There’s a haul truck idling somewhere in the Pilbara as you read this. A machine taller than a house, burning diesel by the hundreds of litres an hour. A portion of what it burns is paid for by a nurse in Geraldton, a teacher in Fairfield, and a pensioner in Launceston. They have never seen the pit and never will. None was asked what they thought. The arrangement is so old and so quiet that it has stopped looking like a decision at all. Which is precisely the condition under which the largest transfers of public wealth are made, not by argument won in the open but by a habit nobody can quite remember forming.
And now the people who benefit from the habit have decided you are the problem.
The Minerals Council of Australia has launched a campaign, “Hands Off Our Fuel”, to keep the Fuel Tax Credit Scheme exactly as it is – which is to say, generous beyond almost any comparable arrangement on the planet. Its CEO has been on the airwaves defending regional jobs and the cost of a weekly shop with the slightly wounded air of an industry that has only ever wanted to help, branding anyone who asks whether the scheme might be reformed as ill-informed, misconceived, and noisy. Urban activists with nothing better to do than attack the bush. The word “noisy” is the one to watch.
Australia taxes fuel. An excise sits on every litre, and the scheme hands that excise back to certain heavy users – mining trucks, agricultural machinery, and the industrial plant that runs off-road where, the argument goes, no public bitumen is worn and so no road tax should apply. The scale is hard to hold in the mind. Fossil fuel subsidies across Australian governments for 2025–26 come to an estimated $16.3 billion, and the single largest piece is this scheme, costing the federal budget near $10.8 billion in a single year — more than the $2.5 billion the government has set aside across five years to recover from the disasters the same fuel is helping to make worse.
Independent analysis puts iron ore and coal at the front of the queue, with a cumulative $37 billion flowing to mining by FY30 if nothing changes. Reckon it differently, and the whole edifice of fossil support runs to something near $30,000 a minute. A sum that would house a family is handed every sixty seconds to the people on the continent least in need of housing, and the meter never stops — not for the drought, not for the flood, not for the question you are about to be told is noise.
The Council insists none of it is a subsidy. The scheme, it says, corrects an unfair tax — a refund of what it calls a road levy on fuel that never touches a road. A subsidy means the government handing out money, and fuel tax credits do no such thing; they merely stop a business paying a tax it does not owe. You can see why it persuades. It takes a multi-billion-dollar transfer and re-clothes it as fairness, the giant relieved of a small injustice.
The trouble is that the excise stopped being a road tax more than thirty years ago. Since 1992 it has been a general revenue measure, untethered from road funding, and what governments spend on roads is decided quite separately from whatever the excise raises. The levy is a contribution to the common purse—the ordinary obligation of those who profit within a society to help carry its weight, an obligation the sector defending itself here has spent considerable ingenuity learning to find unfair. The reframing survives only as long as nobody checks the date.
There’s a deeper tell, and it has little to do with accountancy. Watch what the framing does. Once the credit is cast as a refund—money the miner was unfairly relieved of and is owed back—then anyone proposing to end it is no longer arguing about policy. They are proposing to take money that, by the terms just established, belongs to someone else. Reform becomes confiscation. The reformer becomes the thief. The frame is built so that the only honest position inside it is agreement, and dissent is made to read as malice — which is a remarkably efficient way to empty a room of opponents who would rather be wrong than be robbers. The numbers are the visible fight. The frame is the real one.
An honest reckoning can’t just stop at the indictment. Mining and heavy industry give Australia stuff that’s real and not easily replaced. They pay well, often in places where the alternative to a minimum wage is no wage at all. Resource exports underwrite a large share of national income and feed the revenue that pays for the hospital and the school. And the minerals themselves — iron, copper, nickel, lithium and rare earths the new grid is hungry for — are the literal substance of the energy transition. You can’t build a wind turbine out of a press release. You cannot build a wind turbine out of a press release. You build it out of ore, and the ore is dug in the Hunter and the Pilbara and the Bowen Basin by people who don’t feature in the brochure except as a reason you should not ask questions. The warning about regional jobs lands with such force precisely because, for a great many families, it’s not a slogan. It’s the mortgage.
All of that is true. Then notice what the same cheap diesel also does. A fuel kept artificially cheap is a fuel nobody is in a hurry to replace, so the subsidy that protects the haul truck today is quietly foreclosing the electric haul truck tomorrow. It steers scarce public money toward propping up the fossil-dependent operation rather than helping the town that depends on it find a second leg to stand on. And the climate consequence of burning all that fuel — the longer droughts, the fiercer fires, the floods that arrive now with a regularity that has stopped being news — falls hardest on the very regional Australians the campaign claims to shield. There’s cruelty in the symmetry. Communities held up as the reason the subsidy must survive are among those who will pay the steepest price for its continuation. Phasing the scheme out, by one estimate, could free as much as $57 billion across the forward estimates – enough to decarbonise the mines, harden the towns against the disasters bearing down on them, and pay for the bush’s passage into what comes next rather than its embalming.
Here’s the detail that gives the campaign away. Look at who stands in the publicity: winegrowers, builders, farmers always, weathered and squinting into the regional sun. Then look at who collects the money. The 2023–24 tax figures are unambiguous. Mining takes more in fuel tax credits than any other industry – roughly three times that which farmers receive, very nearly half of every dollar the scheme pays out. Mining drew $4.6 billion; farmers, $900 million. The average mining entity collected around $1.2 million, the average farmer a little under thirteen thousand. Australia’s coal miners alone take more in credits than the whole agriculture, forestry and fishing sector combined.
The farmer is not the beneficiary of this scheme. The farmer is the costume it wears. One commentator has called it using farmers as human shields, and the phrase is exact because the function of the farmer in the photograph is to absorb the fire meant for Glencore and Peabody, for BHP and Rio and Fortescue and Hancock — a defence of the family property mounted, with great feeling, on behalf of companies that could buy the family property, the family, and the district it stands in and never find the line item. This is why the reform actually on the table is so much narrower than the alarm suggests.
The proposal most often floated is a cap: no consolidated corporate group claiming more than $50 million a year. Under that single line, only a handful of firms would have been touched in a recent year. Not one farmer. Not one road-transport business. And the proposal doesn’t even pocket the saving — it recycles the revenue back into the very firms it captures, earmarked to electrify their haulage and build the renewable generation that would let them decarbonise without surrendering a cent of profit. They are being offered, in effect, public money to modernise their own operations and have decided to be insulted by it. The pattern is wearily familiar across the world: a support sold as protection for the vulnerable turns out, almost everywhere it is examined, to flow uphill.
Return now to that word, ‘noisy’. When a lobby calls its opponents noisy activists, it’s not describing them; it’s manipulating them. That one adjective does the quiet task the argument cannot – it sorts the room into the responsible and the disruptive before a single figure has been weighed. On one side the grown-ups, sober and regional, employer of your cousin, and defender of the weekly shop. On the other, noise: rootless, urban conceit, indifferent to the jobs it endangers. You’re invited to choose your side before you are allowed to learn that the loudest beneficiaries are eight companies, and the quietest victims are the towns in the brochure.
Let’s be clear. Public arguments about a transfer worth more than ten billion dollars a year are not noise. They are the sound a democracy makes when it’s still functioning — when an arrangement nobody can remember agreeing to is dragged back into the light and made to account for itself in front of the people who fund it. To call that noise is to wish it would stop — and the eagerness to silence a question is rarely the conduct of those who would survive its answer.
So let the noise continue. Let it specify the trade-off, because every dollar locked into the credit is a dollar absent from a renewable, a clinic, or a flood levee. Let it follow the money past the farmer in the photograph to the corporate group behind him. And let it keep the microphone where it belongs — with the farmer who was used and not asked; the regional worker whose town deserves a future and not an embalming; and the climate-struck who have been talked over for a generation by people with a great deal of money and a single word to spend.
The haul truck is still idling. The diesel is still half-paid by the pensioner in Launceston. None of this was settled in the open, and the campaign now under way is an attempt to keep it that way — to make the questioning itself sound like the crime, so the arrangement can go on being taken for granted rather than agreed to. A society that has forgotten how a decision was made and grown afraid to remember has only one word left for the remembering. Noise.