To paraphrase American curmudgeon Henry Louis (H.L.) Mencken, no one ever went broke underestimating the perfidy of the Australian government. In a country that once prided itself on digging things up and selling them to the world, Canberra now seems determined to bury our prosperity under an avalanche of paperwork, moral vanity and regulatory sludge.

Despite the political spin, successive governments have waged a quiet war on the mining industry, the very industry that finances the public services and redistributive fantasies they so love to expand. The Mining Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) was supposed to be a model of enlightened resource policy: the state would capture a ‘fair share’ of the mining boom while keeping investment strong. But while the MRRT is no more, the logic behind it never died.

The bureaucratic class remained gripped by the idea that the mining sector needed to be slowed and restrained to prevent Dutch disease, the notion that a strong resource sector can hollow out the rest of the economy.

‘Dutch disease’ is the economic term for the paradox of plenty, when success in one export sector drives up the currency and wages, making other industries like manufacturing uncompetitive. The cure, according to Canberra’s mandarins, was to throttle the boom before it distorted the broader economy. But the accelerating decline of Australia’s manufacturing sector is more a product of massively rising energy costs, anti-productivity industrial relations policies, excessive business regulation, and unbridled government spending.

Even though the MRRT was formally repealed in 2014, its spirit lives on through a rent tax by proxy, imposed not via direct levies, but through regulation, energy policy, and endless bureaucratic delay, suffocating the resources sector in the name of ‘process’. The modern Australian MRRT is not a levy on profit or revenue but a maze of compliance costs, approvals, consultations, carbon prices and environmental hurdles. These do not show up in the budget papers other than through declining investment, but they drain the life from the sector all the same. The states also impose huge levies on coal and other minerals that have, for example, led BHP to withdraw from mines in Queensland.

The crown jewel of this regulatory tangle is the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act of 1999 (EPBC), one of the many economic ‘gifts’ left by the Howard government. What was sold as a environmental safeguard has morphed into a Kafkaesque obstacle course that can delay projects for years, sometimes decades. Every new minister promises to ‘streamline’ the process; every reform somehow adds another layer of green tape.

And that was not Howard’s only economic booby trap. His government also blessed Australia with the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act of 2000, which established the original Renewable Energy Target, a policy that hard-wired higher energy costs into the Australian economy. It guaranteed that the nation’s most energy-intensive industries, mining among them, would compete on an uphill playing field. For good measure, nuclear energy, apart from nuclear submarines, remains banned. Another Howard government legislative achievement.

For a government that claimed to stand for free enterprise, it was a master class in communistic central planning. The EPBC Act and the Renewable Energy Target together form the twin pillars of Australia’s modern industrial self-sabotage: one blocks you from building; the other punishes you for operating.

For a mining project, this means endless environmental impact statements, appeals, reviews and public consultations. It is less a regulatory framework than a job-creation program for lawyers, academics, consultants and bureaucrats.

These delays are not abstract. Time is money. Every additional year of approvals means higher financing costs, lower investor confidence and the loss of opportunities to competitors. Global capital is mobile; ore bodies are not. When Indonesia, Brazil, or Chile can deliver permits in two years and Australia takes ten to fourteen, guess where the next round of investment goes.

Then there is energy. Mining and especially critical minerals are one of the most energy-intensive industries on the planet, moving, crushing, grinding and processing millions of tonnes of rock consumes staggering quantities of power and diesel. Instead of ensuring cheap, reliable electricity to sustain that effort, Australian governments at every level have made it progressively more expensive and less dependable to the point that it is up to four times the cost applicable in the US.

When last month, the Australian and US governments announced the ‘Framework for Securing the Supply of Critical Minerals and Rare Earths’, the irony was rich enough to mine. The two governments pledged at least US$1 billion each in the next six months to boost joint mining and processing ventures, a deal heralded as a hedge against foreign monopolies. It sounds impressive. But in the Australian context, ‘six months’ is roughly how long it takes to schedule the first stakeholder meeting, not to start building anything.

Beyond approvals and the likely need to power operations from a renewable grid that does not yet exist, that US$2 billion may achieve little more than another round of glossy feasibility studies and press releases. To save face, failure will not be announced, just delays and cost overruns.

To imagine that a few billion dollars in concessional loans, grants and other subsidies will overcome a culture that treats every mine as an ecological crime scene is pure wishful thinking. The reality is that Australia’s bureaucratic and political class has developed an almost theological disdain for the mining industry. It wants the royalties, the jobs and the tax receipts, but not the minerals, the noise or the inconvenient fact that modern civilisation depends on what miners produce.

This cultural hostility has consequences. Investors can read the signals. When they see ministers boasting about ‘net zero’ and ‘nature-positive’ reforms while approvals crawl along, they move their money elsewhere.

Australia could lead the democratic world in critical minerals, supplying allies with the inputs for defence and advanced manufacturing. Instead, it risks becoming a museum of missed opportunities. Every time a minister in Canberra promises to cut red or green tape, another department quietly adds a new hindrance.

If the US/Australia critical-minerals partnership is meant to be a serious hedge against foreign dominance, then it will require something Australia has not shown for decades: political courage to slash through its own bureaucracy. Without that, the odds of a vibrant extraction and processing sector emerging in the next decade are about the same as Lidia Thorpe becoming prime minister. Theoretically possible, but only in a parallel universe.