This 176-page report (21 MB) summarises an eight-year program of pre-competitive gathering of geoscience information, by Geoscience Australia, completed in 2024.
The concept of public funding of pre-competitive, pre-project assessment of natural resources is a thoroughly respectable one as it produces information of benefit to a wide range of potential users including public authorities, local government, commercial firms and civic groups. It draws a distinction between general public information about Australia’s landscapes and information that a particular applicant for development approval needs to commission to justify their particular project. Too often the information that applicants gather is locked behind commercial paywalls or is not made public online.
It’s a feature of Geoscience Australia that the information it produces is of particular benefit to the fossil fuel industry (along with other mining companies), and turns up as a gift from the taxpayer to the fossil fuel companies.
The program was explained in a factsheet dated approximately 2016.