Originally published by Rebecca Le May
of The West Australian.
10.08.2026
Australia has missed out on a huge amount of investment thanks to “increasingly hostile” government policies that have forced the resources sector into “decline”, new research claims.
According to the Institute of Public Affairs, private business investment as a share of gross domestic product was 11.75 per cent at the end of last year, down from a 2012 peak of 17.6 per cent.
The conservative thinktank’s modelling suggests a whopping $688 billion would have flowed in between 2015 and 2025, had such investment remained at the benchmark levels of the prior decade.
Commodity prices and investor appetite for new resources projects had remained strong – but the big end of town had looked to more welcoming jurisdictions, the IPA said in its “Losing its Lustre” report, blaming 11 factors and both State and Federal governments.
Research fellow Cian Hussey said all of the factors gave a perception of sovereign risk, taking aim at Australia’s carbon emissions target.
“The sooner the pretence of net zero is given up, the better,” Mr Hussey told The West Australian.
“If you accept that total carbon emissions are driving adverse impact, then really we need to look at China, India, the US.
“Australia is around one per cent of global emissions.
“It’s a very expensive virtue signal because we can’t do anything tangible.”
Topically, he turned to Japan’s former ambassador to Australia, Shingo Yamagami, who in 2023 backed up concerns of Inpex chief executive Takayuki Ueda that the Albanese Government had “quietly quit” the global gas trade through market interventions.
“Japan is absolutely reliant on us to be a stable trading partner, and they’ve made some massive investments,” Mr Hussey said.
“It terrifies them this thought that we won’t be producing oil and gas for them to use.”
Other solutions the report offers include binning laws that allow environmentalists to challenge Ministerial approval of resources projects.
Mr Hussey said research showed 94 per cent of cases had not led to substantial changes to a project’s originally approved conditions and were deliberately vexatious “lawfare”, aiming to “disrupt and delay”.
“Most of the time, the end result is that the judges and the court’s time has been tied up. The project proponents’ time has been tied up, and the outcome is the exact same,” he said.
While it is common for groups lobbying for corporate interests to blast “red tape”, Mr Hussey elaborated, saying all-too-frequent compliance reporting obligations should be replaced with an exception-based system, with heftier penalties for wilful breaches.
“Rather than filing a report that says ‘we have done nothing wrong’, which is a waste of everyone’s time, they should just file a report if there’s ever a breach of their project conditions,” he said.
“Then the department could do spot checks or random site visits … to make sure that nothing is amiss.”
Mr Hussey said Australians would eventually “wake up to the tremendous cost of not allowing these major resource investments to go ahead”. And hopefully politicians would follow.
“The world absolutely needs our coal, gas, iron ore, uranium, gold, zinc, copper and lithium. Everything that we’ve got,” he said.
“We’re just tying ourselves up in knots and and robbing ourselves of future prosperity.”
