The short version
What this evidence tells us.
Additional research completed 3 October 2026 for openaus.org. The APLNG money trail was extended on 4 October with FY2025 and FY2026 cash statements, sales, debt balances, shareholder distributions and the tax calculation. This package delivers ten sourced briefings, a coverage/gap register and reproducible evidence. It extends the money-flow dossier with the household, service, rights and future-capacity questions needed to interpret the national accounts.
The central advice: assess who receives the benefits, who bears the costs, and what obligations remain alongside each financial flow. National revenue, business sales and asset wealth do not reveal those distributions by themselves. Representing Australians fairly requires showing different experiences and missing populations, while avoiding a claim that desk research speaks for everyone.
Figures retain their own dates, populations and scope. The complete evidence and original source links remain below.
Evidence and context
Findings that change the project
- Financial stress belongs beside national wealth. GSS cash-flow problems increased from 20.7% in 2020 to 25.3% in 2025. One-parent families reported substantially more difficulty meeting bills than couple families with dependent children. Detailed wealth distribution remains dated. Households.
- Public return needs an actual ledger. APLNG's $1.322bn FY2025 tax liability differs from $1.189bn cash income tax paid during FY2025. Adding $728m royalties gives a $1.917bn cash subtotal. US EXIM's historical US$2.95bn financing authorisation supplies a documented foreign-government funding connection, but is neither Australian revenue nor a grant. Complete net public return remains unresolved. Project case.
- Service spending needs unmet-need measures. Dental cost barriers, unmet disability assistance and aged-care elapsed access time reveal different problems. The aged-care median of 255 days describes services that actually commenced in April–June 2026; it excludes those still waiting and includes time beyond system-managed delays. Services.
- Unpaid work and future costs belong in the account. Time-use participant averages differ by 61 minutes per day between females and males. Resource reinstatement is not completed rehabilitation, and a financial assurance framework does not establish that all closure obligations are funded. Work and care, natural capacity.
- Foreign dependence is measurable within a clear boundary. Korea, Malaysia and Singapore supplied a calculated 59.70% of FY2025–26 diesel imports. That establishes source-country concentration, not a shortage probability. Capacity and fuel.
Every finding above links to a briefing containing its primary sources, periods, populations and limits. These are dated observations, not live readings or causal policy evaluations.
Evidence and context
Read the ten briefings
| Briefing | Main question |
|---|---|
| 1 Household security | Can people meet essential costs and withstand a shock? |
| 2 Housing and place | Can people obtain suitable housing near opportunities and services? |
| 3 Public support and resource return | Who finances APLNG, and what can we establish about the public's return? |
| 4 Services and safety | Who needs support, who receives it and who misses out? |
| 5 Paid work, unpaid care and time | Who contributes, and what does that contribution cost in time and health? |
| 6 First Nations priorities, rights and control | What do public outcomes, legal interests and community-led sources establish? |
| 7 Natural capacity and liabilities | What is used or damaged, and what future obligations remain? |
| 8 Productive capacity and resilience | Are skills, research, assets and critical supplies supporting future living standards? |
| 9 Market and institutional power | Who shapes prices, supplier terms and public decisions? |
| 10 Social connection, trust and voice | Do people have support, belonging and meaningful civic access? |
Evidence and context
What is complete, and what remains unresolved
The public-source research pass and all ten briefs are delivered. The coverage register explicitly assesses each full-plan specification: selected baselines have passed the named checks, while eight wider package specifications remain partial and two are verified within their selected public-baseline scope. Material gaps include current liquid savings across housing tenures, national unmet legal need, complete project support/cleanup costs, freshwater rights and effective decision power, infrastructure maintenance, and a reconciled political-finance/decision chain. Confidential or unestablished amounts are not treated as zero.
First Nations community review and independent subject-matter review have not occurred. Population coverage is uneven, including exclusions affecting very remote communities and people outside private households. The research does not claim a complete representation of every Australian or a national success score.
Evidence and context
Evidence and checks
- 90 archived source resources, plus seven failed archive routes with recorded alternatives or gaps; about 104.9 MB of local originals. Two Origin annual reports were added through the SGX issuer filings after the Origin landing-page routes failed.
- 82 selected source controls, 53 published tables, and 548 country/month diesel inputs. These counts describe this check, not every cell in every collected workbook.
- APLNG's exact entity and ABN matched to the existing ATO original; twelve-month diesel figures reconciled to national controls with a retained 0.1 ML rounding difference.
- Five original calculations reproduce from pinned source inputs; selected PDF table layouts were visually checked. The separate APLNG money-trail verification now checks 80 additional source-row controls and reconciles two cash years, profit, sales, debt and the FY2025 income-tax calculation. These controls overlap some earlier tax observations and are not 80 independent new facts.
Use SOURCE_NOTES.md for provenance and commands; validation.json for the verification scope; observations.json, selected-tables.json, calculations.json and diesel-dependency.json for evidence. CORRECTIONS.md records interpretation problems caught before delivery.
The source manifest pins original bytes and retrieval dates. Original reports and full reading copies remain git-ignored local study material; they are not a backup or an automatic data-refresh service. ADOPTION.md provides three concrete content candidates and a bounded diesel-exposure comparison specification. No application, saved cash model or website was changed by this research package.