Albanese pledges no change to WA's GST deal despite Productivity Commission review

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese arrived in Perth on Monday with a message he repeated until the journalists stopped asking: Western Australia's GST deal would not change on his watch. He said it plainly, then said it again when pressed, then said it a third time for absolute clarity. "There will be no change to WA's arrangements whatsoever on the GST," he told reporters, his tone suggesting the matter was settled.

The urgency of the reassurance became clear only in context. Two weeks earlier, the Productivity Commission had released an interim report calling the 2018 GST arrangement a "costly mistake" that should be scrapped entirely. The deal, struck under the Morrison government, guaranteed Western Australia a floor of 75 cents for every dollar of GST the state contributed to federal coffers, with top-up payments to other states to ensure none fell behind. It sounded fair in theory. In practice, the commission found, it had cost the federal budget $23 billion over six years, with $22 billion of that flowing directly to WA. The report's release had provoked an angry response from the west—Premier Roger Cook dismissed the authors as "east-coast clowns"—and now the political pressure was on Albanese to either defend the arrangement or abandon it.

He chose to defend it, though his language revealed the tightrope he was walking. WA, he said, deserved its "fair share" of GST revenue because the state contributed substantially to the national economy. The 75-cent floor would "absolutely stay." But when state opposition figures and the resources sector demanded he explain what "fair share" actually meant, he had to clarify further. The additional payments to WA, he emphasized, had not come from other states and territories. They came from the Commonwealth. This distinction mattered because it reframed the debate: this was not a zero-sum game where WA's gain was another state's loss. It was a federal spending decision, and Albanese was comfortable with it.

He also had a message for the other premiers and chief ministers listening from their own capitals: remember that when you negotiate with the Commonwealth over money, he seemed to be saying. Don't blame WA for getting what the federal government chose to give it.

Roger Cook, the WA premier, emerged from the announcement visibly relieved. "Every Western Australian is both relieved and pleased," he said, describing Albanese's commitment as a finalization of the debate. The prime minister, Cook suggested, understood Western Australia in a way previous leaders had not. Yet even as Cook declared the matter settled, he signaled that WA would continue to fight for a larger GST share in the lead-up to the Productivity Commission's final report, due at year's end. The public commitment had bought certainty, but the underlying tension remained unresolved.

Albanese was in Henderson, a suburb south of Perth, to announce something else entirely: a new defence precinct that would anchor Australia's commitment to the AUKUS nuclear submarine partnership with the United States and the United Kingdom. The site, he declared, would become a sovereign shipbuilding and maintenance hub—a major step toward keeping advanced naval capability in Australian hands. "AUKUS is full steam ahead and WA is central to it," he said. The GST announcement and the defence announcement were separate stories, but they shared a political logic: Albanese was in Western Australia to show the state it mattered to the federal government, that its economy and its security role were recognized, that it would not be taken for granted. The GST pledge was part of that larger message.