–28, an average of $18.4 billion a year. That is approximately 4.3 per cent of general government revenue across all states and territories combined. Coal, oil and gas account for over $38 billion of the four-year total — just over half. The largest single mineral contributor is Western Australian iron ore, forecast at close to $24 billion over the same period.

3.1 What the figures show

The base is concentrated. Two commodities in two states — Western Australian iron ore and Queensland coal — account for the majority of all royalty revenue collected in Australia. New South Wales is coal at roughly nine-tenths of its royalty base. Western Australia is iron ore at three-quarters of its own. Each of the three largest collectors depends on a single commodity.

The revenue is volatile. Queensland's total royalty take fell 37.5 per cent in a single year. Western Australian iron ore royalties are forecast to fall by roughly a third between 2023–24 and 2025–26. These movements are driven by price, not by policy, and they are larger than the entire annual royalty revenue of most other jurisdictions.

Dependence does not track size. The Northern Territory collects the least of the mining jurisdictions in dollar terms and is the most exposed in proportional terms, with royalties supplying nearly a quarter of the revenue it raises itself.

The Commonwealth's own resource revenue is small. The Petroleum Resource Rent Tax raises approximately $1.5 billion a year, against $18.4 billion a year collected by the states and territories. It is less than a quarter of what Western Australia alone receives from iron ore, and it is levied on one of the largest liquefied natural gas export industries in the world.

4. Company tax, and the total take

Royalty is not the only payment a mining operation makes. It is charged on the value of what is extracted, whether or not the operation makes a profit. Company income tax is charged at 30 per cent on the profit that remains after royalties, operating costs, depreciation and interest. Offshore petroleum projects also pay the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax. Any accounting of what Australia receives for its ore has to include all three.

Commodity prices fell 13.4 per cent across 2023–24. Company tax fell almost twice as fast as royalty, because profit falls faster than value when costs are rising. On the Australian Taxation Office's broader mining-sector definition, which covers a wider population of companies, company tax was $38.1 billion and the combined figure approximately $65 billion. The combined take is estimated to fall to $48.9 billion in 2024–25.

4.1 How much of the tax base this is

Mining is Australia's largest taxpayer by industry. In 2023–24 it paid more company tax than every other sector of the economy combined, for the third consecutive year, on the Australian Taxation Office's own assessment. Minerals sector company tax was 22.6 per cent of all company tax paid in Australia, down from 27.5 per cent the year before, and 38.5 per cent of tax payable by large and international businesses.

Both figures move with profit, and profit moves with price. Company tax from the sector fell by nearly a quarter in a single year on a 13.4 per cent price decline. Royalty, charged on value rather than profit, fell by less — 14.6 per cent over the same period. The two instruments behave differently in a downturn, and that difference is the argument for having both.

4.3 The last ten years

Royalties and company tax from the minerals sector, by year, from 2014–15 to 2023–24. Royalty is collected by the states and territories; company tax by the Commonwealth.

Over the decade the sector paid $167.1 billion in royalties and $227.5 billion in company tax — $394.6 billion in total. The series more than quadrupled from $15.5 billion in 2014–15 to a peak of $74.0 billion in 2022–23, then fell to $59.4 billion.

Three things are visible in the shape of it. Company tax was the smaller of the two payments until 2016–17 and has been the larger in every year since. The peak year, 2022–23, was driven by coal: Queensland's royalties alone reached $14.9 billion that year, against $11.0 billion for Western Australia. And the fall in 2023–24 was steeper on the tax side than the royalty side — company tax down 23.5 per cent, royalty down 14.6 per cent — because profit falls faster than value when costs are rising.

A subsequent EY-Parthenon report covering 2015–16 to 2024–25 revises the 2023–24 company tax figure upward to $36.9 billion on actual rather than estimated data, taking that year's combined total to $63.8 billion and the ten-year total on that window to $432 billion. The chart above is left on the earlier series because it is the only complete year-by-year set published; the revision affects the final bar, not the shape.

4.2 A distinction worth keeping

Industry totals are usually published as a single figure — $59.4 billion in “tax and royalty payments”. The two components are not the same kind of payment and combining them obscures what is being measured.

Company tax is a tax on profit, paid by every profitable business in the country. Royalty is the price of an asset the public already owns, paid for the right to extract and sell it. Every Australian treasury treats it that way. A shopkeeper pays company tax on profit; a shopkeeper does not also pay the Crown for the stock, because the stock was bought. A miner pays for the ore through the royalty because the ore was never theirs.

This matters for any argument about the rate. A claim that the sector already pays $59.4 billion in tax counts the purchase price of the minerals as though it were a tax on income. The correct comparison for a royalty is what a resource owner charges for a resource, not what a taxpayer pays on profit.

5. Two structures, and the one that captures a boom

An ad valorem royalty rises with price automatically — 7.5% of a higher value is a bigger number. What it does not do is rise as a share. Iron ore at $220 a tonne pays the same 7.5% it paid at $80. The windfall above the long-run price goes to the shareholder, not to the owner of the resource.

Queensland is the only jurisdiction that has fixed this. Its coal tiers are marginal, so each rate applies only to the slice of value inside its band — the 40% rate touches only the portion above $300 a tonne, not the whole price. In 2022–23, at peak coal prices, that structure produced a record $15.36 billion in coal royalties. As prices fell it fell with them, to an estimated $5.49 billion in 2024–25.

That behaviour is the argument for the design, and also the answer to the campaign against it. Industry has consistently described Queensland as a 40% royalty state. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis calculated the actual average rate on Queensland coal prices in 2024 at about 20%, and coal sold below $150 a tonne is taxed exactly as it was before 2022. A tiered structure is not a high rate. It is a rate that only becomes high when the price does.

A profit-based royalty — the NT's old scheme, and the PRRT — behaves differently again. It taxes what is left after deductions, which means it collects nothing from a project reporting no profit, however much it ships. The PRRT has raised very little from Australian LNG for that reason. The Northern Territory moved off profit-based to ad valorem in 2024 precisely because the profit calculation proved complex and deductible.

6. Why no state raises its rate

The structural reason sits in Commonwealth-state financial relations, not in state politics.

Australia distributes GST through horizontal fiscal equalisation, which adjusts each state's share according to its capacity to raise its own revenue. A state that increases its mining royalties is assessed as having greater capacity, and its GST share falls accordingly. The state raises the royalty; the Commonwealth Grants Commission takes back a large part of the gain.

The effect is that a state government contemplating a royalty increase faces the full political cost of the fight with the industry and keeps only a fraction of the revenue. This is the single largest disincentive in the system, and it applies to every state — which is why royalty rates have barely moved in decades while commodity prices have moved several hundred per cent.

Any serious attempt to have Australia charge more for its resources has to deal with this first. Rates are downstream of equalisation.

7. The eight-regime problem

The same iron ore, the same lithium and the same gold attract different rates, different valuation rules, different deduction rules and different reporting cycles depending on which side of a line they were dug up on. There is no national framework and no shared definition of value.

The consequences run in both directions. Companies carry eight sets of compliance. Jurisdictions compete on rate to attract projects, which pushes rates down over time — South Australia's 2% new mine rate is an explicit example of exactly that competition. And no jurisdiction can move alone without being told that capital will go to the next one.

Two jurisdictions already price processing directly, by different means. The Northern Territory sets the rate by processing depth, so a more refined export attracts a lower rate. Tasmania reaches the same result through a rebate — 20 per cent off the royalty for metal produced within the state, expressly unavailable where the treatment produces only a concentrate for sale. Both make raw export more expensive than finished product on every shipment.

The Northern Territory's 2024 redesign is the most useful precedent available. It replaced a complex profit calculation with a simple value-based ladder, and it set the rate by processing depth: the less refined the export, the higher the charge. That single feature does more for downstream processing than any grant program, because it prices the raw export against the finished one on every shipment.

8. Traditional Owners — what the law actually provides

Native title does not include minerals. They remain the property of the Crown everywhere in Australia, including on land held under native title and on Aboriginal freehold. Whatever a Traditional Owner group receives from a mine, it does not receive it as the owner of the resource.

The Native Title Act 1993 instead provides a right to negotiate over the grant of mining tenements. Agreements reached under it — commonly Indigenous Land Use Agreements — are legally binding, and typically cover cash payments, employment and contracting commitments, heritage protection and community infrastructure. Payments in negotiated agreements are commonly reported in the range of 0.5% to 2% of gross revenue, though the agreements are confidential and the range should be treated as indicative rather than established.

Two features of the Act shape every one of those negotiations.

The Tribunal cannot award a royalty. If the right-to-negotiate process fails and the matter goes to arbitration, the National Native Title Tribunal is expressly barred from determining a payment calculated on the value or volume of what is extracted. The fallback position for a native title party is therefore a determination that cannot contain a royalty at all — which sets the floor of every negotiation at zero on that measure.

The negotiation is usually funded by the company. Native title parties rarely have independent resources to run a multi-year negotiation against a major miner, and the funding that makes the negotiation possible generally comes from the other side of the table.

The process is slow. The Act sets a six-month minimum negotiation period before either party may apply to the Tribunal. Major agreements take years. Projects hold approved geology and unapproved access for the duration.

Heritage assessment runs a separate cycle. In Western Australia the governing law changed twice in three years: the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 was passed, commenced on 1 July 2023, and repealed on 15 November 2023, returning the state to an amended Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972. Compensation matters run longer again. The Yindjibarndi claim over tenements associated with Fortescue's Solomon Hub was filed in February 2022 and covers 2,462 square kilometres.

The cause is structural. A native title party cannot be awarded a payment based on extraction value at arbitration, and generally cannot fund its own negotiation. Time is the only leverage the statute leaves. Delay is the output of that design, not a departure from it.

The cost falls on all three parties. The company carries holding costs against a stranded approval. The state collects no royalty on ore that does not move. Agreements reached are confidential and unsecured — when Nathan River Resources entered administration in the Northern Territory, Traditional Owners and the Territory were both left as unpaid creditors, the Territory for approximately $9 million.

Statutory arrangements exist in two places and are worth naming because they are the exception rather than the rule. In the Northern Territory, royalty equivalents from mining on Aboriginal land are credited to the Aboriginals Benefit Account, with 30% legislated to flow to communities in areas affected by mining and at least 40% to land council administration. In South Australia, minerals under Aboriginal Lands Trust land remain Crown property, but the state has agreed to pay the Trust an amount equal to up to two-thirds of the royalties it receives from those lands.

Everywhere else, what a Traditional Owner group receives is whatever it was able to negotiate, from a bargaining position the statute itself limits.

8.1 What each jurisdiction provides

Three things are worth separating: a statutory share of the royalty the Crown receives, a consent or veto right over mining on Aboriginal-held land, and a negotiated agreement under the Native Title Act. Only the first is a royalty entitlement. The third is available everywhere and guarantees nothing.

Three different things are being separated here. A statutory share of the royalty the Crown receives exists in one jurisdiction. A consent right over mining on Aboriginal-held land exists in two, and in New South Wales it excludes the four commodities the state actually earns from. A negotiated agreement under the Native Title Act 1993 is available everywhere and guarantees nothing.

Western Australia is the outlier in both directions. It has the largest royalty base in the country and the least statutory provision — no share, and the only state without an Aboriginal land rights Act. Everything there rests on native title agreements and on heritage law that changed twice in three years.

Two jurisdictions out of eight direct any part of the royalty to Traditional Owners, and one of those two does it by agreement rather than by statute. In the remaining six, a Traditional Owner group's entire entitlement is what it can negotiate — from a position where arbitration cannot award it a payment based on what is extracted, and where the negotiation is generally funded by the company on the other side.

8.2 The agreements nobody can see

Outside the two statutory schemes, what a Traditional Owner group receives is set by private agreement with the company — most often an Indigenous Land Use Agreement made under the Native Title Act. As at 30 June 2025 more than 1,520 ILUAs sat on the national register, covering mining, conservation, township infrastructure and settlement of claims.

The register is a record that an agreement exists, not a record of what it says. The Native Title Registrar must enter the area covered, the name and contact address of each party, the period of operation, and any statement about extinguishment, future acts or contracting out of the right to negotiate. The commercial terms are not among them. There is no entry for what is paid, on what basis, to whom, or for how long.

A copy of the agreement itself can be sought only by applying — the Tribunal maintains a request form for the purpose — and the practical answer usually comes from the parties, who are bound by the confidentiality clause in the document being requested.

Three consequences follow, and they are the reason there is no national figure in section 9.2.

• No community can compare its agreement with the one signed over the next tenement.
• No parliament can assess whether the arrangements are adequate, because it cannot read them.
• No researcher can produce a national total, which is why every published figure for what Traditional Owners receive is an estimate built from the two jurisdictions that legislate a share.

Confidentiality is not the only restriction these agreements carry. The Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia, inquiring into the destruction of the Juukan Gorge rock shelters, was told that participation agreements commonly contain provisions preventing Traditional Owners from speaking publicly against a company's proposals. The Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples gave evidence that their agreement with Rio Tinto prevented them from objecting to the company's section 18 application over the shelters, or from seeking an emergency injunction under Commonwealth heritage law.

The committee's final report, A Way Forward, tabled on 18 October 2021, recommended that such clauses be outlawed, and that every mining company independently review its agreements with Traditional Owners and remove any that restrict them. The National Native Title Council put a related point to the same inquiry: the Native Title Act contains no requirement of free, prior and informed consent.

Read against section 8, the position is a closed loop. A group cannot be awarded a payment based on the value of what is extracted if the negotiation fails and goes to arbitration. It generally cannot fund its own negotiation. The agreement it signs is confidential, so no other group can see the benchmark. And in some agreements it has also given up the ability to object publicly to what follows.

8.3 What Traditional Owners receive — an estimate by jurisdiction

Value of production is derived from each jurisdiction's royalty revenue at section 3 divided by its effective royalty rate at section 2. The Northern Territory columns are not separable because the ABA credit is calculated on royalties from mining on Aboriginal land, which is also where most Territory agreements sit.

Two things follow, and they pull in opposite directions.

The statutory total is small and it is knowable: somewhere between $200 and $400 million a year, essentially all of it the Northern Territory's, against $26.9 billion of royalty and roughly $61 billion of total public take. That is the figure behind the under-one-per-cent statement at section 9.

The negotiated total may be several times larger, and nobody can say by how much. If the upper end of the range is right, Traditional Owners receive around $3 billion a year and the public record contains no evidence of it. If the lower end is right, they receive less than the Commonwealth collects from the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax. Both statements are consistent with everything that is published, which is the finding of this section rather than a qualification of it.

Where a figure is quoted in this memo or in Memo 4 as the current Traditional Owner share, it is the statutory column. The negotiated column cannot be quoted, because it cannot be verified.

9. Summary — the total take, and who receives it

Three instruments collect from the extraction of Australian ore. Company income tax is charged on profit and goes to the Commonwealth. Royalty is charged on the value of what is extracted and goes to the state or territory that owns the mineral. The Petroleum Resource Rent Tax is charged on offshore petroleum profit and goes to the Commonwealth. Set out together, on the minerals sector for 2023–24:

On the Australian Taxation Office's broader mining-sector definition, company tax is $38.1 billion rather than $32.5 billion, which puts the total at approximately $66.5 billion and the Commonwealth share at 59.5 per cent. The two definitions cover different populations of companies and should not be mixed within a single calculation.

9.1 Why the two instruments sit where they do

The division is not arbitrary and it is not a policy choice made recently. It follows from ownership. The states and territories own the minerals, so they charge for them — a price on value, payable whether or not the operation profits. The Commonwealth does not own the onshore resource, so it taxes the income earned from extracting it, as it taxes the income of every other business. Offshore, where the Commonwealth does own the resource, it charges both.

The two instruments behave differently. Royalty is charged on value and is not affected by how a company is structured. Company tax is charged on profit and moves with it. In 2023–24 company tax from the sector fell 23.5 per cent while royalty fell 14.6 per cent.

9.2 The Traditional Owner share

There is no national Traditional Owner share and no figure that can be stated for Australia as a whole. Section 8.1 sets out why: two jurisdictions of eight direct any part of the royalty to Traditional Owners, and one of those does it by agreement rather than statute.

The only sizeable statutory stream is the Aboriginals Benefit Account, which covers mining on Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory alone. In 2018–19, the most recent year for which a clean figure is available, the Commonwealth credited $426.05 million to the account and $208.31 million was debited from it. That is a Northern Territory figure from a different year and is not directly comparable to the 2023–24 totals above, but the order of magnitude is the point: against a national take of around $60 billion, the statutory Traditional Owner share is a fraction of one per cent, and more than half of what was credited in that year was not distributed.

Everywhere outside the Northern Territory and the South Australian Aboriginal Lands Trust arrangement, the share is whatever was negotiated, under confidentiality, from the bargaining position described in section 8.

9.3 Against revenue and profit

A take of $61 billion means little without the figures it is taken from. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports the mining industry's sales and service income for 2023–24 at approximately $492 billion, and operating profit before tax at approximately $172 billion, after a fall of around 28 per cent from the previous year as coal, LNG and spodumene prices came off their peaks.

Royalty is an operating cost, deducted before profit is calculated. So the sequence runs:

On those figures the total public take is approximately 12 per cent of what the industry sells, and approximately 31 per cent of what it earns before royalty and income tax. Royalty alone is about 5.5 per cent of sales, which is consistent with the ad valorem rates in section 2 sitting between 1.9 and 7.5 per cent depending on commodity and processing.

Two cautions attach to the arithmetic. The revenue and profit figures are Australian Bureau of Statistics data for the mining industry, which includes oil and gas extraction and mining support services; the royalty and company tax figures are for the minerals sector on a narrower definition. The populations are not identical and the percentages should be read as indicative rather than exact. Second, company tax of $32.5 billion against pre-tax profit of $172 billion is below the 30 per cent statutory rate. Part of that gap is the same definitional mismatch, and part reflects ordinary features of the tax system — foreign income tax offsets on income taxed overseas, carried-forward losses, and timing differences between accounting and taxable profit. It is stated here because the figures invite the question, not as a finding about any company.

9.4 The position in one line

The industry sells around $492 billion of Australian ore and gas a year. Approximately $61 billion of that is collected in royalty and tax — about 12 per cent of sales, and about 31 per cent of earnings before royalty and income tax. Of the $61 billion, around 56 per cent goes to the Commonwealth, around 44 per cent to the states and territories, and under 1 per cent to Traditional Owners through statutory entitlements, with an unmeasurable amount additional to that under confidential agreement.

10. The legislation

Every instrument that sets, imposes, administers or distributes a resource royalty in Australia. Royalty rates for most jurisdictions sit in regulations rather than the principal Act, which is why rates can change without a bill.

10.1 Commonwealth

10.2 States and territories

11. Sources

1. Australian Government, Seas and Submerged Lands Act 1973 — Commonwealth sovereignty over the seabed beyond the three-nautical-mile coastal waters limit; the basis of federal ownership offshore.
2. Australian Government, Offshore Petroleum (Royalty) Act 2006 and Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act 2006 — royalty imposed on offshore petroleum including the North West Shelf; the titles and licensing framework that replaced the Petroleum (Submerged Lands) Act 1967.
3. Australian Government, Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act 1978 — the Territory's power to levy and retain its own royalties, subject to Commonwealth reservations including uranium.
4. Australian Government, Uranium Royalty (Northern Territory) Act 2009 — the Commonwealth royalty on uranium and other designated substances recovered in the NT, imposed by applying the NT Mineral Royalty Act 1982 as a law of the Commonwealth.
5. Northern Territory Department of Treasury and Finance, Mineral Royalties Act 2024 — the ad valorem scheme from 1 July 2024; the four processing categories and their rates; grandfathering of mines in production during 2023 under the Mineral Royalty Act 1982; and the statement that minerals in the NT are owned by the people of the NT.
6. RevenueWA and the Western Australian Department of Mines, Petroleum and Exploration, Mining (Royalties) Regulations 2025 — rates for production from 1 July 2025 to 30 June 2030; the three processing bands; the 2.5 per cent gold rate; State Agreement Act variations; and the published Reserve Bank quarterly rates used to convert shipments and deductions.
7. Queensland Revenue Office, Mineral Resources (Royalty) Regulation 2025 — the six marginal coal tiers to 40 per cent above $300 a tonne, and the 2.5 per cent default rate for minerals with no specified rate.
8. Queensland Government, Progressive Coal Royalties Protection (Keep it in the Bank) Act 2024 — the requirement for parliamentary approval before any reduction in coal royalty rates.
9. NSW Resources — coal royalty rates by mining method from 1 July 2024 (open cut 10.8 per cent, underground 9.8 per cent, deep underground 8.8 per cent), petroleum at 10 per cent, most minerals at 4 per cent; and 2024–25 royalty revenue of approximately $2.95 billion from coal and $250 million from all minerals and petroleum.
10. South Australia Department for Energy and Mining, Mining Act 1971 sections 17 and 17A — the 3.5 per cent standard rate and the 2.0 per cent new mine rate, its five-year and ten-return limits, and its exclusion for extractive minerals.
11. Resources Victoria, royalty information sheets under the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) (Mineral Industries) Regulations 2019 — the 2.75 per cent rate on net market value for all minerals other than lignite; the gold royalty from 1 January 2020 and its 2,500-ounce annual threshold; and the definition of net market value as value at first arm's-length sale less directly incurred selling costs.
12. Mineral Resources Tasmania and the Tasmanian Department of State Growth, Mineral Resources Regulations 2016 regulation 7 — the 1.9 per cent net sales base plus profit component, the 5.35 per cent maximum, the 20 per cent rebate for metal produced in the state (10 per cent for gold doré) and its exclusion for concentrate, and quarterly payment within 30 days of quarter end.
13. Queensland Treasury, mid-year fiscal and economic review 2024–25 and budget papers — total royalty revenue of $7.98 billion in 2024–25, a fall of $4.79 billion or 37.5 per cent; record coal royalties of $15.36 billion in 2022–23; and petroleum and gas royalties of $1.19 billion in 2021–22.
14. Western Australian Budget, Economic and Fiscal Outlook, and the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia — iron ore at 83 per cent of royalty income in 2022–23 and around 75 per cent thereafter; the 2022–23 composition of $9.2 billion iron ore, $1.3 billion North West Shelf grants, $910 million lithium and $469 million gold; and the iron ore royalty forecast path to 2028–29.
15. Northern Territory Budget 2025–26 — mineral royalties of $388 million, equal to 23.2 per cent of Territory own-source revenue.
16. Centre for Independent Studies, Riches from Royalties: How Australia's states and territories depend on mining (2025) — the four-year royalty forecast exceeding $73 billion, the $18.4 billion annual average, the 4.3 per cent share of general government revenue, and Petroleum Resource Rent Tax revenue drawn from Commonwealth Final Budget Outcome reports.
17. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Industry 2023–24 (cat. 8155.0) — mining industry sales and service income of approximately $492 billion, operating profit before tax after a fall of $66.7 billion or 27.4 per cent, industry value added of $312.2 billion, and employment of 235,000 at June 2024; cited in section 9.3.
18. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Business Indicators, Australia — the further 19.1 per cent fall in mining operating profits in 2024–25; cited in section 9.3.
19. EY for the Minerals Council of Australia, Royalty and Company Tax Payments (20 May 2025), Tables 1, 2 and 3 — the year-by-year royalty and net company tax series charted at section 4.3; royalty by state and territory 2013–14 to 2023–24; gross and net company tax, the difference being research and development, franking and foreign income tax offsets. A later EY-Parthenon edition covering 2015–16 to 2024–25 revises 2023–24 company tax to $36.9 billion on actual data, the year total to $63.8 billion and the ten-year total on that window to $432 billion; noted at section 4.3.
20. EY-Parthenon for the Minerals Council of Australia, Royalty and Company Tax Payments (2024 and 2025 editions) — minerals sector company tax of $32.5 billion and royalties of $26.9 billion in 2023–24; the fall from $42.5 billion company tax and $31.5 billion royalties in 2022–23; the decade totals of $227.5 billion and $167.1 billion; the sector's 22.6 per cent share of all company tax and 38.5 per cent share of tax payable by large and international businesses; and the estimate of $48.9 billion for 2024–25. Cited in section 4.
21. Australian Taxation Office, Corporate Tax Transparency Report 2023–24 — mining sector company tax of $38.1 billion, and the finding that the sector paid more company tax than all other sectors combined for the third consecutive year; cited in sections 4 and 4.1.
22. Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (2025) — the average effective royalty rate on Queensland coal prices in 2024 of approximately 20 per cent against the 40 per cent top tier, and the observation that coal below $150 a tonne is taxed as it was before 2022.
23. Australian Government, Native Title Act 1993 — the right to negotiate over future acts; the six-month minimum negotiation period; and section 38(2), which bars the National Native Title Tribunal from determining a payment worked out by reference to the amount or value of minerals produced.
24. New South Wales Government, Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983, and NSW Resources guidance — the requirement for Aboriginal Land Council consent to exploration and mining on vested land for minerals other than gold, silver, coal and petroleum; cited in section 7.1.
25. South Australia Department for Energy and Mining, Aboriginal Lands Trust Act 2013, Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Land Rights Act 1981 and Maralinga Tjarutja Land Rights Act 1984 — the agreement to pay the Trust up to two-thirds of royalties received from Trust lands, the APY Executive Board's 120-day decision period, and the right of traditional owners to seek compensation for disturbance; cited in sections 7 and 7.1.
26. Queensland Government, Aboriginal Land Act 1991 and Torres Strait Islander Land Act 1991; Victorian Government, Traditional Owner Settlement Act 2010; Tasmanian Government, Aboriginal Lands Act 1995 — land-granting regimes that reserve minerals to the Crown and confer no royalty entitlement; cited in section 7.1.
27. Australian Government, Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, and the National Indigenous Australians Agency — the Aboriginals Benefit Account; the 30 per cent directed to areas affected by mining and the minimum 40 per cent to land council administration.
28. Western Australian Government, Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 and the repealing legislation of 2023 — commencement on 1 July 2023 and repeal on 15 November 2023, returning the state to an amended Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972.
29. Australian Government, Minerals Resource Rent Tax Act 2012 and Minerals Resource Rent Tax Repeal and Other Measures Act 2014 — the crediting of state royalties against the federal tax, and the repeal that followed.
30. National Electricity Law (South Australia) and the application Acts of the participating jurisdictions — the applied-law model proposed in section 8, under which one law is drafted once and applied as law in each jurisdiction with a single national regulator.
31. National Native Title Tribunal, Register of Indigenous Land Use Agreements and About Indigenous Land Use Agreements — the matters the Registrar must enter on the register (area, parties and contact address, period of operation, and any statement on extinguishment, future acts or contracting out of the right to negotiate), the absence of any commercial term among them, and the request-form process for obtaining a copy of an agreement; cited in section 8.2.
32. Federal Court of Australia, Report of the National Native Title Tribunal — more than 1,520 Indigenous Land Use Agreements on the national register as at 30 June 2025; cited in section 8.2.
33. Joint Standing Committee on Northern Australia, A Way Forward: Final report into the destruction of Indigenous heritage sites at Juukan Gorge (18 October 2021) — the recommendation that confidentiality or "gag" clauses preventing Traditional Owners from speaking publicly be outlawed, and that every mining company independently review its agreements and remove such restrictions; the evidence of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura peoples that their agreement prevented them objecting to the section 18 application or seeking an emergency injunction under Commonwealth heritage law; and the National Native Title Council's evidence that the Native Title Act contains no free, prior and informed consent requirement. Cited in section 8.2.