The Farm Belongs to Everyone But Us: Resource Bonanza for the NDIS
The Resource Sovereignty Series is an ongoing investigation into how Australia's Sovereign Resource Wealth, has been progressively captured by foreign corporate interests.
This story is told through the lens of George Orwell's Animal Farm, because no other frame captures the mechanism quite as precisely.
The animals did not lose their farm in a battle.
They lost it through a series of small, incremental, bureaucratically impeccable decisions, each of which seemed reasonable in isolation, each of which was explained to them by Squealer the Pig, in the language of progress and partnership and mutual benefit ~
…….until one day they looked up and the pigs were sleeping in the farmhouse and the commandments had been rewritten and nobody could quite remember what they had originally said.
Australia is one of the top LNG exporters on earth.
Based on current estimates, Australia exports approximately 79 million tonnes of LNG annually, worth around A$64 billion in export value ~ yet the government collects more money from beer excise and student HECS debt repayments than it does from all gas exports combined.
At the same time, the government is removing 160,000 Australians from the NDIS, reducing average support plans from $31,000 to $26,000, and targeting spending rises of only 2% per year ~ well below inflation.
The proposition is simple: the people being cut from the NDIS are being cut to balance a budget that would not need balancing if Australia taxed its sovereign resources at the rate of any comparable nation.
The Numbers ~ Side By Side
Osprey Report ~ « How Australia Ceded its Gas Wealth While Qatar Built an Empire.»
The Fraud Framing Is False
The government’s justification for NDIS cuts rests on two claims: the scheme costs too much, and fraud is rampant.
The government has framed the bill largely around fraud and restoring the scheme’s social licence ~ but that framing does not hold up against the government’s own figures. The projected savings come overwhelmingly from cutting supports for existing participants and tightening access ~ not from fraud measures. [Ref: gulfnews]
The $37.8 billion in projected NDIS savings is the single largest component of the government’s entire $63.8 billion savings package. [Ref: Swottemplate]
This is not a fraud crackdown.
It is a budget repair exercise carried out on the backs of the most vulnerable Australians — while the industry producing $64 billion in annual exports pays less in resource rent than Australia collects from beer.
Consider: If the ALP govt states that Fraud is the True Reason for decimating the NDIS funding ~ Mobilize the Auditor General! Why has this NOT happened?
Why Resource Sovereignty Matters
You are standing on one of the richest pieces of ground on earth.
Beneath the soil of Australia’s Cooper Basin lies enough natural gas to heat cities. Beneath the continental shelf off the coast of Western Australia lie LNG reserves that nations have gone to war over.
Beneath the coastal ranges of Queensland, beneath the Gippsland plains of Victoria, beneath the seabed of the Timor Sea, lie resources that the world is willing to pay extraordinary sums to access.
You own this.
Not metaphorically.
Not aspirationally.
As a citizen of Australia, you own these resources by sovereign right ~ enshrined in law, affirmed by every government since Federation, acknowledged even by the companies that extract them.
And yet.
The gas extracted from your sovereign territory leaves on ships bound for Japan and China and South Korea, generating revenues of approximately A$64 billion per year, while the federal government collects A$1.42 billion in the tax designed to capture your share of that wealth.
The pipelines that carry your gas from your fields to your homes are owned, in large measure, by a Chinese state-owned enterprise and a Hong Kong billionaire’s infrastructure conglomerate.
One of your most celebrated national institutions ~ the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which provides reasonable and necessary support to Australians who cannot live independently without it ~ is being cut.
160,000 people will lose access by 2030.
The government says it cannot afford it.
These facts belong in the same conversation. That is what this series is for.
The Revenue Gap Is the Policy Choice
Australia’s failure to collect sovereign resource revenue is not an accident of geology or economics. It is a sustained, documented policy choice.
Most LNG production in Australia is royalty-free and until 2023–24 all Australian LNG projects had paid zero PRRT. [Ref: Santos]
PRRT revenues have been continually revised down ~ in the December 2025 mid-year budget update, receipts were revised down by $0.5 billion in 2025–26 and by $2.5 billion over four years to 2027–28. [Ref: The Australia Institute]
Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, valued at approximately $3.08 Trillion, invests revenues from petroleum taxation and state equity participation into globally diversified financial assets ~ in 2025 it reported a profit of approximately $350 billion, representing a 15.1% return on investment. [Ref: Australia runs on gas]
Norway built a $3 trillion fund from its gas. Australia cut disability services.
This is a policy choice, not an economic inevitability.
Osprey Link: Norway ~ Clever Country Owning & Managing Their Oil & Gas Bonanza
The Human Cost Is Specific and Documented
« 160,000 people will lose access to the scheme if we utilise the government’s numbers. That’s a frightening amount,» People With Disability Australia president Jeremy Hope said. [Ref: Encyclopedia.com]
Disability advocates warn that the cuts could increase social isolation, with some participants relying on these supports as their only interaction with the outside world. Representatives from the disability community highlighted that even simple activities like going to a café or grocery shopping contribute significantly to independence and mental well-being ~ losing such support could push more people into isolation and place additional strain on families already under pressure. [Ref: Porter’s Five Forces]
The 2026-27 budget provides;
No increase to the Disability Support Pension,
Mo disability-specific energy relief,
No accessible housing investment, and
No meaningful new independent advocacy funding.
« This is not a budget that sees people with disability,» said Nicolas Lawler, CEO of Advocacy for Inclusion. [Ref: Swot template]
The Alternative Is Fully Costed
The NDIS currently costs approximately $50 billion per year.
The proposed cuts target $37.8 billion in savings over the forward estimates.
The question is not whether Australia can afford the NDIS.
The question is whether Australia chooses to fund it from sovereign resource revenue rather than from the lives of disabled citizens.
Independent MP Allegra Spender and others have proposed a 25% export levy on LNG revenues as a mechanism to increase the public’s share of resource rents ~ the federal government explicitly rejected this proposal for the current budget cycle.
[Ref: Australia runs on gas]
A 25% levy on $64 billion in annual LNG exports would generate approximately $16 billion per year.
Over four years ~ the timeframe of the NDIS savings target ~ that is $64 billion.
More than enough to fund the NDIS in full, without removing a single participant.
The government chose not to pursue it.
The Moral Architecture
How Australia Chose Gas Profits for Foreign Corporations Over Disabled Citizens!
Australia tells its disabled citizens there is no money.
It tells this to people who cannot work, cannot advocate for themselves in most cases, cannot lobby, cannot threaten electoral consequences with the same force as a multinational corporation.
It tells them the nation is broke.
Meanwhile, the nation sits on the world’s largest LNG export industry, collects less in resource rent than Japan collects in import duties on the gas it buys from us, and has explicitly rejected proposals to tax those exports at rates other sovereign nations consider standard.
The «disabled» who need the most protection are the first ones sent to the knackery.
The pigs are still at the trough, telling all and sundry ~ «nothing can be done!»
What the Osprey Is Doing Here
The Osprey does not take political sides in the conventional sense.
These are not left or right issues.
The PRRT was designed under a Labor government and extended by Coalition governments.
The pipeline sales were approved by governments of both colours.
The NDIS was built by Labor and reformed ~ cut ~ by Labor.
The capture of Australian sovereign resources has been bipartisan in its architecture and bipartisan in its neglect.
What this newsletter does is place numbers next to each other that the powerful would prefer kept separate.
AUD 64 billion in exports. AUD 1.42 billion in PRRT.
State Grid Corporation of China. 60% of the pipeline to Sydney.
25% export levy. Rejected. 160,000 people ~ Cut Off.
The Osprey climbs to altitude because that is where the full picture becomes visible. The individual stories ~ one company, one pipeline, one scheme ~ make sense in isolation. The pattern only emerges from height.
The commandment for this story writes itself:
Original: «Australia’s sovereign resources shall fund the common good.»
Amended: «Australia’s sovereign resources shall fund the common good, after all reasonable deductions, uplift factors, LNG exemptions, and rejected export levy proposals have been accounted for ~ at which point the remaining funds available for the common good shall be found by reducing support for the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.”
A Call To Action
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