The Australian also has a good article by Paul Garvey (who, it’s worth noting, is based in Perth) about the WA GST deal on 1^st October 2025

If you’re really interested in this (and I know that’s not a huge number of people!!), it’s worth having a look at the comments at the foot of this article, to see how many commenters (almost all of them from behind the veil of pusillanimous anonymity) regurgitate the myths that WA has successfully perpetrated, including:

• that the wealth WA is currently rolling in is all the result of “visionary leadership” by past WA State Governments and the current one, and that if only the “mendicant eastern states” showed the same “visionary leadership”, somehow minerals would magically appear under their soils and gas under their adjacent waters (and never mind that WA bans uranium mining, which SA doesn’t, or logging in native forests, which Tasmania doesn’t – when WA bans something, that’s a “legitimate social or environmental concern”, whereas, according to these commenters, when other states ban something, that’s being “woke” or “mendicant”);
• that there are figures somewhere showing how much GST is collected in each state and territory, and that it is therefore possible to ascertain how much each state and territory is “getting back” from “its GST” (there aren’t, and it isn’t);
• that WA “needs” more GST than the Grants Commission assesses it should get, in order to fund the infrastructure investment which WA governments make to facilitate the growth of its resources sector (the truth being that the mining companies provide and pay for most of this infrastructure themselves, in contrast to the coal mining companies in NSW and Qld, and that infrastructure investment by the WA Government is actually a much smaller percentage of gross state product than in any other state or territory);
• and that I’m only pushing the arguments which I have been because I’m a Tasmanian and “want more money for my own state” (the truth being that scrapping the WA GST deal wouldn’t deliver any more revenue to Tasmania or any of the other “eastern states” which these anonymous commenters despise so much, because the cost of The Worst Australian Public Policy Decision of the 21st Century Thus Far is being entirely borne by the Federal Budget (to the tune of $60 billion over the 11 years to 2029-30).

I posted some comments myself trying (again) to refute these myths. But, as (I think it was) Upton Sinclair wrote, it’s hard to get a man (or a woman) to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it!

WA's GST deal_ The true cost to Australia's economy revealed _ The Australian